The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson 9780198794660, 0198794665

Citation preview

T H E OX F O R D H A N D B O O K O F

SAMUEL J OH N S ON

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

SAMUEL JOHNSON Edited by

JACK LYNCH

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935159 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​879466–​0 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198794660.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

Short Titles  Notes on Contributors 

ix xi

Introduction  Jack Lynch

1

PA RT I :   C A R E E R 1. Youth  Kevin Joel Berland

7

2. Prime  Michael Bundock

31

3. Age  Peter Sabor

49

4. Lives  Lisa Berglund

67

5. Editions  Robert DeMaria, Jr.

83

PA RT I I :   G E N R E S 6. Journalism  Paul Tankard

103

7. Verse  David F. Venturo

120

8. Essays  Richard Squibbs

137

9. Scholarship  Mark A. Pedreira

153

vi   Contents

10. Fiction  Steven Scherwatzky

169

11. Criticism  Jack Lynch

191

12. Sermons  Howard D. Weinbrot

209

13. Polemic  Christopher Vilmar

226

14. Travel  Anthony W. Lee

244

15. Biography  Nicholas Seager

260

PA RT I I I :   TOP IC S 16. Authorship  Benjamin Pauley

281

17. Language  Lynda Mugglestone

298

18. History  Jenny Davidson

315

19. Law  Greg Clingham

332

20. Politics  Thomas Kaminski

349

21. War  Melinda Alliker Rabb

367

22. Commerce  Frans De Bruyn

389

23. Women  Isobel Grundy

408

Contents   vii

24. Sociability  Jaclyn Geller

425

25. Humor  J. T. Scanlan

453

26. Education  Jessica Richard

477

27. Science  Joseph Drury

496

28. Philosophy  Brad Pasanek

519

29. Suffering  Adam Rounce

536

30. Death  Eric Parisot

551

31. Doubt  Carrie D. Shanafelt

567

32. Hope  Adam Potkay

582

33. Emotion  Philip Smallwood

599

34. Happiness  Brian Michael Norton

617

35. Virtue  Nicholas Hudson

631

36. God  Blanford Parker

646

Index

665

Short Titles

Dictionary Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, 2 vols. (London, 1755). Letters The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992–​4). Life James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64). Lives Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Yale Works The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 23 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958–​2018).

Notes on Contributors

Lisa Berglund is Professor and chair of the English Department at Buffalo State College, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Milton, the eighteenth century, and lexicography. She has served as the Executive Director of the Dictionary Society of North America (2007–​13) and of the American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies (2017–​21). Kevin Joel Berland is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published studies on a wide variety of topics including British and American literature, disability studies, history of philosophy, physiognomy, and classical influences in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century literature. Michael Bundock is the author of The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (Yale University Press, 2015) and of numerous articles on Johnson. He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. Greg Clingham is Professor of English Emeritus at Bucknell University and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and many scholarly articles on Johnson, Boswell, Dryden, Lady Anne Barnard, translation, memory, historiography, orientalism, archives, the history of the book, and scholarly publishing, including Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Most recently he is co-​editor (with Bärbel Czennia) of Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2020), editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and author of the forthcoming Samuel Johnson’s Interests: Life, Literature, Limits. He is writing a literary and art history of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope (1797–​1802) and working on Sir George Macartney’s diplomatic papers from China, India, Russia, and the Cape of Good Hope. From 1996 to 2018, he was the director and chief acquiring editor at Bucknell University Press, which published around 700 titles during his tenure. He is presently the general editor of a new series, Eighteenth-​Century Moments, with Clemson University Press. Jenny Davidson is Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her next book will consider the use of ruins as a tool for making the past live again in Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and a host of other works.

xii   Notes on Contributors Frans De Bruyn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (Clarendon Press, 1996), co-​editor (with Shaun Regan) of The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-​Century Atlantic World (University of Toronto Press, 2014), and most recently co-​ author (with Joyce Goggin) of Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720 (Liverpool University Press, 2020). He has also published numerous articles on a variety of subjects in eighteenth-​century studies, from georgic and agricultural writing to the reception of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Robert DeMaria, Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College, the general editor of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, and the editor of the Johnsonian News Letter. He is the author of a critical biography of Johnson and the co-​editor of three volumes in the Yale Edition. He is currently at work on an edition of Johnson’s poems. Joseph Drury is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author of Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), as well as a number of articles about eighteenth-​century literature and science. Jaclyn Geller is Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-​century studies. She is the author of articles on early modern satire, Samuel Butler, and Samuel Johnson. Her book, Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, critiques American bridal culture. Her (upcoming) monograph, Moving Past Marriage, analyzes relationship-​status discrimination and the history of non-​marital people in the West. Isobel Grundy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada. She holds degrees from Oxford University (St. Anne’s College) and spent the first half of her career at Queen Mary, London, before moving to Alberta in 1990 as Henry Marshall Tory Professor. Her publications include a monograph and edited collection of essays on Samuel Johnson, a biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford University Press, 1999) and editions of many of Montagu’s hugely versatile writings. Isobel Grundy was joint editor of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (Yale University Press, 1990), with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements, and is currently Research Director of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, an electronic work of literary history published online by Cambridge University Press, which is regularly expanded, notably in a new “edition” with new interface in early 2021. Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought (Oxford University Press, 1988), Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge University Press,

Notes on Contributors    xiii 2003), A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (Pickering & Chatto, 2013), and of many essays on eighteenth-​century thought, literature, and culture. Thomas Kaminski is Emeritus Professor of English at Loyola University in Chicago. He is the author of The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford University Press, 1987) and has edited Johnson’s Debates in Parliament for the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Anthony W. Lee has published six books and more than forty-​five essays on Johnson and eighteenth-​century literature and culture. He has two books forthcoming: Notes on Footnotes: Annotating Eighteenth-Century-Literature (with Melvin New) (Penn State University Press, 2022) and A “Clubbable Man”: Essays on Eighteenth-​Century Literature in Honor of Greg Clingham (Bucknell University Press, 2022). He has taught at several colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Tech University, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Maryland University College, where he served as Director of English and Humanities Program for three years. Jack Lynch is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University–​Newark. He is the author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), and editor of Samuel Johnson in Context (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–​1800 (Oxford University Press, 2016). With J. T. Scanlan he edits The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual. Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at Oxford University. She has published widely on the social and cultural history of English, with particular reference to lexicography, lexical history, and the history of spoken English. Publications include Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Yale University Press, 2005), Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Oxford History of English (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (Oxford University Press, 2015, 2018). Her most recent book is Writing a War of Words: Andrew Clark and the Search for Meaning in World War One (Oxford University Press, 2021). Brian Michael Norton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including New Literary History, Eighteenth-​Century Life, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-​Century Fiction, as well as in collections on Laurence Sterne and on philosophy and literature. He is author of Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press, 2012). Eric Parisot is a Senior Lecturer in English at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is primarily interested in aspects of death and dying as revealed in the literature and culture of the British long eighteenth century. He has published widely

xiv   Notes on Contributors on eighteenth-​century suicide, the Gothic, and graveyard poetry, including the monograph Graveyard Poetry (Ashgate, 2013). Blanford Parker is Visiting Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is working on a book-​length study of the relation of pastoral, georgic, and epic in European literature. Brad Pasanek is the current Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Metaphors of Mind, A Dictionary, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. His overlapping areas of study include eighteenth-​century literature and the digital humanities. His research and teaching focus on literary form and intellectual history, with a developing interest in fabrication (laser cutters and 3D printing). He is at work on a new book about Josephine Miles and the pre-​digital digital humanities. Benjamin Pauley is Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has published essays on William Godwin and Daniel Defoe, and was founding Secretary of the Defoe Society. He is a member of the faculty of Rare Book school at the University of Virginia, where he teaches digital approaches to bibliography and book history. Mark A. Pedreira was Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. He published essays, encyclopedic articles, and book chapters on rhetoric, philosophy, lexicography, and textual criticism concerning Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Abraham Cowley, and Samuel Butler, as well as essays on metaphor theory. He also edited two special features on metaphor in the poetry and criticism of the long eighteenth century in separate volumes (vols. 18 and 26) of the scholarly annual, 1650–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Adam Potkay is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities at the College of William & Mary. His books include The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Cornell University Press, 2000), and The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. His latest book, Hope: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines literary and philosophical treatments of hope from classical antiquity and early Christian theology through to the present day. Melinda Alliker Rabb is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650–​1750 (Palgrave, 2007), Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Material Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019), as well as articles and chapters on Evelyn, Swift, Pope, Gay, Collier, Johnson, Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Manley, and Godwin. Her current project is Parting Shots: Literature and War Trauma in the Long Eighteenth-​Century. Jessica Richard is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, editor of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Broadview Press, 2008), and author of The

Notes on Contributors    xv Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-​Century British Novel (Palgrave, 2011), as well as articles on Belinda, Frankenstein, sequels to Rasselas, and Pride and Prejudice. She is the co-​founder and co-​editor of The 18th-​Century Common, a public humanities website for enthusiasts of eighteenth-​century studies, and an editor of The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, a collaborative digital edition. Adam Rounce is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on various seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​ century writers, including Dryden, Pope, Churchill, and Johnson. He is co-​editor of Irish Political Writings after 1725 (2018) in the ongoing Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Jonathan Swift, as well as co-​editor of another volume, and writing a separately published Chronology. He is the author of Fame and Failure, 1720–​ 1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Peter Sabor is Canada Research Chair and Professor of English at McGill University, where he is also Director of the Burney Centre. Recent publications include Samuel Richardson in Context, co-​edited with Betty Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and The Cambridge Companion to Emma (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is general editor of The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney (Oxford University Press, 2011–​19, 6 vols.) and Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney (Oxford University Press, 2015–​18, 2 vols.), as well as co-​general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress, 24 vols.). He is general editor of The Letters of Dr. Charles Burney (Oxford University Press, in progress, 6 vols.). His website Reading with Austen is a digital recreation of the library used by Jane Austen at Godmersham Park: www.readingwithausten.com. J. T. Scanlan is Professor of English at Providence College. He co-​edits with Jack Lynch The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, published by Bucknell University Press. He has written many essays and articles on the eighteenth century and on Samuel Johnson in particular. He is currently writing a book on the relations between law and literature in eighteenth-​century London. Steven Scherwatzky is Associate Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Merrimack College (North Andover, MA). He has published essays on Samuel Johnson in Eighteenth-​Century Life and in The Age of Johnson. Most recently, his “Samuel Johnson and Autobiography: Reflection, Ambivalence, and ‘Split Intentionality’ ” appeared in New Essays on Samuel Johnson, ed. Anthony W. Lee (University of Delaware Press, 2018). Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature at Keele University. He is the co-​editor with Lance Wilcox of Johnson’s Life of Savage (Broadview Press, 2016) and editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe and The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe, both forthcoming in 2022. Carrie D. Shanafelt is Associate Professor of literature and philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is the author of Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer

xvi   Notes on Contributors Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (University of Virginia Press, 2022), as well as various articles on eighteenth-​century aesthetic theory, rhetoric, and sexuality. Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham City University and Honorary Senior Associate Teacher at Bristol University. He has held visiting fellowships at the Universities of London, Oxford, and Yale, and has lectured in Britain, the USA, and China. He is the author of numerous essays, and editor of collections of essays on Johnson, Pope, and critical history. His collection entitled Johnson Re-​Visioned appeared in 2001 (Bucknell University Press) and his monograph on the pertinence of eighteenth-​century criticism, Reconstructing Criticism, in 2003 (Bucknell University Press), followed a year later by his prizewinning Johnson’s Critical Presence (Ashgate). His Critical Occasions appeared in 2011 (AMS); the hybrid anthology, Ridiculous Critics, co-​edited with Min Wild, in 2014 (Bucknell University Press). Smallwood is co-​editor of The Philosophy of Enchantment (Clarendon Press, 2005), a collection of the critical and cultural manuscripts of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood. Richard Squibbs is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago and author of Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-​Century Periodical Essay (Palgrave, 2014). While he continues to publish articles on the British and early American periodical essay, he is also completing a monograph that explores the messy entanglements of picaresque fiction and the early English novel. Paul Tankard teaches and researches in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His chief scholarly interests are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, the Inklings, paratextuality, and the future of literacy. In 2017, his pioneering edition of Boswell’s journalism, Facts and Inventions, won the Bibliographical Society of America’s Mitchell Prize. He teaches fantasy literature (particularly Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) and public writing, and edits the Papers of the Johnson Society of Australia. David F. Venturo, Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, author of Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (University of Delaware Press, 1999) and editor of The School of the Eucharist . . . With a Preface Concerning the Testimony of Miracles (AMS Press, 2006), writes about and teaches British literature, 1550–​1850, poetry, baseball and American culture, and the Beatles and popular culture. An editor of The Scriblerian, he is writing books on epic, mock epic, and growing skepticism about heroic ideals in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century literature and on the Beatles’ lives and music. Christopher Vilmar is Professor of English at Salisbury University. In addition to publications on Samuel Johnson, satire, and pedagogy, he co-​edited (with Adam Rounce) the poetry entries of the Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660–​1789 (gen. eds. Gary Day and Jack Lynch, Wiley Blackwell, 2015). His current research focuses on the intersections of satire, philology, and political writing in eighteenth-​century British literature, and popular music.

Notes on Contributors    xvii Howard D. Weinbrot was Ricardo Quintana Professor of English and William Freeman Vilas Research Professor in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–​Madison. He was the author or editor of more than a dozen books on the literature and history of the long eighteenth century, most recently Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–​1780 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) and Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (Huntington Library, 2014). With Robert DeMaria, Jr. and Stephen Fix he edited Samuel Johnson: Selected Works (Yale University Press, 2021).

Introdu c t i on Jack Lynch

Few writers have worked in as many forms: essays, fiction both short and long, lyric and didactic poetry, journalism, sermons, verse tragedy, book reviews, scholarly editions, biographies of poets, scholars, physicians, and explorers, literary criticism, linguistics, prayers, Oriental tales, travel narratives, political polemic, translations, dedications, philosophical meditations, pedagogical theory, satires in both verse and prose, classical imitations, parliamentary reporting, a treatise on the common law, a dictionary, a library catalog. In terms of the number of pages he published, he is more copious than almost any English author who came before him. The complete surviving works of Chaucer and Shakespeare fit in a single large volume; the works of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Fielding, and Richardson fill a shelf or two. The complete writings of Johnson would fill a substantial bookcase. The Dictionary alone is so large—​as long as the King James Bible, Clarissa, all of Shakespeare’s plays, and all of Jane Austen’s novels put together—​that only a tiny number of people, even a tiny number of professional Johnsonians, can claim to have read it from A “The first letter of the European alphabets” to zootomy “Dissection of the bodies of beasts.” We are overwhelmed not only by the volume of writing by Johnson but also by the volume of writing about him. His generation was the first to come of age in a world shaped by newspapers and magazines, and he was one of the first authors to achieve real celebrity. His public profile was such that a checklist of his lifetime appearances in periodicals fills nearly 350 pages.1 Thanks to his contemporary biographers—​James Boswell most famously, but also Sir John Hawkins, Hester Piozzi, and a host of less familiar figures—​we know more about his private life and opinions than about any earlier writer in any language. The commentary on his life and works began while he was still alive and has increased steadily since then, so that today only a few English 1  Helen

Louise McGuffie, Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 1749–​1784: A Chronological Checklist (New York: Garland, 1976).

2   Jack Lynch authors—​ Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens—​ have generated more scholarship. But this profusion of writing comes at a cost: it is so extensive and so diverse that few can hope to read it all. And so people have for generations turned to shortcuts and substitutes. The story of how Boswell eclipsed Johnson’s popularity, beginning in the nineteenth century, has been told many times. Johnson was demoted from an author to a character in someone else’s book. His conversational sallies became better known than his reasoned arguments; Boswell’s half-​remembered, half-​invented invocations of “the Johnsonian aether” were widely quoted while Johnson’s carefully crafted prose often went unread. Less remarked, though, is that even Boswell has typically been digested in small morsels. The Life of Johnson is more than half a million words, making it one of the longest books in English with any claim to canonicity. Abridged versions began appearing as soon as it was published,2 and these abridgments have taught the world much of what it knows about Johnson. The ability to drop Boswellian bons mots into conversation has long been a marker of a certain kind of literariness, and even today journalists and politicians with pretensions to culture resort to the occasional Boswellism. Of course, because these sayings are usually repeated without reference to the primary sources, many of them are wrong—​ truncated, distorted, or invented out of whole cloth. A Google search for “I think it was Dr. Johnson who said” produces 1,970 hits, and not one of the top ten is an accurate quotation. A broader search for “ ‘Samuel Johnson’ quotes” returns nearly a million hits, a curious blend of wicked zingers and inspirational platitudes, but here, too, mutilations and spurious attributions abound. For the world at large, it hardly matters. It is enough that they sound “Johnsonian.” The abundance of Johnson’s primary sources combines with his gift for memorable expression to allow us to see him only in fragments—​not extended arguments, not carefully structured works of imagination, but isolated flashes of brilliance. But if we think of Johnson simply as a retailer of axioms and commonplaces, he comes across as confident, monologic, untroubled. Johnson’s popular image is that of the waspish dogmatist who would brook no contradiction—​thus he appears in countless cartoons, and thus he appears in a delightfully absurd episode of Blackadder. And yet the actual Johnson 2 The

first abridgment of Boswell appeared even before the Life was published: to the seventh edition of The Beauties of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1787) were added “Biographical Anecdotes of the Doctor, selected from The Late Productions of Mrs. Piozzi, Mr. Boswell, and Other Authentic Testimonies,” containing selections from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and in the year the Life of Johnson appeared two abridgments were rushed into print. The first two abridgments of the Life proper were The Witticisms, Anecdotes, Jests, and Sayings, of Dr. Samuel Johnson, during the Whole Course of His Life: Collected from Boswell, Piozzi, Hawkins, Baretti, Beauclerk, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Other Gentlemen in the Habits of Intimacy with the Doctor (London, 1791), attributed to “J. Merry, Esq. of Pembroke College” (likely a pseudonym), and A Collection of Interesting Biography: Containing, I. The Life of S. Johnson, LL.D., Abridged, Principally, from Boswell’s Celebrated Memoirs, 2 vols. (London, 1791). They were followed by Dr. Johnson’s Table-​Talk: Containing Aphorisms on Literature, Life, and Manners; with Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons: Selected and Arranged from Mr. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (London, 1798).

Introduction   3 was one of the least dogmatic of major writers and may be the most dialogic intelligence in English letters. He was almost always willing to entertain multiple points of view, to wrestle with complexity, and to remind the world that what seems simple on the surface is more complicated when viewed up close. On a few subjects was he doctrinaire: he would, for instance, tolerate no questioning of the fundamental truths of Christianity. Among sublunary topics his opposition to slavery is one of the few where he was unwilling to entertain different points of view. On nearly everything else, though, he was at once more tentative and more playful than the popular image of a blustering dogmatist suggests. In fact, one of his characteristic gestures is to develop an idea for a few paragraphs—​and then to pause, rethink, and take it all back.3 It is wrong, of course, to reduce any writer to a few slogans, but to reduce Johnson’s subtle, complex, and multifarious mind to simple banalities—​especially misquoted or misattributed banalities—​is particularly damaging. The goal of this collection, therefore, is to subject all the half-​remembered commonplaces to serious scrutiny and to integrate all these disjecta membra into a coherent whole—​to get beyond the fragmented vision of Johnson and to see the man in full. In organizing this Oxford Handbook, I’ve striven to cover as many aspects of Johnson’s mind as possible, and to find novel approaches even to his best-​known works. The contributors represent a range of scholarly backgrounds, interests, and career stages. Some are already well known for their work on Johnson, while others have so far focused on other aspects of eighteenth-​century studies. I have resisted the urge to ask scholars to turn out chapter-​length rehashes of their books, and whenever possible I have sought contributors who might approach familiar material from unfamiliar angles. The first part, “Career,” offers a three-​chapter account of Johnson’s life, a survey of the biographical tradition by which we know about that life, and a reflection on the state of Johnson’s text in the early twenty-​first century, now that The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson is complete. The chapters in Part II, “Genres,” are organized around the many forms in which Johnson worked. Part III, “Topics,” focuses on the subjects and themes that echo across Johnson’s entire career, from language, commerce, and politics to happiness, suffering, and God. Why these chapters? I deliberately selected rubrics that do not map neatly onto single works: instead of a chapter on Rasselas, for instance, there is one on “Fiction,” which includes Rasselas but also The Fountains, the narrative periodical essays, even the comments about fiction in the critical writing. Rasselas, meanwhile, appears not only there but also in “Sociability,” “Hope,” “Happiness,” “Suffering,” and so on. These unfamiliar juxtapositions ensure all the major works are covered from multiple perspectives, while the less familiar ones—​the Harleian Catalogue, the preface to the Preceptor—​have somewhere to appear other than a ragtag “Minor Works” chapter.

3 

See, e.g., Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 161.

4   Jack Lynch It would, of course, be easy to extend the list of chapters indefinitely, especially in the “Topics” part. I would be glad to include chapter-​length explorations of Johnson and America, anthropology, celebrity, childhood, clubs, crime, economics, epic, food, gambling, gardening, humanism, imperialism, London, lying, mathematics, medicine, memory, Milton, music, nature, patronage, poverty, psychology, race, Scotland, sex, slavery, sports, theater, tragedy, translation, the visual arts, ad infinitum. But this book is already the largest single-​volume collection of Johnsonian scholarship ever published, roughly the length of The Rambler, with thirty-​six contributors. Even if the Delegates of Oxford University Press could be persuaded to push the limits of what can be squeezed between two covers, we would still fall short of a truly comprehensive picture of Johnson. When Oliver Goldsmith complained to Johnson that “we have travelled over one another’s minds,” Johnson shot back, “Sir, you have not travelled over my mind, I promise you” (Life, vol. iv, 183). There will always be more to discover. I hope, though, that this Handbook will give scholars an opportunity to reflect on the state of Johnsonian studies now, and to muse on where it might go next. Johnson wrote his Dictionary “amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 112). Though I’ve benefited from “the shelter of academick bowers,” this has been a strange time to prepare a collection like this. Some of the writing and much of the editing took place during a pandemic that disrupted teaching and writing schedules and shut down libraries around the world. And three great Johnsonians who were present at this book’s inception did not live to see its completion. Robert Folkenflik agreed to contribute the chapter on criticism, but died of lymphoma in July 2019 before he was able to write it. Howard Weinbrot submitted his chapter on Johnson’s sermons, and saw it through the editing process, but fell victim to COVID-​19 in January 2021. And Mark Pedreira died unexpectedly after a brief illness in July 2021. Publishing tradition says edited collections do not receive dedications, but every contributor to this volume owes a debt to Bob, Howard, and Mark, who were unfailingly generous with their erudition and their good humor. I hope the collection is a worthy tribute to their memories.

PA RT I

CAREER

Chapter 1

You t h Kevin Joel Berland

The Man in Miniature Samuel Johnson, born on September 18 (N.S.), 1709, was the son of Lichfield bookseller Michael Johnson (1657–​1731) and Sarah Ford Johnson (1669–​1759). Less is known of his early life than of his well-​documented later years, in part because in the last year of his life Johnson destroyed the notebooks containing his early recollections, so only a few autobiographical items survive. One of Johnson’s early biographers, William Shaw, lamented that “the anecdotes of his juvenile days have perished with the companions of his youth.”1 Fortunately Shaw’s assertion has proved untrue, for anecdotes and snippets of details continued to surface during the decades following Johnson’s death: first a paucity, then a superfluity. Hester Lynch Piozzi observed, “Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to Biography as too little; the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities, and finds difficulty in separating report from truth . . . Numberless informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses which multiply will for the most part be found also to obscure.”2 So much of what has furnished Johnson’s biographers originates in the assemblage of scattered anecdotes; such records are to be received with caution, especially when they are imbedded in speculative interpretation by biographers and critics. Johnson himself was keenly aware of the problem: He that writes the life of another is either his friend or his enemy, and wishes either to exalt his praise or aggravate his infamy; many temptations to falsehood will occur in

1 

William Shaw, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Johnson (London, 1785), 2. Writing soon after Johnson’s death, Shaw likewise could find no material about his school days or his time at Oxford. 2  Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 147.

8   Kevin Joel Berland the disguise of passions, too specious to fear such resistance. Love of virtue will animate panegyric, and hatred of wickedness embitter censure. The zeal of gratitude, the ardour of patriotism, fondness for an opinion, or fidelity to a party, may easily overpower the vigilance of a mind habitually well disposed, and prevail over unassisted and unfriended veracity. (Idler 84, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 263–​4)

We should approach representations of Johnson with caution, recognizing that each rendition is constructed within an interpretive framework belonging, not to the biographical subject, but to each author’s historical understanding and cultural values. This set of ideas influences the selection of evidence to support an underlying theme, which historians call the metanarrative. A biographer’s predispositions shape the version of the subject they present, as if the subject were a puzzle in need of a solution.3 In a multitude of ways, writers on Johnson have sought the origins of his adult character, talents, and idiosyncrasies in his childhood. Boswell’s great biography employs this technique, among many others, when he writes that Johnson “is a memorable instance of what has often been observed, that the boy is the man in miniature: and that the distinguishing characteristics of each individual are the same, through the whole course of life” (Life, vol. I, 46–​7). This insight, well expressed in the opening pages of James Clifford’s Young Sam Johnson, still stands: In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible: great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.4

Family Johnson’s parents married and had children at an unusually advanced age. His mother was in her early forties and his father past fifty when Samuel was born, and his brother Nathaniel came three years later. Life in the Johnson household was fraught with tensions brought about by parental personality differences and by financial worries. Samuel Johnson spoke little of his early years, as Hester Piozzi notes, for he “did not delight in talking much of his family” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 148). Still, biographers, scholars, and historians have uncovered some particulars.

3 

4 

See Mary Fulford, Historical Theory (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), 67. James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), 4.

Youth   9 At the time of his first son Samuel’s birth, Michael Johnson had been operating his Lichfield bookshop for some eighteen years, and the family lived above the shop. The son of a day-​laborer, Michael attended Lichfield’s charity school, then served an apprenticeship in a London stationer’s shop, with his fees paid by a Lichfield charity. He was named Freeman of the Stationers’ Company in 1685 and left London to set up as a bookseller in Lichfield. In his shop, Johnson’s father not only sold books but also prepared paper and tanned leather for book binding. He also published sixteen titles and editions between 1687 and the early 1720s. He traveled to regional markets to sell books and offered books on approval to several collectors. What is known of his inventory confirms the extent of his learning and ambition.5 This was both an advantage and a liability, for he had a good eye for acquiring books that ought to have been in demand, but was rarely able to turn over his stock consistently. In 1706, he boldly purchased the Earl of Derby’s library—​ 29,000 volumes—​but rather than increasing his reputation and custom, the purchase saddled him with a burden of debt from which he was never able to escape. None of his enterprises—​bookselling, bookbinding, paper-​making, tanning—​were sufficiently remunerative and he struggled with debt for the rest of his life. The Johnson home was suffused with financial worries, which Samuel later remembered as miserable poverty. As for Michael Johnson’s person and character, Boswell summarizes: Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of a large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet . . . there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness.6

This affliction, which Boswell identified as “a vile melancholy,” the son believed he had inherited from the father. Accounts of the intensity of Michael Johnson’s gloom vary, but he was certainly not incapacitated. While his business did not prosper, he was well respected in Lichfield, serving in civic offices including senior bailiff, sheriff, and magistrate.7 Samuel Johnson’s mother, Sarah, came from a provincial family of some status, the Fords of Kings Norton, Warwickshire, “an ancient race of substantial yeomanry.” As 5   Michael Johnson’s title pages list London printing and Lichfield sales. He specialized in authors from the Lichfield area, including Sir John Floyer, ΦΑΡΜΑΚΟ-​ΒΑΣΑΝΟΣ; or, The Touch-​stone of Medicines: Discovering the Vertues of Vegetables, Minerals, & Animals, by Their Tastes & Smells and The Preternatural State of Animal Humours Described; the headmaster of the Ashby School, Rev. Samuel Shaw, Grammatica Anglo-​Romana; and Rev. John Bradley, Rector of Norton in Hales, An Impartial View of the Truth of Christianity and The Life of Apollonius Tynæus. He also published several other Anglican sermons and treatises. 6 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 35. Joseph Wood Krutch concurs with Reynolds’s view of Johnson’s “fits of scrupulosity”: Samuel Johnson: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), 3. 7  William Shaw concluded optimistically, he “might be reputable, but could not be rich. He was a man of reserved manners, but of acknowledged shrewdness. From habits of steadiness and punctuality he acquired great personal respectability” (Memoirs, 8).

10   Kevin Joel Berland a result, she was “inclined to think higher of herself than of her husband, whose conduct in money matters being but indifferent, she had a trick of teizing him about it.” Apparently disappointed in the social strictures of her married life, she was disinclined to go out in any company other than her own relatives and showed contempt for her husband’s family. She could not see much value in literature or books in general, and she knew just enough of her husband’s finances to be very unsettled and impatient. On the plus side, as a devout Protestant she assumed responsibility for the first steps of her son’s religious education, teaching him to read so he could study the Bible and religious texts suitable for a pious child. There is little agreement among biographers and literary historians about Johnson’s relationship with his mother: was she emotionally remote or affectionate and proud of her son’s qualities and achievements? Johnson told Piozzi that he did not respect her, though he loved her.8 As an adult Johnson allowed that he had grown up in a familial atmosphere of considerable discord: My father and mother had not much happiness from each other. They seldom conversed; for my father could not bear to talk of his affairs; and my mother, being unacquainted with books, cared not to talk of any thing else. Had my mother been more literate, they had been better companions. She might have sometimes introduced her unwelcome topick with more success, if she could have diversified her conversation. Of business she had no distinct conception; and therefore her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion. (Yale Works, vol. i, 7)

In addition to his parents’ unhappy relationship, a lasting disconnect with his younger brother Nathaniel (1712–​37) began when they were childhood “rivals for the mother’s fondness” (Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 150). As a young man Nathaniel helped in his father’s shop, and at the age of twenty-​four he took on the management of a branch in Burton-​on-​Trent. The enterprise failed catastrophically. In attempting to escape indebtedness, he engaged in some sort of dishonest activities that he described in a letter to his mother as “crimes,” declaring that he would have to emigrate to the new colony of Georgia. In the same letter, Nathaniel complained that he expected no help from his brother Samuel, who not only opposed his setting up a bookshop for himself at Stourbridge, but also “would scarce ever use me with common civility” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 90, n. 3). He died suddenly soon after, just when Johnson was going to London. The cause of Nathaniel’s death remains unclear, and while suicide is a possibility, the fact that he was buried in consecrated ground argues against it. Long after Nathaniel’s death Johnson praised his “manly spirit,” and Johnson’s epitaph for his brother mentions his “pious death” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 150). Be this as it may, the paucity of references to his brother in Johnson’s recollections indicates that they had never been close. The absence of evidence inevitably leads to speculation: was Johnson uncomfortable with his brother’s dishonesty, or with some other defect of character, or perhaps 8 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 35; Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 154, 163.

Youth   11 with the lack of common interests? Taking into account Johnson’s scrupulous attention to personal responsibility, Clifford conjectures that it was “likely that a deep sense of regret and guilt remained with Johnson always. His conscience would never let him forget, even if on the surface he showed no sign. He might dream about Nathaniel, but he avoided mentioning him even to his intimate friends” (Young Sam Johnson, 172).

Birth, Childhood, Illness, and “Hypochondria” Born “almost dead” after “a very difficult and dangerous labour,” the infant Samuel did not thrive, so he was sent to a wet nurse for strengthening. While he did gain strength he contracted scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph nodes), very likely transmitted by his nurse. When the extent of his illness and its deleterious effects on his eyesight was recognized, his caretakers opened an incision or “issue” in his arm to allow the infection to drain, a supposedly therapeutic incision that was kept open for the first six years of his life.9 At the age of three his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne for the “king’s evil,” as scrofula was called.10 Though Robert DeMaria rightly cautions that “Johnson’s inner life as a child is impossible to recover,”11 his early illnesses, scrofula and smallpox—​together with the partial deafness and blindness they produced—​clearly had a lifelong impact. His respiration was compromised early, he suffered shortness of breath and asthma throughout his life, and his death was attributed to what is now known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, complicated by congestive heart failure and kidney failure. It is unclear at what age Johnson came to be troubled by the chronic neurological conditions that produced a halt in his walking, spasmodic movements of his limbs, involuntary vocal sounds, tics, and “the convulsive starts and bizarre movements which later kept Johnson’s body in almost constant motion.” The fact that his hearing and sight were adversely affected by the childhood tubercular infection of his lymph nodes indicates that the auditory and optic cranial nerves were damaged. This resulted in Johnson’s deafness in his left ear, and blindness in one eye with reduced vision in the other. It is not impossible that the infection also damaged other cranial nerves that regulate facial and bodily movement. Boswell, consulting Dr. Sydenham’s symptomology, proposed that Johnson suffered from St. Vitus’s dance (chorea minor). Sir Joshua Reynolds disagreed, insisting Johnson’s “motions or tricks” could not have been convulsive, for he actually

9 

Johnson defines issue as “A fontanel; a vent made in a muscle for the discharge of humours.” Rogers points out evidence that the ancient tradition of curative royal touch was current at this period: a service for this rite was included in The Book of Common Prayer; Pat Rogers, The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 42. 11  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 3. 10  Pat

12   Kevin Joel Berland was capable of holding still; rather, they were habits associated with certain troubling thoughts or “scruples.” In addition to these physical motions, Johnson exhibited a number of compulsive behavioral eccentricities, such as beating his feet on the floor, blowing out breaths, shambolic eating, conspicuous negligence of dress, muttering, counting steps, or touching posts as he walked, and pausing before a threshold before jumping inside—​all documented by Boswell and confirmed by others. Alexander Pope, for instance, writing in support of an endeavor to persuade Trinity College Dublin to grant Johnson an M.A., mentioned his condition as a disability: “He has an infirmity that attacks him sometimes, so as to make him a sad spectacle.”12 Some of Johnson’s peculiarities may have developed later in his life, but they are relevant here because so many biographers and scholars have assumed a direct link between Johnson’s physical illnesses and his mental state, and therefore have sought etiologies in Johnson’s early life. Moreover, much that has been written about Johnson engages with a popular version or “folk image” of the man13—​“Johnson as an oddity”—​that conflates all the childhood illnesses, neurological and psychological issues, various eccentricities, and essential character. The most merciless example is Thomas Babington Macaulay’s description: Johnson . . . is better known to us than any man in history. Every thing about him—​ his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St Vitus’s dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-​sauce and veal-​pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-​peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his fits of tempestuous rage . . . all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood . . . From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper.14

Clearly, biographers have long sought to connect the disconcerting array of neurophysiological symptoms with the disturbances of Johnson’s mind. There is his

12 Clifford,

Young Sam Johnson, 24; Boswell, Life, vol. i, 144; Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, 11 vols. (London: privately printed, 1909–​52), vol. v, 98. On the views of medical historians, see John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Helen Deutsch, “Doctor Johnson’s Autopsy, or Anecdotal Immortality,” The Eighteenth Century 40, no. 2 (1999), 113–​27; and Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., “Samuel Johnson’s Tics and Gesticulations,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (April 1967), 152–​68. 13  “Folk image” is Bertrand Bronson’s term, as quoted by Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1. 14  William Babington Macaulay, review of The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. John Wilson Croker, The Edinburgh Review 54, no. 107 (September 1831), 21, 25. William Kenney locates the source of the “Johnson as an oddity” tradition in Macaulay’s review of Croker’s edition, and notes that Macaulay’s method—​condensing Boswell’s scattered observations of eccentricities while omitting much else—​ produces “a gross distortion.” “Dr. Johnson and the Psychiatrists,” American Imago 17, no. 1 (1960), 75–​6.

Youth   13 melancholy and hypochondria to consider; his sessions of profound depression; his temper and irritability; his compulsive habits of voice and body; his habitual procrastination; and his disinclination to begin, engage in, or complete intellectual undertakings for which he was abundantly qualified—​as Piozzi noted, “This facility of writing, and this dilatoriness ever to write, Mr. Johnson always retained” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 178). The paradoxical condition of a great writer capable of unprecedented excellence constantly reluctant to write presents a challenge to biographers. Conjectures abound, ranging from the empathetic to the censorious: was his “indolence” an involuntary response to a life seemingly of continual crisis, or a mere character flaw (laziness and sloth)? Donald Greene identifies this condition as “neurotic inhibition.”15 Paul Fussell describes the simultaneous pressure of “constitutional indolence and neurotic impulsiveness.”16 Other readers make a stronger case for Johnson’s functional powerlessness during crises of melancholic hypochondria, which John Wain sensitively called “that horrible depressive paralysis of the will.”17 Hawkins views Johnson’s indolence as a moral failing: “And here we cannot but reflect on that inertness and laxity of mind which the neglect of order and regularity in living, and the observance of fixed hours, in short, the waste of time, is apt to lead men to: this was the source of Johnson’s misery throughout his life; all he did was by fits and starts, and he had no genuine impulse to action, either corporal or mental.”18 This is a severe reproach, and one of many issues in Hawkins’s Life with which Boswell takes issue. The question remains whether Johnson’s “indolence” was a character flaw or a concomitant effect of his deep-​rooted anxiety and mental disturbance. Prone to attacks of melancholy or depression, Johnson was exceedingly aware of his mental difficulties, so much so that he feared madness as long as he lived. Because he had observed the effects of melancholy on his father, Johnson tended to believe the source of his turmoil was constitutional, and he tended to believe melancholy was a precursor or symptom of the onset of insanity. He took issue with Boswell’s attempt to distinguish between melancholy and madness as separate though not unrelated conditions. On another occasion, he declared to Boswell that his inherited melancholy “has made me mad all my life, at least not sober” (Life, vol. iii, 175–​6; vol. v, 215). According to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson once told him, “The great business of his life . . . was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered the disease of his mind.” A highly developed sense of guilt, established early in life, must have amplified these attacks of melancholy. Johnson recorded in his Annals that, during a childhood visit to his Aunt Phoebe Ford, he consumed a surprising amount of boiled leg of mutton, an event which his mother told him would not soon be forgotten. John Wain, discussing this incident, calls this 15 

Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1970), 26. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 20. 17  John Wain, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 55. 18  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 126. 16 

14   Kevin Joel Berland an unforgettable view of Sarah Johnson at work, moulding her son’s character. Whether or not he was healthy Sam was large, and his physical appetites were correspondingly robust. Already before his tenth year was out these appetites had been associated with guilt and wrongdoing.19

To this maternal influence on Johnson’s embodied discomfort and guilt must be added abundant supplies of guilt derived from his many failures, from uncharitable or inappropriate thoughts and impulses, and from a distressing sense of not living up to his familial and religious duties. The worst of Johnson’s depressive attacks occurred when he left Oxford for Lichfield. Johnson called these episodes “hypochondria,” suggesting that he brooded on his illnesses and disabilities so compulsively that he even questioned whether they were real or imaginary. Late in life he confided to his friend Edmund Hector, “My health has been, from my twentieth year, such as seldom afforded me a single day of ease.” Boswell, marveling that extraordinary genius and understanding could coexist with such a painfully stubborn disorder, speculated that Johnson’s melancholy must have been “in some degree, occasioned by a defect in his nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frame” (Life, vol. i, 144–​5, 64). Searching through the vast body of biographical approaches over the centuries, one is bound to encounter a variety of interpretations of Johnson’s maladies. As long as sixty years ago James Clifford cautioned that “historical-​literary psychoanalysis is always hazardous,” especially in complex cases such as Johnson’s, in which “no single explanation is sufficient.” Literary-​medical interpretations necessarily involve a mixture of science and speculation, as well as an unacknowledged selectivity of evidence, focusing on the elements that fit. As Helen Deutsch has observed, “literary Johnsonians have preserved their hero in anecdotal detail, just as medical Johnsonians have preserved his corpse in parts.”20 Disciples of Freud have diagnosed Johnson with compulsion neurosis, an Oedipus complex, and guilt for rejecting his mother. W. J. Bate traces Johnson’s disorders to anxiety generated by the extreme “internal self-​demand” of the superego.21 Pat Rogers concludes that some of Johnson’s “singularities” derive partly from “private superstitions,” while others “appear to be no more than compulsive actions stemming from an obsessive personality.”22 Still, it is of considerable interest to note Boswell’s prescient identification of Johnson’s symptoms as resulting from damage to the nervous system. Modern medical advances in neurology may be useful in this regard, and DeMaria makes a compelling case for Johnson having Tourette’s syndrome: 19 Wain, Samuel Johnson, 23. 20 

Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 18. 25. On mid-​century Freudian interpretations, see William Kenney, “Dr. Johnson and the Psychiatrists.” A more coherent view is that of W. Jackson Bate, who observes, “Long before Freud, Johnson himself was aware of the paralytic effects that can result from the crushing demands of what Freud called the ‘super-​ego.’ ” Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 19. 22 Rogers, Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia, 93. 21 Clifford,

Youth   15 Johnson was capable of astonishing verbal performances, but he often declined conversational engagement altogether until he was provoked or roused to explosive entry into the fray. Diagnosing the diseases of the dead is absurd, of course, and there is an anachronism in superimposing on them our age’s medical terminology, but something like Tourette’s syndrome would explain both Johnson’s reticence and his explosive power as a talker, as well as various symptoms of his movement disorder.

DeMaria demonstrates how a number of Johnson’s well-​known characteristics fit with Tourette’s, intensified by solitude and anxiety. People with Tourette’s often experience difficulty with the physicality of daily experience: “Bodily laziness is also a symptom of the disease, and Johnson may have felt a neurological resistance to the physical engagement of writing.” People with Tourette’s also experience “wide swings in mood and energy.” All these issues are readily compatible with what we know of Johnson’s physiological and mental health.23

Early Education Johnson’s mother and his nurse read to him and taught him his letters quite early, and he learned reading at a nearby dame school for young children run by one Anne Oliver. He took to reading quite rapidly and pursued his interest in romances and fanciful tales. Aging out of dame school, he attended lessons with a local part-​time schoolmaster, and then, at the age of seven and a half, he entered Lichfield Grammar School, well known for producing scholars, clerics, natural philosophers, lawyers, and writers. There, in the lower school under the kindly usher Humphry Hawkins, he studied Lily’s Latin Grammar, memorized rules and passages, parsed and construed Latin sentences, and read selections from Roman authors. In 1716, he moved to the upper school where he came to study under the headmaster, Rev. John Hunter, who, according to Johnson, “was very severe, and wrong-​headedly severe. He used . . . to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it.” Johnson disliked Hunter not because he disapproved of corporal punishment–​he did not–​but because of the arbitrary cruelty of his discipline. Still, he later credited Hunter for his fluency in Latin, explaining to his friend Bennet Langton, “My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing” (Life, vol. i, 44, 27). Piozzi also records Johnson’s account of Hunter’s

23  Robert

DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 6, 9, 24. On Johnson and Tourette’s, see also T. J. Murray, “Dr Johnson’s Movement Disorder,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 6178 (June 16, 1979), 1610–​4. Helen Deutsch observes that “the embattled history of scholarship on Tourette’s reinforces the power of Johnson’s example to compromise our ability to distinguish between tics, symptoms, habits, and compulsions” (Loving Dr. Johnson, 98).

16   Kevin Joel Berland brutality, but she also adds that he acknowledged Hunter’s “scholarship to be very great” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 159). As for Johnson’s manner of learning, Boswell—​drawing on reminiscences of Johnson’s schoolmate and lifelong friend, Edmund Hector—​states, “He seemed to learn by intuition; for though indolence and procrastination were inherent in his constitution, whenever he made an exertion he did more than any one else. In short, he is a memorable instance of what has often been observed, that the boy is the man in miniature: and that the distinguishing characteristics of each individual are the same, through the whole course of life” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 46–​7). Despite his illnesses and impaired vision, as Clifford notes, “the force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar.” A competitive eagerness to excel motivated him, imperfectly balanced with indolence and procrastination: “The hardest thing he ever had to do was to force himself to get down to work.”24 This early disposition never left him. His time at the Lichfield Grammar School was marked by procrastination, mischief, and preeminence. He was popular with his schoolmates, who considered him a kind of champion and carried him on their shoulders, no mean feat, since he was already a very large boy. Hector remembered that Johnson was never corrected for his schoolwork like the other students, but only for talking, entertaining, and distracting the other boys (Life, vol. i, 47). At school he made friends, with some of whom he maintained a lifelong relation. First among these friends was Edmund Hector, son of the “man-​midwife” who attended at Johnson’s birth; the younger Hector became a surgeon in Birmingham, where for a time he hosted Johnson and supported his writing. John Taylor, who became a clergyman, remained close to Johnson even though their characters and beliefs might have seemed incompatible. Johnson wrote a number of sermons for Taylor, which were published under Taylor’s name after his death (see Chapter 12, “Sermons”). Robert James became a physician best known for his commercially successful fever powder; Johnson contributed to his Medical Dictionary (1743), writing the proposal for the work and (probably) the dedication to Dr. Mead (Life, vol. i, 159). The Congreve brothers, Charles and Richard, went into the Church; Charles rose to be the Archdeacon of Armagh, but succumbed to drink, and Johnson evidently last had contact with Richard when seeking advice about starting the academy at Edial. Isaac Hawkins Browne, poet and silent member of parliament, was a friend who Johnson valued for his conversation. In the fall of 1725, Sarah Johnson’s nephew Cornelius Ford visited Lichfield to help resolve a lingering problem with her marriage settlement. He observed something out of the ordinary in his young cousin and invited him for a brief visit at his home at Pedmore, near Stourbridge, Worcestershire. Johnson later described Ford as “a man of great wit and stupendous parts.” He was acquainted with Pope and other poets, had been a don at Cambridge before he took orders, had served as Lord Chesterfield’s chaplain

24 Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 4, 60–​1.

Youth   17 at the Hague, and was an accomplished Latinist. Much later “Parson Ford” became notorious for licentiousness, and long after his cousin’s death Johnson, in his Life of Fenton, expressed regret for Ford’s wasted potential. With his talents, “instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and wise.”25 The cousins got along so well that Ford invited Johnson to stay longer, and so he remained at Pedmore for six months. According to Hawkins, Ford extended his cousin’s visit because he “was possessed of uncommon parts, was unwilling to let him return, and to make up for the loss he might sustain by his absence from school, became his instructor in the classics, and further assisted him in his studies.”26 Accounts of the visit to Pedmore generally follow Hawkins, as when Clifford describes Johnson studying the classics with his “attractive and sympathetic tutor.” But he goes on to suggest that it is more likely that they discussed what Johnson had been reading, rather than formal instruction. And DeMaria suggests that Johnson’s program of reading at Pedmore was not particularly studious, but “of a more pleasurable and looser kind,” including English poetry—​Garth, Congreve, Addison, Prior—​as well as Anacreon and Martial, whose Latin verse fell well outside the standard grammar school curriculum.27 Piozzi relates that Ford gave Johnson two pieces of advice, the first of which “no man surely ever followed more exactly”: “Obtain (says Ford) some general principles of every science; he who can talk only on one subject, or act only in one department, is seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished for; while the man of general knowledge can often benefit, and always please.” Ford also recommended that Johnson should focus on the written word and eschew competing in conversation, a prognostication the very reverse of Johnson’s development: “You will make your way more easily in the world, I see, as you are contented to dispute no man’s claim to conversation excellence; they will, therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as a writer” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 155). This prediction anticipated the outcome considerably less accurately than the first. During his sojourn with Ford, Johnson was exposed to an environment in which learning and literature mattered. As Reade explains, in Lichfield he was the bookseller’s son, but at Pedmore and Stourbridge he was the nephew of the leading physician, Dr. Ford, and the cousin of the brilliant Cornelius.28 Although Johnson’s extraordinary talents had been recognized at home and in school, this was the first time such recognition had not been framed as a challenge to educational discipline. Moreover, while Ford’s establishment and the familial and social circle at Stourbridge were for the most part not especially luxurious, Johnson must have felt relief at the absence of financial

25 Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 348; Life of Fenton, in Yale Works, vol. xxii, 782.

26 Hawkins, Life, 6. Wain notes that Ford, certain “some countenance” would be required for Johnson’s absence from school, “had given a more or less formal undertaking to oversee his education during that time” (Wain, Samuel Johnson, 32). 27 Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 84; DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 76. 28 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. iii, 153.

18   Kevin Joel Berland tensions, as well as some comfort from acceptance by a socially and culturally elevated community. When at last Johnson returned to Lichfield, Hunter refused him readmission to Lichfield Grammar School because he had been absent without sufficient cause. An application to enter the Norfolk School as scholar and assistant to the headmaster was unsuccessful. With his cousin Ford’s support, Johnson then entered the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stourbridge. The headmaster, Rev. John Wentworth, was, according to Johnson, very able, but idle and severe to him; Johnson said he had learned much from Lichfield School but little from the master, and at Stourbridge he learned nothing from the school but much from the master. He did not remain long in this school, returning home to Lichfield after about a year, where, as Boswell says, “he may be said to have loitered, for two years, in a state very unworthy his uncommon abilities.” Though Johnson confessed that he had been idle during this period, he also told Boswell that he did not wish to be viewed as having done nothing (Life, vol. i, 50, 57). In fact, he was engaged in an informal but rigorous course of study, launched by two events: the acquisition of Littleton’s Latin dictionary and the discovery of a folio volume of Petrarch on a shelf where he was searching for the apples he thought his brother had hidden. DeMaria has cogently observed, “Johnson was early trying to get above the common round of classical study for reasons both of curiosity and of pride” (DeMaria, Life, 15). He had set his mind on attaining a high level of learning, even if he had to do it independently of pedagogical direction. This is not to say that he was unassisted in this effort. Johnson was fortunate to attract the attention of several accomplished and generous mentors. We have already seen the positive effects of Cornelius Ford’s interest in his young cousin. Another important influence was Gilbert Walmsley, a well-​educated barrister who served as registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court of the Diocese of Lichfield and lived in the Bishop’s Palace. He was learned, moderately worldly, and an accomplished controversialist. A frequent customer at Michael Johnson’s bookshop, Walmsley must have encountered the young man he came to call “the stupendous stripling” there. He “took pleasure in rising genius,” as Anna Seward phrased it, and Johnson and David Garrick enjoyed many convivial dinners with Walmsley and other guests at the Bishop’s Palace.29 Many years later Johnson reflected on Walmsley in his Life of Smith, “I knew him very early; he was one of the first friends that literature procured me, and I hope that, at least, my gratitude made me worthy of his notice. He was of an advanced age, and I was only not a boy; yet he never received my notions with contempt.”30 Walmsley’s attraction for Johnson consisted of a number of elements: he was a Whig unusually tolerant of Johnson’s Tory notions, he was worldly and experienced, he continually improved his mind, he progressed from regularity to piety, and he was unequaled in knowledge, especially the knowledge of books. “Such was the amplitude of learning, and such copiousness of communication, that it

29 

30 

As quoted by Bate, Samuel Johnson, 81. Life of Smith, in Yale Works, vol. xxii, 532–​3.

Youth   19 may be doubted whether a day now passes, in which I have not some advantage from his friendship” (Life, vol. i, 81). Emulating Walmsley was an essential part of Johnson’s self-​formation. He admired the way Walmsley kept himself apprised of cultural developments by adding to his always-​expanding library. Clifford locates the primary influence in Walmsley’s “vigorous honesty of expression—​his insistence on saying exactly what he thought, regardless of the consequences, yet with a willingness to hear the other side.” Bate also emphasizes the influence of Walmsley’s conversation: “with his trained lawyer’s habits of controversy, forcefulness in dispute, and readiness to take issue and discover flaws in another’s argument.”31 By the time he encountered Walmsley, Johnson had already developed a mischievous delight in arguing on either side of an issue, so Walmsley was sowing on fertile ground.

Oxford After Johnson left the school at Stourbridge he lingered at home in Lichfield. The prospects of continuing his education were dim until his mother received a small inheritance. A former schoolfellow at Lichfield, Andrew Corbet—​by then a gentleman commoner at Pembroke College—​offered to help Johnson go up to Oxford, possibly with the provision that Johnson would help him with his studies. It remains unclear how long the promised benefaction continued, for Corbet’s stay in Oxford during Johnson’s residence was brief; indeed, it remains unclear whether any funds at all were forthcoming from him.32 The long-​standing tradition is that Johnson was “miserably poor” at Oxford, but Clifford observes, “For dramatic effect some writers have overstressed Johnson’s poverty at Oxford,” though he did not have to perform menial work as a servitor for his tuition or board, and “was not especially pinched,” and the evidence of college buttery books analyzed in Johnsonian Gleanings indicates, and as DeMaria concludes, he was in fact “a moderately comfortable commoner.”33 It was therefore not poverty alone that disturbed Johnson. He had not anticipated the deeply embedded class distinctions that had evolved to make Oxford the domain of social status, wealth, and rank. Privileges of birth outweighed talent and scholarship, so Johnson found it difficult to stand out on the basis of his considerable abilities 31 Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 107; Bate, Samuel Johnson, 83. 32 

The story of Corbet financially supporting Johnson at Oxford is problematic; see Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. v, 20. Bate notes that Corbet may have thought his financial obligation to Johnson ceased when he no longer needed his assistance with his studies because he had left Oxford (Bate, Samuel Johnson, 88). 33 Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 114; Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. v, 4–​5, 22–​4, appendix H; and DeMaria, Life, 20. See also the comment by G. B. Hill, Boswell’s editor: “Yet his college bills came to only some eight shillings a week. As this was about the average amount of an undergraduate’s bill it is clear that, so far as food went, he lived . . . as well as his fellow students” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 78, n1).

20   Kevin Joel Berland alone. His uncouth appearance, too, worked against him. Though he was not exactly impoverished, neither was he able to dress well, which accentuated his difference from the other students. As Bate observes, “His sense of shame that his need was so obvious was acute.” He reacted explosively to an anonymous gift of shoes left at his door by another student, possibly an unwelcome instance of unsolicited charity, but more likely an expression of the donor’s class superiority and a sophomoric display of contempt for the way Johnson looked and dressed (Bate, Samuel Johnson, 104). It is important to understand the context of Johnson’s wounded pride. He had formed an idealistic image of the quality of learning at Oxford, and all his independent studying was meant to prepare him for the noble pursuit of scholarship. But he was deeply disappointed by the social hierarchies of birth and the shallow attitudes of many students. Donald Greene places resistance to class and power structures at the core of Johnson’s attitude, calling him “the angry young man of Pembroke,” barely able to endure Oxford’s “petty tyrants and arbitrary inflictions.”34 He was also disappointed with what appeared to be ignorance and incompetence of some of the dons, and stayed away from the lectures of his tutor William Jorden, “finding him no scholar” (Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 164). When Jorden asked why he had been absent, Johnson answered impudently that he had been busy sliding on the ice in Christ Church Meadow. As in his earlier school days, Johnson enjoyed playful mischief at Oxford, which fit well with his deliberate endeavor to mask his disappointment by appearing not to care. Similarly, he cultivated the appearance of indolence and of not studying, he resisted the college’s residential procedures, he was dilatory in turning in college exercises, and he idled about the college gate entertaining other students and keeping them from their studies. Jorden’s successor was Dr. William Adams, a junior fellow who would have been Johnson’s tutor had he returned to Oxford, later the master of Pembroke College and Johnson’s friend. Adams was apparently convinced by Johnson’s performance, telling Boswell that Johnson “was caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicksome fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life”—​an account Boswell described as “striking proof of the fallacy of appearances” (Life, vol. i, 73). In private, however, Johnson was not always idle: he improvised some of his assigned tasks on the spot, offered clever excuses for not submitting other assignments, offered ingenious alternative compositions instead of those assigned, attended lectures by other professors he found more learned than his own tutor, and translated Pope’s Messiah into Latin. He read French authors, including Le Grand’s Relation historique d’Abyssinie, which he later translated and published, and he picked up Italian along the way. He read Homer and Euripides in Greek, and expanded his already impressive familiarity with Roman and Renaissance literature in Latin. Johnson’s disappointment in, and scorn for, Oxford’s elevation of social rank and inconsistent devotion to scholarship affected him deeply. He was set upon succeeding in the world of literature, and as DeMaria concludes,

34 

Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 60.

Youth   21 Johnson “needed to assert his pre-​eminence there, just as he needed to assert the superiority of letters to high society” (DeMaria, Life, 21). Johnson was not planning to leave Oxford for good when he returned to Lichfield for the Christmas vacation of 1729, for he did not take his books with him, and he only sent for them three years later, when he was preparing to open his own school at Edial. Whatever Johnson’s thoughts about returning to Oxford might have been, he was never able to resume his studies there. Boswell and others attribute Johnson’s departure to the “irresistible necessity” of his father’s insolvency. The break also coincided with the onset of a severe depression. Boswell traces this episode to a constitutional “morbid melancholy” gathering strength until it “afflicted him in a dreadful manner . . . He felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery.” He attempted to overcome this affliction by means of “forcible exertions” such as walking long distances, but to no avail. The pain continued to grow until he even considered suicide. When he drew up a statement of his case in Latin, he gave it to Dr. Swinfen, his godfather, who gravely replied that such a condition was likely to end in madness. And Johnson himself was “too ready to call such a complaint by the name of madness.” Johnson never fully recovered, and was subject to recurring bouts of extreme melancholy and what Clifford calls “the morbid obsession that he was losing his mind.”35 Nonetheless, eventually, as the frustration and sting of having to abandon his studies at Oxford faded, Johnson’s opinion of the university mellowed, and as DeMaria observes, his “attitude of hostility, pride, and scorn softened . . . into regretful respect.” At last, Piozzi records, Johnson “delighted in his own partiality to Oxford.”36

After Oxford: Lichfield and Birmingham Michael Johnson died toward the end of 1731, leaving an estate encumbered by debt. The house in Lichfield had been settled on his wife and children, and this, together with the stock of the shop, was almost certainly the bulk of the inheritance. Sarah and Nathaniel continued to work in the shop, but Johnson felt out of place as a bookseller and sought academic work. He applied without success for a position as usher at the Stourbridge Grammar School, and then gained a place at the Free Dixie Grammar School in Market Bosworth, where he was immersed in the tedious routine of teaching uncomprehending young boys the rudiments of Latin from Lily’s Grammar. Worse yet was the condescending treatment by the school’s patron, Sir Wolstan Dixie, who insisted that Johnson live in his extravagantly showy home, Bosworth Hall, rather than 35 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 63–​5, 78; Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 130. 36 DeMaria, Life, 19; Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 168.

22   Kevin Joel Berland the private house specified in the contract. Sir Wolstan demanded that Johnson perform the services of chaplain and subjected him to a steady regime of contempt and humiliation. Johnson’s would-​be patron, Clifford explains, was an ignorant bully, “the kind of boorish, egotistical sportsman who finds delight in poking fun at those more sensitive and intellectual than himself.”37 Johnson could only bear six months of Sir Wolstan and his school. The advent of a legacy of twenty pounds from his father’s estate may have encouraged him to escape the odious situation, so he left his position at Market Bosworth, writing to his friend John Taylor that leaving Bosworth Hall was like “coming out of prison.”38 Johnson returned to Lichfield, but he had not given up the pursuit of a position in education. He applied to the Ashbourne Grammar School, but even with several recommendations he was unsuccessful. After an uncomfortable stay in his mother’s house, Johnson accepted his friend Edmund Hector’s invitation to join him in Birmingham. Having established his practice as a surgeon, Hector lived in the house of the bookseller and printer Thomas Warren, who soon found Johnson’s knowledge of books useful. Warren commissioned him to write for his newspaper, the Birmingham Journal, and Johnson may have contributed anonymously to productions of Warren’s press. Johnson stayed with Hector for about six months, and then took up quarters elsewhere in Birmingham. There he embarked on his translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia with the encouragement of Hector and Warren, who undertook to publish the work. However, as Boswell reports, “his constitutional indolence soon prevailed, and the work was at a stand,” and so Hector intervened. Mr. Hector, who knew that a motive of humanity would be the most prevailing argument with his friend, went to Johnson, and represented to him, that the printer could have no other employment till this undertaking was finished, and that the poor man and his family were suffering. Johnson upon this exerted the powers of his mind, though his body was relaxed. He lay in bed with the book, which was a quarto, before him, and dictated while Hector wrote. Mr, Hector carried the sheets to the press, and corrected almost all the proof sheets, very few of which were even seen by Johnson.39

Boswell rightly calls Hector’s part in the preparation of Johnson’s first book “active friendship.” The episodes often described as “indolence” were not simply laziness or lack of resolution to start a task or carry it to completion. Rather, they were symptoms of the incapacitating “vile melancholy” which he suffered in the form of an invasive mental process that made both physical and mental activity extraordinarily difficult, a condition which Bate astutely identifies as “paralyzing self-​detestation and despair.” At such 37 Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 19.

38 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. v, 85.

39 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 8. According to Thomas Kaminski, “Hector had to extort from Johnson his translation of Father Lobo’s Journey to Abyssinia by representing to him the distress his delay caused his family.” The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4 (emphasis added).

Youth   23 times Johnson’s mind turned inward. DeMaria explains: “His mentality was formed on the silent and largely private study of books; he was quintessentially literate, but the kind of physicality needed in the literate world was an obstacle to him.” Keeping his mind on task was complicated by “a neurological resistance to the physical engagement of writing.”40 In taking dictation from Johnson, Hector provided a bridge from the solitary and physically inert (“relaxed”) body to a literary process Johnson needed to exist fully in his interior life. Not long after this Johnson sent a letter to Edward Cave, the founder and editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, offering (in a singularly undiplomatic manner) proposals to improve “the defects of your poetical article,” and offering “short literary dissertations,” critical remarks, revival of poems undeservedly forgotten, all of which would make “the literary article . . . better recommended to the publick than by low jests, aukward buffoonery, or the dull scurrilities of either party.” It would be unsurprising if Cave had simply ignored the letter, but Cave’s papers indicate that he read and replied to the letter. Cave’s reply has not been discovered, yet Hawkins concludes (incorrectly) that Johnson had already started to write for the Gentleman’s Magazine before he made his way to London (see Chapter 6, “Journalism”).41

Marriage and the Edial School In Birmingham, Johnson met Elizabeth Porter (née Jervis), the widow of the woolen draper Harry Porter, and he soon became “her fervent admirer.” Most accounts of the match view it as odd, unlikely, or even “amazing.”42 Boswell observes that she was twenty years older than Johnson, and “her person and manner . . . were by no means pleasing to others,”43 while Johnson’s appearance was downright forbidding: “He was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible.” His neurological tics were frequent enough to attract surprise and even ridicule, but Mrs. Porter must have had superior understanding, Boswell continues, because she found Johnson’s conversation was so engaging

40

 Bate, Samuel Johnson, 140; DeMaria, Life, 9. Life, vol. i, 95–​96. Hawkins wrongly maintains that Cave then “accepted the services of Johnson and retained him as a correspondent and a contributor to his Magazine” (Hawkins, Life, 18). 42 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. vi, 22. 43  Boswell here quotes David Garrick, who famously described Mrs. Johnson (later in life) as “very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting; flaring and fantastick in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behavior” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 99). Unflattering descriptions largely derived from Garrick were common, but Shaw maintains that at the time of her marriage to Johnson “she was still young and handsome” (Memoirs, 25). Clifford questions the reliability of reports that she “lacked physical charms” at the time she married Johnson (Young Sam Johnson, 152–​3). Cf. Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. vi, 25–​8, and DeMaria, Life, 33. 41 Boswell,

24   Kevin Joel Berland that “she overlooked all these external disadvantages, and said to her daughter “this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.” They were married on July 9, 1735. Johnson insisted “it was a love-​marriage on both sides.” Boswell describes him as “a most affectionate and indulgent husband to the last moments of Mrs. Johnson’s life,” and observes that he regarded her with fondness long after her death.44 Johnson applied for employment at the grammar schools at Solihull and Brerewood, but the applications failed largely because of his strange appearance and his convulsive gesticulations. He then made plans to set up his own academy and rented a large house at Edial, near Lichfield, apparently with a substantial portion of Mrs. Johnson’s funds. There, according to advertisements in the Gentleman’s Magazine, he proposed to board and teach young gentlemen Latin and Greek. Hawkins offers an optimistic picture of Johnson’s fitness for the enterprise: His acquisitions at school and at the university, and the improvements he had made in the study of the French and Italian languages qualified him in an eminent degree for the instruction of youth in classical literature; and the reputation of his father, and the connections he had formed in and about Lichfield, pointed out to him a fair prospect of succeeding in that useful profession.45

Johnson’s motives for this venture seem to be both a reaction to his failure to gain a teaching position, and a wish for freedom from subjection to the sort of abuse he had experienced at Market Bosworth. But recruiting students was not as easy as Hawkins suggests, for there were only three boarders (including David Garrick and his brother George) and never more than eight day students. Johnson had prepared a detailed “Scheme for the Classes of a Grammar School,” quite impressive on paper, but evidently not easy for him to put into practice. Perhaps countering Hawkins’s overoptimistic view, Boswell offers a candid assessment of Johnson’s unfitness as a schoolmaster: The truth, however, is, that he was not so well qualified for being a teacher of elements, and a conductor in learning by regular gradations, as men of inferior powers of mind. His own acquisitions had been made by fits and starts, by violent irruptions into the regions of knowledge; and it could not be expected that his impatience would be subdued, and his impetuosity restrained, so as to fit him, for a quiet guide to novices. (Life, vol. i, 97)

Meanwhile, Johnson endeavored to write something that would lift him out of the dreary life of a schoolmaster. Catherine Dille has pointed out that “Johnson pursued his

44 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 94–​ 9. However, Shaw mentions rumors of Johnson’s “conjugal infelicity” (Memoirs, 33), and Pat Rogers avers, “There is considerable anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to show that it was not altogether happy” (Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia, 205). 45 Hawkins, Life, 22.

Youth   25 vocation as a writer against the background of repeated attempts to become a teacher.” The school at Edial was one of the last of these attempts. At the same time that Johnson was attempting to manage his school—​and as he must have been aware that it was failing—​he was also working on his tragedy, Irene, partially complete when he departed for London.46

The Journey to London There was nothing else he could do now that the vocation of schoolmaster was closed to him. The gravity of his situation cannot be exaggerated. Donald Greene sums it up eloquently: When Johnson set out from Lichfield for London, he was twenty-​eight years old, and a failure. A career in the University, the Church, the learned professions, had been denied to him by his poverty, or the unavailability of a patron, or the unlikelihood of his being able to cultivate one if one had appeared. Even in the poor makeshift of elementary schoolmastering, he must have come to see that his deficiencies of personality were almost impassable barriers to even a minimum of success. There was only one further alternative means of earning a living by the use of his brains—​that of writing for money; and so Johnson went to London as the most likely place to earn it.47

Seeing no other prospects, and encouraged by praise for his writing from Hector, Walmsley, and others, Johnson decided that his tragedy Irene would be his entry to a life of writing. As Boswell put it, “Johnson now thought of trying his fortune in London, the great field of genius and exertion, where talents of every kind have the fullest scope, and the highest encouragement” (Life, vol. i, 101). This was, at least, what Johnson must have hoped for. On March 2, 1737, he set out for London, 120 miles away, with his friend and former pupil, David Garrick, who was supposed to be preparing to study law. They had very little money, mere pocket change, and they made their way with a single horse, each walking in turns while the other rode. Arriving in London, they made their way to the shop of Wilcox the printer. Johnson told Wilcox that he intended to make his living as an author, whereupon Wilcox, observing Johnson’s powerful build, replied that he had “better buy a porter’s knot.”48 Nonetheless, Johnson and Garrick asked for a small loan of five pounds, and he gave it to them. 46 

Catherine Dille, “Education,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 174. One last attempt to gain a position as schoolmaster occurred in 1738–​9; see Reade, “The Appleby Incident,” c­ hapter 9 of Johnsonian Gleanings, vol. vi, 96–​114. 47 Greene, Politics, 81. 48  The anecdote was recorded by John Nichols; Boswell, Life, vol. i, 102 n2.

26   Kevin Joel Berland Johnson stayed in the least expensive lodging he could find, working on his tragedy and seeking opportunities to write for money. A letter of introduction from Walmsley to the printer-​publisher Bernard Lintot apparently produced no work. Johnson wrote again to Cave, this time under his own name, proposing a translation of Paolo Sarpi’s Historia del concilio Tridentino, appealing to a market for “theological-​political controversy.” Cave published Johnson’s biographical sketch of the author and his proposal for the translation, but the project was abandoned. And so Johnson entered Grub Street.

Johnson and Religion The chronological scheme of the foregoing parts of this chapter does not accommodate the topic of religion, though the matter of Johnson’s religion runs through every stage of his life, and his early struggles are certainly relevant to his later life and career. His mother instructed him in the basic tenets of the Church of England. She had him memorize collects from the Book of Common Prayer, and had him read from The Whole Duty of Man. What Johnson most remembered from his mother’s instruction was her emphasis on the future state of rewards and punishments. For Sarah Johnson, Clifford writes, “Hell was real, and damnation no mere symbolic device. So well did her son learn the lesson that he was never rid of the terrors of the other world.”49 Paul Fussell refers to Johnson’s “lifetime terror of extinction and his torments about the likelihood of his own damnation.”50 Johnson attended church services with his family at St. Mary’s, Lichfield, until at the age of nine he petitioned his parents to allow him to stop. Rather than being subjected to sermons and liturgical rituals he could barely hear or see, he preferred to walk and read in the countryside. In retrospect, Johnson makes no excuses for his neglect of religion: I fell into an inattention to religion or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year, and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. While at Oxford, I took up “Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life,” expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are,) and perhaps to laugh

49 

Young Sam Johnson, 23. Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 33. 50  Paul

Youth   27 at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I was capable of rational inquiry. (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 67–​8)

He confided in Boswell that he had thought little about religion until he experienced “scruples of infidelity” around the age of ten. Determined to find answers to his questions about the truth of revealed religion, he attempted to read Grotius’s De Veritate religionis but found his understanding of Latin insufficient. This served as a motive for studying Latin with renewed vigor.51 It appears that the doctrine of life after death stood for the youthful Johnson as an obstacle to belief. W. J. Bate reasons that the guilt Johnson felt for having neglected to seek answers during his sessions of doubt led indirectly to faith: Meanwhile, in a kind of juvenile anticipation of Kant’s argument that conscience is groundless without the existence of moral law and immortality of some sort, from the pain which guilt had given him, he now began to adduce the soul’s immortality, which was the point that belief first stopped at.52

Clearly Johnson’s acquisition of religious belief occurred in stages. John Wain posits a congruence between the insufficiency of parental love in Johnson’s childhood and “his tendency to irrational guilt and self-​accusation,” so that the features of Christianity “on which Johnson’s mind laid hold were the minatory.”53 Donald Greene has noted the influence of early Evangelism on Johnson’s sense of responsibility for the well-​being of his soul: Many of Johnson’s characteristic modes of behavior fall into the Evangelical pattern. The frequent reviews, in Johnson’s diaries, of the conduct of his life, his resolution to rise at eight, to fast on Good Friday, to read 160 verses of Greek Testament every Sunday . . . are in this tradition.54

Johnson’s personal writing is suffused with a sense of the power of original sin to corrupt human intentions and endeavors. His prayers and private meditations involve “self-​ examination and self-​scourging.”55 But as his sermons show, Johnson’s understanding of original sin was not the utter human depravity of Augustine or Calvin; he believed in conditional salvation, “a belief which makes God’s grace, to some extent, contingent on human effort” (see Chapter 36, “God”).56 It is the urgency of his efforts to achieve

51 

DeMaria calls this episode a “myth of Johnson’s ur-​reading,” arguing that Johnson’s early progress in substantive reading was far more gradual (Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, 75). 52 Bate, Samuel Johnson, 41–​2. 53 Wain, Samuel Johnson, 55. 54 Greene, Politics, 51. 55 Rogers, Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia, 309. 56  Thomas Kass, “Johnson’s ‘Sermons’: An Enlightened Response to Radical Evil,” Christianity and Literature 41, no. 4 (Summer 1992), 395.

28   Kevin Joel Berland salvation and the lifelong fear of damnation that drive Johnson’s many resolutions to live a more pious life. Johnson “was a devout and serious Christian,” as Pat Rogers maintains, but he was also an orthodox Anglican who “did not regularly take communion or indeed attend divine service.”57 This apparent contradiction is best understood as a product of Johnson’s constant struggle between paralyzing indolence and an earnest desire for establishing a pattern of life consistent with his understanding of true piety. The experience of reading and absorbing Law’s Serious Call at Oxford seems to have helped to mature his religious thought, particularly in the area of what a devout person is supposed to do. Boswell declares that after Johnson read Law, “religion was the predominant object of his thoughts,” although “he lamented that his practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to do” (Life, vol. i, 67–​9). Questions often arise about the extent to which Johnson’s experiences at Oxford played a part in Johnson’s Toryism and High Church piety, political and religious attitudes associated with the university in Johnson’s time. Hawkins sees Oxford as the fons et origo of Johnson’s religious life: The advantages to be derived from an university education went a great way toward fixing, as well his moral as his literary character: the order and discipline of college life, the reading the best authors, the attendance on public exercises, the early calls to prayer, the frequent instructions from the pulpit, with all the other means of religious and moral effect; and though they left his natural temper much as they had found it, they begat in his mind, those sentiments of piety which were the rule of his conduct throughout his future life, and made so conspicuous part of his character.58

In applying this idealization of Oxford to Johnson’s spiritual life, Hawkins seems to get nearly everything wrong. Pace Hawkins, Oxford instilled in Johnson no habits of order or discipline whatsoever, no early rising for prayers, no regular attendance at church services to hear sermons. This simply was not Johnson’s experience of the university; if Johnson developed religious and moral qualities at Oxford, he did it on his own. If such an Oxford as Hawkins describes ever existed, Johnson did not have access to it, and therefore Oxford cannot take credit for nourishing his piety. DeMaria responds to Hawkins’ assertions: “Perhaps this is the effect that intellectual and religious life of Oxford would have had, if it could have been experienced apart from the social reality of a place in which Johnson was evidently uncomfortable.”59 Around the same time that Johnson was reading Law, he was also reading Mandeville, whose display of self-​interest in society lurking beneath the cant of sentiment or social order had a signal effect. Piozzi writes, “He had been a great reader of Mandeville, and was ever on the watch to spy out those stains of original corruption, so easily discovered even in the purest minds” (Anecdotes, in Miscellanies, vol. i, 207). While Johnson was 57 Rogers,

Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia, 325–​6. Rogers adds that Johnson’s “strict observance of Lent reflected the kind of self-​mortification which most believers were abandoning . . . Above all, he was a man of faith who was afraid of death and uncertain of his own salvation.” 58 Hawkins, Life, 196. 59 DeMaria, Life, 19.

Youth   29 quick to condemn Mandeville’s cynicism and moral relativism, he did admire that part of Mandeville’s philosophy pertaining to the variety of human weakness, venality, and self-​deception, all of which Johnson understood as marks of original sin upon human nature. Possibly it was Mandeville as much as Law that led Johnson to his lasting commitment to self-​examination.

Samuel Johnson, “Brave Boy” George Hector, who attended Sarah Johnson at her son Samuel’s birth, seeking to reassure her after a long and painful labor, held the inert and uncrying infant up and declared, “Here is a brave boy.” Whether Hector meant that the baby showed a kind of courage upon his precarious entry into the world, or that the baby was a fine specimen and that his birth was a success, cannot now be determined. It was far from certain that he would survive, so his parents had him baptized immediately. As he grew older, he experienced so many physical, mental, and social obstacles it is hard sometimes to tell them apart. He was half deaf and more than half blind, little inclined to extended application, and yet he flourished in school and captured the attention and admiration of discerning adults. He was beset with doubts, fears, illnesses, and depressions. He started out believing that his talents would prevail, and despite everything, his worth in the eyes of the world rose slowly but surely. Thomas Carlyle sagely declared that the essential quality of Johnson’s life was courage and valor: “What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man’s heart may find that, since the time of Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore.”60 Similarly, W. J. Bate concludes (with Carlyle) that Johnson was a brave man of heroic proportions: As in the archetypal stories in folklore, we have a hero who starts out with everything against him, including painful liabilities of temperament—​a turbulent imagination, acute anxiety, aggressive pride, extreme impatience, radical self-​division and self-​ conflict. He is compelled to wage long and desperate struggles, at two crucial times of his life, against what he feared was the onset of insanity. Yet step by step, often in the hardest possible way, he wins his way to the triumph of honesty to experience, that all of us prize in our hearts.61

Though facts, events and their significance, and aspects of Johnson’s character have been argued over by many interpreters, it is clear that most of the original motions of his

60  Thomas Carlyle, review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life, Fraser’s Magazine (1832), in James T. Boulton, ed., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 440. 61 Bate, Samuel Johnson, 3–​4.

30   Kevin Joel Berland character and genius are discoverable in his struggle to rise, despite the many trials of his first twenty-​five years.

Further Reading Bate, W. Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Clifford, James L. Young Sam Johnson. New York: McGraw Hill, 1952. Deutsch, Helen E. Loving Dr. Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971. Kaminski, Thomas. The Early Career of Samuel Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. McHenry, Lawrence C., Jr. “Samuel Johnson’s Tics and Gesticulations.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (April 1967): 152–​68. Murray, T. J. “Dr Johnson’s Movement Disorder.” British Medical Journal 1, no. 6178 (June 1979): 1610–​4. Nokes, David. Samuel Johnson: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2009.

Chapter 2

Prim e Michael Bundock

When Samuel Johnson’s poem London was published anonymously in May 1738, Alexander Pope enquired after the identity of the author. On being told that it was some obscure man named Johnson, Pope declared, “He will soon be déterré.”1 The leading poet of the day had recognized the author as someone from whom more was to be expected, but it was to be many years before his name would be widely known.

At St. John’s Gate For Johnson the long path to renown began at St. John’s Gate, where Edward Cave published the Gentleman’s Magazine, a miscellany which Johnson much admired (see Chapter 6, “Journalism”). As early as November 1734, Johnson had written to Cave, offering his services to help remedy the “defects” of the magazine. Not surprisingly his clumsy approach was rejected, but when he arrived in London in 1737 he wrote to Cave again, and this time was successful (Letters, vol. i, 5, 12). His early contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine, beginning with the publication in March 1738 of the poem “Ad Urbanum,” were poetical tributes in Latin or Greek to figures connected with the magazine—​Cave himself, the poet Richard Savage, and Elizabeth Carter, also a poet and an established contributor. They are the work of someone eager to advertise his learning, to make a good impression, and to obtain an entrée to Grub Street. Soon after “Ad Urbanum” had appeared Johnson wrote another letter to Cave, this time in distinctly flattering terms (Letters, vol. i, 14). He offered to sell him London for publication, identifying the poet only as an impoverished author on whose behalf Johnson was acting. Cave immediately recognized the poem’s quality and replied

1 

Life, vol. i, 128–​9, n. 1, vol. ii, 85.

32   Michael Bundock speedily, enclosing an advance. A correspondence about its publication ensued; Johnson soon dropped the pretense of being a disinterested third party and offered Cave other work, including his play Irene. London announced itself as “In Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal,” and Juvenal’s Latin text was published as footnotes to Johnson’s English version (a practice Pope had followed). It displayed Johnson’s knowledge not only of Latin in general and Juvenal in particular, but also of later scholarly commentary. He might not be a university graduate, but he was determined to be recognized as a scholar (see Chapter 7, “Verse”).2 Johnson’s satire excoriates the city (and, by extension, the government) as corrupt and decadent, a place where ability on its own was not enough to secure recognition or to guarantee an income. “This mournful truth is ev’ry where confess’d, | Slow rises worth by poverty depress’d,” wrote Johnson, in lines clearly drawn from experience.3 The poem also positions its anonymous author politically by its attack on the Walpole administration, taking aim at such favorite opposition targets as the stage Licensing Act of 1737, the abuse of patronage, and the failure to counter Spanish interference with English trade in the Caribbean. London sold out in less than a week, and second and third editions followed within two months. Johnson had been published by one of Pope’s publishers, had a success with the poem, and was paid ten guineas for the copyright, a reasonable sum for a poet who was completely unknown. Cave and the Gentleman’s Magazine provided Johnson not only with work but also with a growing social circle. Johnson soon met many of the other contributors, some of whom were to play significant roles in his life. Elizabeth Carter, learned in many languages, was to become the translator of Epictetus and a respected senior figure in the Bluestocking circle of literary women, which included Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Boscawen, and Hester Chapone (see Chapter 23, “Women”). The lawyer John Hawkins became a lifelong friend and eventually the leading executor of Johnson’s will. John Hawkesworth, who also wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine (and became an editor in 1756), worked closely with Johnson and was part of his circle for over thirty years. Both of these men knew Johnson at a time when he was making his way in London. Johnson told Hester Thrale that if she wanted the story of his early life in the city, she must “go to Jack Hawkesworth for anecdotes,” but sadly he left no account of Johnson.4 Hawkins, however, edited the first edition of Johnson’s works and wrote the first book-​length biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). In the summer of 1738, Johnson became effectively assistant editor of Cave’s magazine, selecting some items, revising others, and making occasional contributions himself.

2 See

Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 48–​9. 3  London, lines 176–​7, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 56. 4  Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in G. Birkbeck Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 166.

Prime   33 He probably worked for Cave on a few days each month, earning £100 per annum.5 In addition to his editorial work, Johnson embarked on a number of projects of his own. Over the next few years he contributed several short biographies to the Gentleman’s Magazine (see Chapter 15, “Biography”). These were not works of research: the critical skills Johnson employed were those of translation and selection from readily available sources, with occasional editorial interjections of his own. Some of the lives, such as those of the English heroes Admiral Blake (1740) and Sir Francis Drake (1740), provided the opportunity to make a political point: their actions against the Spanish provided an implied critique of Walpole’s failures in that respect.6 But most of his biographical studies were of men of learning and they were not limited to Englishmen: they included the physician Herman Boerhaave of the University of Leiden (1739), the German child prodigy JeanPhilippe Baratier (1741 and 1742), and the Dutch jurist Pieter Burman (1742). The first such life he wrote, that of the Venetian scholar-​priest Paolo Sarpi (1738), had its origins in a much larger project. Not long after Johnson had taken up his editorial role, Cave agreed to publish Johnson’s translation from the Italian of Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, together with the notes by Pierre François Le Courayer from his French edition of the work. It was to be a very substantial undertaking, running to 1,600 pages. There were good prospects that both the translation and the commentary would confer on the author a reputation as a scholar, and this was not to be the work of an anonymous writer. Even before the work was finished Johnson stood to gain by the publicity: 6,000 copies of the proposals were distributed and Johnson’s name appeared on them. Johnson began work in August 1738, but in October the project was dealt a fatal blow when a rival translator—​unfortunately also called Johnson—​asserted that he was already at work. Cave published in the Gentleman’s Magazine Johnson’s “Life of Sarpi” (which had been intended to preface the translation), but the plan to publish the translation was abandoned, with some hundreds of pages already completed. Johnson’s continued effort to make a name as a scholar had been thwarted. This disappointment was to be repeated. Cave had engaged Carter and Johnson to translate two controversial critiques of Pope by Jean Pierre de Crousaz. Carter was to translate the Examen de l’Essai de Monsieur Pope sur l’homme while Johnson was to translate the Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. l’Abbé Du Resnel, de l’Essai de M. Pope sur l’homme. The two writers were at work on these translations in the autumn of 1738 when the publication of a rival translation of the Commentaire was announced. On this occasion, however, Cave decided to proceed: he speedily published Carter’s translation of the Examen, but Johnson’s Commentary languished until its publication in 1741, by which time its moment had passed.

5 

On Johnson’s earnings, I have relied on J. D. Fleeman, “The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings,” in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), 211–​30, and Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 6  See DeMaria, Life, 74.

34   Michael Bundock The frustration of Johnson’s translation ambitions may well have fed into the publication in May 1739 (at almost the same time as Sarpi and Crousaz were grinding to a halt) of two works of a very different tone, Marmor Norfolciense and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, neither of which was published by Cave. In the first of these satirical pamphlets, Johnson once again attacked the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, but this time he also targeted the Hanoverian succession in a manner which some readers considered Jacobite (see Chapter 20, “Politics”). (According to John Hawkins the pamphlet resulted in the government issuing a warrant for Johnson’s arrest, although it is not certain that this in fact occurred.) In A Compleat Vindication, Johnson adopted an authoritarian persona in order to attack the treatment of fellow writer Henry Brooke, whose play Gustavus Vasa had been banned by the stage licenser. In these pamphlets, the scholar of the translations had become “a rabid, harsh opponent of the ruling government, a critic not only of a party but of the King.”7 The period of writing of these oppositional satires coincided with Johnson’s short-​ lived but intense friendship with an extraordinary figure, Richard Savage, poet, wastrel, and pardoned murderer. Savage was a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, and they probably met through Cave in the spring or summer of 1738. He combined great personal charm with a conviction that his merits had gone unrewarded by the world, and an expectation that his friends would recognize them by supporting him. He had a particular grievance against Lady Macclesfield, whom he alleged to be his mother, a claim which she vehemently denied, but which Johnson seems to have accepted as true. The libertine and the moralist enjoyed each other’s company and reinforced each other’s political views during all-​night wanderings in the squares of London, where they “inveighed against the minister” and “resolved they would stand by their country.” There was rumor that Savage’s influence on Johnson was, in some unspecified way, pernicious: according to Boswell, the dissipated poet led Johnson into “some indulgencies which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind” (Life, vol. i, 164). Their nocturnal ramblings came to an end in July 1739 when Savage retired to Wales, financed by a fund raised by Pope and other friends. Johnson never saw him again.

At Home Some accounts of this period of Johnson’s life suggest that he was at times so impoverished that he was effectively homeless. This was not in fact the case: Johnson had a home and presumably his wife Elizabeth was there, waiting for him, while he was out with Savage. When he first came to London he left her behind, but on his return in late 1737 she accompanied him. They settled in lodgings in Woodstock Street, near Hanover

7 Kaminski, Early Career, 91.

Prime   35 Square, but by April 1738 they had moved to No. 6 Castle Street, near Cavendish Square, where they stayed until at least January 1740. For Johnson the move to London meant the possibility of making his name and fortune as a writer. Elizabeth may have shared his hopes for the future, but she had much more to lose than he did, including her position as a comfortably off widow. She had left her daughter behind in Lichfield and neither of her sons was reconciled to the marriage—​she never saw any of her children again. Her new home was in a city she did not like. Johnson’s all-​night absences may have been a symptom or a cause of tensions in the marriage. According to John Hawkins, Johnson and his wife Elizabeth separated briefly at the time of his friendship with Savage, he lodging in Fleet Street while she stayed with a friend near the Tower of London.8 The most conspicuous sign of disharmony occurred in August 1739, when Johnson applied for the post of Latin master at Appleby School, a position which carried a salary of £70 per annum. Johnson’s willingness to make such an application in spite of his heartfelt dislike of schoolmastering suggests that he was desperate. After two years in London, Johnson had not made a name for himself, there was no prospect of Irene being performed, and he had no confidence in his ability to make a living by his pen. Not long after Savage’s departure for Wales Johnson left London for Leicestershire to pursue his application for the teaching post. In the words of Lord Gower, one of his supporters for the post, Johnson was willing to venture on such a long journey, “choosing rather to die upon the road, than be starved to death in translating for booksellers” (Life, vol. i, 133). Elizabeth was left behind in London. Johnson’s application at Appleby was unsuccessful. But he remained in the Midlands for over six months, spending time in Lichfield, visiting friends and making new acquaintances. It was an enjoyable idyll for Johnson, including conversation with the learned Miss Hill Boothby and what he much later recalled as the “measureless delight” of the company of the intelligent Molly Aston. These women were both almost exactly Johnson’s age, twenty years younger than his wife. This leisurely interval was interrupted by a letter from Elizabeth, who had suffered a serious leg injury. On January 31, 1740, Johnson wrote her a curiously worded letter (the only surviving one from Johnson to his wife), referring to their “misfortunes,” assuring her of his affection, apparently seeking reconciliation, promising to send money—​and signally failing to say when he would return (Letters, vol. i, 22). At some time before May 1740, however, Johnson made his way back to London, back to Grub Street and back to the Gentleman’s Magazine. He was to become ever more deeply involved there over the next four years. One large-​scale project in which Johnson was to take on a greater role was the publication of the parliamentary debates (see Chapter 13, “Polemic,” and Chapter 20, “Politics”). Anxious to satisfy his readers’ interest in the subject (and conscious of the

8 

Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 56; but see also Kaminski, Early Career, 226, n. 22.

36   Michael Bundock activities of rival publications) Cave had come up with a scheme for evading the prohibition on reporting the debates in Parliament. He decided to print them as Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, in which the true identity of the fictional speakers would be not so much hidden as revealed by the names given to them (Ptit for Pitt, and so on). The debates, which were written by William Guthrie, started to appear in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1738. It was Johnson’s role at first to revise these texts, but from July 1741 he became the author. Working from sparse notes discreetly scribbled by Cave’s “spies,” summaries of arguments, occasional phrases, and the names and part taken by the participants, Johnson aimed to present the essence of the debates and the interplay of idea and argument; he demonstrated considerable forensic skill in stating either side of an issue. It was a very substantial undertaking which involved filling, on average, twenty double-​ columned pages of the magazine every month until he ceased to write the debates in March 1744.9 The debates were not the only major project which Johnson was undertaking at this time. The great library of the Earl of Oxford, including some 50,000 books, had been purchased for resale by the bookseller Thomas Osborne, who engaged Johnson and the bibliographer William Oldys to compile a monumental sale catalog (see Chapter 9, “Scholarship”). In November 1742, Osborne issued proposals for printing it, which included Johnson’s “Account of the Harleian Library,” in which he set out to distinguish the work from common sale catalogs (which were usually available free) and to justify the decision to charge for it. Johnson undertook that the books would be categorized into classes and by the period of their publication, their physical characteristics described, different editions noted and commentary added from the authors of literary histories.10 The first two volumes of the catalog appeared in February 1743, followed eleven months later by the third and fourth volumes.11 The finished work fell short of Johnson’s declared aims, but the entries carried substantial annotation, principally of a bibliographical or biographical nature. The outcome might be unsatisfactory, but the work was significant for Johnson’s development as a man of letters: the task of cataloging had given him at least some familiarity with a very substantial body of literature.12 Osborne also decided to publish a selection of the pamphlets (many of them of a political nature) in the library, and the proposals for the Harleian Miscellany, including Johnson’s “Account” of the project, appeared in December 1743. (Among those who subscribed was Johnson’s mother, who was still running the bookshop in Lichfield, together with Elizabeth’s daughter Lucy.) The first part of the Miscellany was published the following March and included Johnson’s introduction, later known as “An Essay on 9 Yale Works, vol. xi, introduction, xxiii, liii. 10 

“An Account of the Harleian Library,” in Yale Works, vol. xx, 77–​8. It appears that Johnson did not work on the fifth part; see Kaminski, Early Career, 181. 12 Thomas Kaminski, “Johnson and Oldys as Bibliographers: An Introduction to the Harleian Catalogue,” Philological Quarterly, 60 (1981), 439–​53, at 440. 11 

Prime   37 the Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces,” in which he celebrated the multiplicity of such works and the freedom accorded to their authors to make their views public. The weekly parts, edited by Johnson and Oldys, followed over the succeeding two years. At the same time as he was working on the parliamentary debates and the Harleian materials, Johnson wrote another work of a very different nature. In August 1743, his friend Richard Savage died in Bristol prison, where he was under arrest for debt. Less than a month later, Cave and Johnson announced that an account of his life was in preparation, and it appeared on February 11, 1744. As a historical narrative it had weaknesses: Johnson relied heavily on previous accounts and made little attempt to add to or correct them. But the power of the work lay in Johnson’s determination to tell the life in a way which was deeply sympathetic and, at the same time, wholly unillusioned. In spite of being paid fifteen guineas for the work, Johnson remained poor. Shortly after its publication he hid behind a screen rather than have one of Cave’s visitors see how shabbily he was dressed.13 Johnson’s last planned major project with Cave was an edition of Shakespeare’s plays (see Chapter 9, “Scholarship,” and Chapter 11, “Criticism”). In April 1745, he published Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, to which were added his proposals for an edition of the plays in ten volumes with explanatory and critical notes. Included in the proposals were two specimen pages. The proposals (especially the proposed corrections to the texts of the plays) constituted a remarkable demonstration of Johnson’s confidence in his abilities, but for a third time his plans were frustrated. The bookseller Jacob Tonson claimed to hold the copyright in Shakespeare’s works, and threatened to enforce it by court action, leaving Cave and Johnson with little choice but to abandon the edition. Not all was lost however: when Johnson published his Plays of William Shakespeare twenty years later, this time with Tonson as one of the publishers, most of the notes on Macbeth were taken from his Miscellaneous Observations. In November 1746, Johnson’s old mentor Gilbert Walmesley described Johnson as “a great genius—​quite lost both to himself and the world.”14 He did not know that on June 18 of that year Johnson had signed a contract with a consortium of booksellers for the writing of a dictionary of the English language (see Chapter 17, “Language”). It marked a turning point in Johnson’s life, both professional and personal, and ensured him a significant income—​£1,575, payable in installments over the three years that Johnson optimistically estimated the work would take. It also demonstrated the confidence that the booksellers by now had in Johnson as someone who was able to take on a major project and see it through. If he did not yet have much of a reputation with the general public he certainly did in Grub Street.

13 See Life, vol. i, 163, n. 1.

14 See Life, vol. i, 176, n. 2.

38   Michael Bundock Johnson shared the publishers’ confidence. He had given long thought to the process of dictionary-​making, and set out his ideas in “A Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language,” completed on April 30, 1746. The “Short Scheme” was revised and published in August 1747 as the Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language; it was addressed to Lord Chesterfield, highly regarded as a patron for literary works.

Gough Square Johnson’s financial security enabled him to establish a new home in 1747. In the six years since their departure from Castle Street in 1740, Johnson and Elizabeth had lived in seven different sets of lodgings, all of them on Fleet Street or in the nearby courtyards and alleys. Now he could afford the rent on a house at 17 Gough Square, at a cost of about £26 a year. He was to stay there for some twelve years, his longest period in one home, excepting only his birthplace. The house was a substantial four-​story building, constructed in the late seventeenth century for a wool merchant. The square in which it stood could be reached by a number of alleyways which led the short distance from Fleet Street and was conveniently close to Little New Street, where William Strahan, the printer of the Dictionary, had his home and workshop. The building was tall but shallow, with a single room each side of the solid central staircase except when one reached the garret which ran the full length and depth of the house—​it was some twenty-​five feet long and well lit by windows on three sides. The principal attraction of the house may well have been the potential of the garret, with its space and light, as a place to compile the dictionary. Johnson equipped the room with high desks and bookcases and there was other furniture too, none of it in good repair. Visitors commented unfavorably on the dust which covered the books, an old deal writing desk, and a chair which had only three legs. The room became a place of work for a number of people. Johnson required clerical assistance and this was provided at different times by six amanuenses (five of them Scottish), all of whom seem to have had some connection with the world of print: Alexander Macbean, his brother William Macbean, V. J. Peyton, Robert Shiels, Francis Stewart, and a man named Maitland. The Dictionary was to be based on the usage of words by the best writers in the language since the sixteenth century; the process of compiling it involved Johnson in consulting hundreds of books. As he read, he would underline a chosen word, mark up the example of its use, and write its initial letter in the margin. It would be the task of an amanuensis to copy the passage onto a slip of paper and to place the slips in alphabetical order. Johnson would then write the headwords and etymologies, list the various senses of the word and compose the definitions which were supported by the illustrations (see also Chapter 17, “Language”). This enormously laborious task was to take Johnson not

Prime   39 three years but nine. But it was during this period that his fame was established with the publication of the Rambler, the Dictionary, and Rasselas. Johnson may have hoped that the acquisition of the comfortable house in Gough Square would help to ease the continuing tensions in his marriage, and possibly that his home would become a place of hospitality. But his life with Elizabeth seems to have become a thing apart: he invited few friends to the house during her lifetime and Hawkins, who knew Johnson from the early 1740s, never met her.15 In fact, Elizabeth was not often in Gough Square. Suffering from poor health and approaching sixty, she took to escaping from the city to the country air of Hampstead. At some point before 1748 they rented a small house there, close to the church, where Elizabeth stayed with a maid and a companion, Elizabeth Swynfen (later Mrs. Desmoulins), the daughter of Johnson’s godfather. Johnson continued to live and work in Gough Square but often visited Elizabeth in Hampstead for two or three days at a time. Escape from London also meant escape from Johnson. The relationship had ceased to be a sexual one many years before: Elizabeth insisted on sleeping alone. The much younger Johnson remained sexually vigorous and on occasion he would start to fondle and kiss Swynfen until, smitten by his conscience, he would push her away.16

The Ivy Lane Club Separated for much of the time from his wife and in need of company to distract him from himself and his work, in the winter of 1749 Johnson established the first of the clubs with which he was to be associated (see Chapter 24, “Sociability”). It was to play a significant part in his life over the following seven or eight years. Meetings took place every Tuesday evening at the King’s Head beefsteak house in Ivy Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the members would have a substantial supper with wine (though Johnson, it seems, drank only lemonade at this time) and then talk until about eleven. “The great delight of [Johnson’s] life,” wrote John Hawkins, “was conversation and mental intercourse.”17 The members of the club were Johnson, John Hawkins, John Hawkesworth and his brother-​in-​law John Ryland (a West India merchant), three physicians (Edmund Barker, Richard Bathurst, and William McGhie), a bookseller (John Payne), a divine (Samuel Salter), and a prospective Dissenting minister (Samuel Dyer). If this group was not as distinguished as the members of Johnson’s later Literary Club, the participants were intelligent and well-​educated, and they brought out the best in Johnson: “his habitual 15 

See Hawkins, Life, 188. Boswell, The Applause of the Jury, 1782–​1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1981), 110–​13. 17 Hawkins, Life, 134. 16 

40   Michael Bundock melancholy and lassitude of spirit gave way; his countenance brightened; his mind was made to expand, and his wit to sparkle . . . In the talent of humour there hardly ever was his equal.”18 The conversation would range over science and medicine, moral philosophy and literature. Johnson famously “made it a rule to talk his best . . . contending as often for victory as for truth.” The club’s best-​known meeting (probably in 1750) took place when Johnson instigated an all-​night celebration of the publication of Charlotte Lennox’s first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart. Somewhat improbably, Hawkins recalled it as resembling a debauch.19 When Johnson had first come to the city it was in the hope that Irene would be produced on the London stage, and by 1749 Garrick, now actor-​manager at the Drury Lane Theatre, was in a position to bring this about. Garrick put considerable effort into the lavish production and a strong cast was provided, but Johnson strenuously resisted a number of changes which the vastly experienced actor wanted to make to the text. When the play was first performed on February 6, 1749 Johnson attended in a spirit of optimism, resplendent in new scarlet waistcoat with gold lace and a gold-​laced hat. In the event, the reception was lukewarm and the play was not performed again after its first run. It was far from being a complete failure, however, and Johnson was well rewarded. It ran for nine nights, ensuring three benefit nights—​Johnson received almost £200. He also sold the copyright to Robert Dodsley for a further £100. Publicity for the play may have been helped by the fact that Johnson’s poem The Vanity of Human Wishes had been published only a few weeks earlier by Dodsley, on January 9. For the first time, Johnson’s name appeared on a title page, and it did so again on February 16 when Dodsley published the text of Irene. The Vanity had been written at great speed, following Johnson’s frequent practice of thinking deeply and composing in his head before setting pen to paper. Its theme was that all choices of life are destined to disappoint unless guided by religion, but the weight of the poem lies in the illustrations of the emptiness of worldly paths to happiness. It may be that these somber warnings reflected Johnson’s mood that year as his relationship with Elizabeth continued to be strained—​he wrote down the first seventy lines while visiting her in Hampstead—​and progress on the Dictionary had proved slow. Certainly there seems to be an autobiographical note in his warning for the eager young Oxford undergraduate, “There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail | Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail” (lines 159–​60, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 99).20 In some respects, the poem echoed the theme of Johnson’s Vision of Theodore: The Hermit of Teneriffe, an allegorical fable published in April 1748 in Dodsley’s Preceptor (a textbook for young readers to which Johnson also contributed a preface; see Chapter 10, 18 Hawkins, Life, 151-​2, 156. 19 Hawkins, Life, 155, 173. 20 

In the revised edition of 1755, published about a month after his scathing letter of February 7, 1755 to Lord Chesterfield, Johnson substituted “patron” for “garret”; see below.

Prime   41 “Fiction,” and Chapter 26, “Education”). As Lawrence Lipking notes of the Vision, “The picture of life as a narrow course of obstacles tells us a good deal about the way he envisioned his own career.”21 The Vanity was less well received than London, perhaps because it was viewed as, in Garrick’s phrase, “as hard as Greek” (Life, vol. i, 194). No further separate edition of the Vanity was called for during Johnson’s lifetime, while London had five English editions (as well as Edinburgh and Dublin editions). Dodsley paid Johnson fifteen guineas for the copyright. On March 20, 1750, in search of relief from the grind of the Dictionary and (as ever) some income, Johnson issued the first of his Rambler essays (see Chapter 8, “Essays”). The demands of this undertaking were relentless: Johnson was to provide two essays of about 1,200 to 1,700 words each week, for publication on Tuesday and Saturday. The series ran until March 14, 1752, and of the 208 essays published in that period Johnson wrote 201 in their entirety. He was paid two guineas for each essay by Cave and the other publishers. Johnson’s aim in publishing the Rambler was deeply serious: it was not merely to inform or to educate but to promote virtue (see Chapter 35, “Virtue”). Throughout his life he often composed formal prayers to mark significant occasions, and he did so on beginning the Rambler: Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without whose help all Labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom is folly, grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be witheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others. (“Prayer on the Rambler,” in Yale Works, vol. i, 43)

Johnson had a great regard for his wife’s judgment and was highly gratified when she told him after a few issues of the Rambler had appeared, “I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.” Some readers tried to persuade Johnson to introduce more humorous or lighter papers, but he was unrepentant and took much pride in the work. “My other works are wine and water,” he remarked, “but my Rambler is pure wine” (Life, vol. i, 210 and n. 1). Authorship of the Ramblers had, at first, been anonymous, but Johnson’s name soon became known. The essays did not have a great sale but they were widely read because they were much reprinted in provincial newspapers and elsewhere. There was also sufficient demand for them to be issued in bound volumes, for which Johnson revised the text: there were ten English editions in Johnson’s lifetime as well as Dublin and Edinburgh editions. Johnson came to be described as “the author of the Rambler.”

21  Lawrence

Lipking, “Learning to Read Johnson: The Vision of Theodore and The Vanity of Human Wishes,” ELH 43, no. 4 (Winter 1976), 517–​37, at 520.

42   Michael Bundock Some fifteen years after his arrival in London, Johnson’s reputation was now firmly established. In the early 1750s, more than three years into his work on the Dictionary, Johnson was dismayed to discover that the methodology he had adopted would need to be fundamentally revised.22 There would inevitably be delays and the booksellers were expressing their concerns. (They may also have been displeased by his committing time to the Rambler.) Johnson angrily refused to meet them, writing to William Strahan on November 1, 1751: “I shall not see the Gentlemen Partners till the first volume is in the press” (Letters, vol. i, 50). On several occasions he had to borrow money to pay off his debts. But these pressures were as nothing compared with the blow which was to fall. Elizabeth had moved back into Gough Square in 1751, as her health declined. On March 13, 1752, Johnson gave her some reprinted volumes of the Rambler, and the following day the final issue appeared, with its weighty opening sentence: “Time, which puts an end to all human pleasures and sorrows, has likewise concluded the labours of the Rambler” (Yale Works, vol. v, 315). On the night of March 17–​18, 1752, Elizabeth died. (Following the change in the calendar that September, Johnson always thought of the date of her death as March 28.) Johnson was devastated, writing to John Taylor, “My Distress is Great . . . Remember me in your Prayers—​For vain is the help of Man” (Letters, vol. i, 61). He was too overcome to make the funeral arrangements, which were dealt with by John Hawkesworth, and on March 26, Elizabeth Johnson was buried in Bromley, Kent, where Hawkesworth lived. Johnson did not attend the funeral, and it was to be another thirty-​two years before he arranged for a gravestone to be erected. He composed a funeral sermon but, according to Arthur Murphy, John Taylor (who held a very low opinion of Elizabeth) declined to preach it because its praise of her was too fulsome. From the first, Johnson’s biographers have held conflicting views about Elizabeth and about the Johnsons’ marriage: Boswell glossed over its difficulties while Hawkins emphasized them and modern biographers are equally divided, in part because the records are sparse and we know little of their life together for a lengthy period of the 1740s.23 But whatever may have been the case while she was alive, Johnson mourned Elizabeth deeply. He composed moving prayers on her death and, in subsequent years, on its anniversary. Many of them express feelings of remorse and guilt. Thirty years after her death Johnson wrote in his journal: “On what we did amiss, and our faults were great, I have thought of late with more regret than at any former time . . . Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God, help me” (Yale Works, vol. i, 319). 22  On Johnson’s false start, see Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25–​54. 23 Compare the generally unfavorable account of Elizabeth Johnson in David Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) with the more sympathetic portrait in Kate Chisholm, Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011).

Prime   43

Johnson’s Household The death of Elizabeth coincided with a growth of the numbers in the household. From that time until his death, Johnson always had around him a number of individuals who formed part of his household-​family, people who were dependent upon him and for whom he, in turn, felt responsible (see Chapter 24, “Sociability”). The residents were the beneficiaries of Johnson’s charity, but the benefits were mutual as they eased his solitude and provided a focus outside of himself: company was the best remedy for Johnson’s constitutional depression. The most significant figures in this group were Anna Williams, Francis Barber, and Robert Levet. Anna Williams was the daughter of an impoverished amateur scientist, Zachariah Williams, whom Johnson assisted in his efforts to prove the success of his method of establishing longitude. Anna, a gifted poet who had gone blind when she was about thirty-​four, became a friend of Johnson’s wife. Shortly after Elizabeth’s death Johnson arranged for an operation which might restore Anna’s sight. It took place in the house in Gough Square and was not a success: Anna remained blind. She stayed on as part of the household and remained with Johnson (with brief intervals) until her death thirty years later. As well as running the domestic life of the house, she provided Johnson with late-​ night tea and conversation. Francis Barber had been born into slavery in Jamaica in about 1742 and brought to England in 1750 by his owner Colonel Richard Bathurst, the father of Johnson’s friend, Dr. Richard Bathurst. At the latter’s suggestion Barber joined Johnson’s household as a servant just a few weeks after Elizabeth’s death. With two long gaps he was to remain by his side until Johnson’s death, becoming almost a surrogate son. Johnson paid to have Barber educated, at first by a writing-​master (Jacob Desmoulins, who had married Miss Swynfen), and much later at Bishop’s Stortford Grammar School. Robert Levet had been a friend of Johnson since 1746, and by 1756 he had become part of his household. A morose and withdrawn individual, he was a medical practitioner of sorts, though he had no training. His patients often paid him in alcohol, and he was frequently drunk. Neither he nor Johnson were early risers, and they often took breakfast together around noon in companionable silence. The atmosphere in Gough Square was often fractious: in particular, the notoriously ill-​tempered Williams frequently quarreled with Barber. At one point, following some argument, Barber left the house for four years, first to serve an apothecary and then to go to sea, before returning to Johnson. When Barber later married and had children they all formed part of Johnson’s household. Johnson thought seriously about marrying again. On April 22, 1753, he recorded his intention to try to seek a new wife and to take his leave of Elizabeth in a solemn commendation of her soul to God. It seems likely that this was a general aim rather

44   Michael Bundock than that Johnson had one particular woman in mind. It may be, however, that he was thinking of his old friend Hill Boothby—​his later letters to her are full of affection. But such a marriage was no longer possible: in March 1753 she had formally assumed the care of the household of a relation who had been widowed, leaving him with six children. In the event, Johnson never remarried. In December 1754, he wrote to his friend Thomas Warton, describing his mood since Elizabeth’s death: I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point of view. A gloomy gazer on a World to which I have little relation. (Letters, vol. i, 90)

In 1752, John Hawkesworth and other members of the Ivy Lane club had decided to start a new periodical, the Adventurer. From the beginning Johnson was involved in the planning, which was for two issues a week, the total number to be 140. Johnson contributed at least twenty-​nine essays beginning in March 1753, again earning two guineas for each one. At some point after 1751, Johnson had struck up a friendship with the poet and critic Joseph Warton, and he too became a contributor to the Adventurer, apparently in collaboration with his sister Jane and his brother Thomas, a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Johnson also came to know Thomas and in the summer of 1754 he visited Oxford, where he stayed for over a month, with Warton as his host. The visit had one particularly significant outcome for Johnson: a process was initiated (possibly by Warton) whereby Johnson was later to be awarded the degree of Master of Arts for literary work conducted outside the university. Johnson’s growing friendship with Warton was one of a number of important relationships which began in the years 1754 to 1756, including those with the playwright Arthur Murphy, the lawyer Robert Chambers, and an admirer of the Rambler, Bennet Langton. (Johnson always enjoyed the company of much younger people such as Chambers and Langton.) Others with whom Johnson was to develop long-​ standing friendships at this time were Joshua Reynolds and the scholar-​clergyman Thomas Percy. In November and December 1754, Lord Chesterfield (to whom Johnson’s original Plan of 1747 had been dedicated) published two articles promoting the Dictionary. Their publication created the impression that Chesterfield had been an active patron: the reality was that he had given Johnson ten pounds and then done nothing further to assist him (see Chapter 16, “Authorship”). Johnson was incensed, and wrote to Chesterfield on February 7, 1755, in tones of controlled fury, “I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself ” (Letters, vol. i, 94–​7).

Prime   45

The Dictionary Published Johnson’s Oxford degree was awarded on February 20, 1755, conferring on him the authority of a scholar and, in part, assuaging his sense of the failure of his undergraduate career. At last, on April 15, the newspapers announced the publication of A Dictionary of the English Language “by Samuel Johnson A.M.” in two folio volumes, priced at £4. 10s. The publication was widely noted, almost always in favorable terms. A second edition was published in weekly numbers from June 14, but it was the abridged octavo edition, published in January 1756 at 10s., that became a popular success. It went through seven London editions (of 5,000 copies each) in Johnson’s lifetime.24 Johnson, however, did not benefit financially from the completion of his great work; indeed he may have been overpaid according to the terms of the original contract.25 He was now both “Mr. Rambler” and “Dictionary Johnson,” but in March 1756 he had to seek Samuel Richardson’s help when he was arrested for debt. Any sense of achievement which Johnson may have felt was tempered by the regret he experienced in his “gloom of solitude . . . I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 113). For a period after publication of the Dictionary, Johnson was mired in lethargy, rising at about two to receive a succession of visits from his friends whom he would entertain at the tea table until four or five. At the end of the year he suffered a period of illness. He exchanged affectionate letters (often mentioning matters of health) with his “sweet angel” Hill Boothby, but in January 1756 she died, leaving Johnson distracted with grief. Johnson had still to address the issue of making a living by his pen. He considered for some time establishing a journal to review both English and European literature, but nothing came of the plan. He did devote a considerable amount of time to reviewing elsewhere: in the period between May 1756 and July 1757 he wrote some forty reviews and a number of essays for the Literary Magazine, or Universal Review. (He may also have served as acting editor.) In spite of its name, the magazine’s concerns were largely political and Johnson’s contributions included “An Introduction to the Political State of Great-​Britain” and “Observations on the Present State of Affairs,” important statements of his views, especially concerning the developing Seven Years’ War (see Chapter 21, “War”). It was also in the Literary Magazine that he published, in 1757, a review of Soame Jenyns, A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, in which Johnson vehemently attacked what he saw as the complacency and shallowness of Jenyns’s account (see also Chapter 6, “Journalism,” Chapter 13, “Polemic,” Chapter 29, “Suffering,” Chapter 31, “Doubt,” and Chapter 36, “God”). 24  25 

For details of reception and sales, see Reddick, Making, 83–​8. See Hawkins, Life, 208.

46   Michael Bundock Johnson’s work on the Dictionary had involved extensive engagement with quotations from Shakespeare’s plays. In June 1756, Johnson returned to his abandoned plan of producing an edition of the plays in eight volumes and issued his proposals for printing them by subscription. The conditions provided that subscribers were to pay two guineas (one guinea payable on subscription) and that the work would be published on or before Christmas 1757. In the event, it did not appear until 1765. The slow trickle of subscriptions left Johnson borrowing money in 1757 and being arrested for debt for a second time in February 1758. In need of income, and perhaps also relief from his labors on the Shakespeare edition, he agreed to write another series of essays, this time under the name of the Idler; the articles appeared each Saturday from April 15, 1758 until April 5, 1760. Johnson wrote ninety-​one of them, earning the welcome sum of three guineas for each one, and then an additional £84 2s. 4d. when bound volumes were published. Unlike the Rambler and the Adventurer, the essays were not published as independent items: they appeared in a newspaper, the Universal Chronicle; or, Weekly Gazette, sometimes commenting on news reports in the same issue.26 The later months of 1758 and the early part of 1759 marked a particularly bleak period in Johnson’s personal life. On January 20, 1759, his mother died in Lichfield, her death putting beyond repair their difficult relationship. When she fell ill Johnson (who had not visited her for twenty years) wrote emotional letters to her and told his stepdaughter that he would come to Lichfield. He did not do so, but his sleep was troubled by memories of his family: on the day of his mother’s funeral he recorded, “The dream of my Brother, I shall remember” (Yale Works, vol. i, 67). Johnson had sent money to his mother in her last days and, perhaps anticipating that he would need more, he rapidly composed The Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale (commonly known as Rasselas). The book was published on April 20, 1759 and had a mixed reception, some readers being disappointed by the lack of event and by a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. But it sold well: within a year of its publication 3,500 copies had been issued. Johnson was paid £100 for the first edition and £25 for the second. Francis Barber had left Johnson’s service in 1756 and was serving in the navy at the time when Johnson’s mother died. Johnson, however, anxious to have Barber back with him, pulled strings at the Admiralty and had Barber discharged, contrary to his wishes. Barber returned to Johnson’s household, but it was not to the house in Gough Square. In March 1759, Johnson’s financial difficulties had forced him to give up his home of twelve years. Over the following thirteen months, returning to the uncertain pattern of his life before Gough Square, he lived in lodgings in Staple Inn, then in Gray’s Inn and then moved to Inner Temple Lane.

26 

See Nicholas Hudson, “Johnson’s Philosophy, from Rambler to Idler,” in Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014), 241–​61.

Prime   47

Pensioner As his friends were well aware, throughout his life Johnson had lived from hand to mouth, and in the 1760s they determined to do something about it. In the autumn of 1761, a letter was sent anonymously (probably at the instigation of Thomas Percy) to the Earl of Bute, proposing that Johnson should receive a pension, and a number of Johnson’s supporters were active in promoting the idea. The proposal was raised with Johnson who was doubtful whether he should accept, given his long-​standing anti-​Hanoverian views and his repeated attacks on patronage exercised by the grant of pensions. (In the Dictionary, he had famously described a pension as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.”) But Reynolds and others assured him that the award was for literary merit and Bute told him that, “It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done” (Life, vol. i, 374). Satisfied by these assurances, Johnson accepted, and on July 19, 1762 he was awarded a civil list pension of £300 per annum. Johnson’s critics were not slow to attack him for hypocrisy in accepting the pension in the face of his well-​known views, John Wilkes launching a vigorous assault in the North Briton. But Johnson was unmoved, remarking, “I wish my pension were twice as large, that they might make twice as much noise” (Life, vol. i, 429 n. 2). The pension brought to an end the way of life which Johnson had followed for a quarter of a century. Since his arrival in London as a failed schoolmaster and penniless literary hopeful he had produced an enormous body of work, much of it of lasting quality. Along the way he had suffered great personal losses but had acquired the support of a large circle of friends and admirers. Throughout, he had been completely dependent on what he could earn by his wits and his pen. Whatever he might achieve in the future, “Mr. Rambler,” “Dictionary Johnson,” would never have to live and work under such pressures again.

Further Reading Bundock, Michael. The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Chisholm, Kate. Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women. London: Chatto and Windus, 2011. Clifford, James L. Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years. New York: McGraw Hill, 1979. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Fleeman, J. D. “The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings.” In Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, edited by R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip, and R. J. Roberts, 211–​30. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975. Hudson, Nicholas. A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.

48   Michael Bundock Kaminski, Thomas. The Early Career of Samuel Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Lipking, Lawrence. Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Nokes, David. Samuel Johnson: A Life. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Reddick, Allen. The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773, rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter 3

Age Peter Sabor

In March 1756, Samuel Johnson was arrested for debt; a loan of six guineas from the printer and novelist Samuel Richardson was needed to release him from confinement in a sponging house. Two years later, in February 1758, he was arrested for debt again, for the very considerable sum of forty pounds; on this occasion the publisher Jacob Tonson came to his aid. Once Johnson was granted his Civil List pension of £300 per annum in July 1762, there would be no more indignities of this kind. Rather than running into debt, he could now accumulate wealth. By the time of his death in December 1784, the pension had brought him a total of some £6,400. Earnings from his publications in this nineteen-​year period were relatively small: less than £1,000. Even so, he left money and property worth some £3,000, having saved over 40 percent of his income.1

A Pensioner in Devon “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” declared Johnson in April 1776 (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 19), but after receiving notice of his pension from the First Lord of the Treasury, the third earl of Bute, he knew that he would not need to write for money again. Always eager to travel, he now had the means and the leisure to do so (see Chapter 14, “Travel”). In August 1762, well before receiving the first of the quarterly payments (he had to write to Lord Bute in November, reminding him that the funds were overdue),2 he accepted an invitation from his friend Joshua Reynolds, the greatest English painter of the day, to accompany him on a six-​week tour of Reynolds’s native Devon in southwest England, a part of the country that Johnson had never previously seen. Setting off from London by stagecoach on August 16, they spent two nights at 1  See J. D. Fleeman, “The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings,” in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), 211–​30. 2  See Johnson to Lord Bute, November 3, 1762, in Letters, vol. i, 212.

50   Peter Sabor Winchester, where they saw Johnson’s old friend, the critic and poet Joseph Warton, then second master of Winchester College. From there they traveled to Salisbury and visited Wilton House, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, and Longford Castle, the home of Lord Folkestone. They passed through Kingston Lacy, where they visited the Bankes family, Dorchester, Bridport, Axminster, Exeter and Torrington, the home of two of Reynolds’ sisters, where they were also met by a third sister, the painter Frances Reynolds, a friend of Johnson’s. Finally, they arrived at Plymouth, where they stayed for three weeks with an old schoolfriend of Reynolds, the physician John Mudge. A day before returning to London, the friends visited Reynolds’ childhood home and schoolroom in Plympton. Among Johnson’s exploits in Devon were devouring thirteen pancakes on one occasion and downing seventeen cups of tea on another. In Devon, too, Johnson challenged a young lady to a race, which he won easily, and after a supper drank three bottles of wine, which in Reynolds’ account “affected his speech so much that he was unable to articulate a hard word which occurred in the course of his conversation” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 379, n. 2).3 Regrettably, Johnson kept no record of this tour, when he saw important sights, made new friends and acquaintances, and became closer to Reynolds, who would remain a lifelong companion, outliving Johnson by eight years.

A Scot in London In November 1762, some six weeks after Johnson’s return to his dingy lodgings on Inner Temple Lane, James Boswell, a twenty-​two-​year-​old Scot, set out for London from Edinburgh. He had studied civil law there and, after various interruptions, passed the Faculty of Advocates examination in the same month that Johnson received his pension. Equipped by his father Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, with an annual allowance of £200, he could now embark on a lengthy stay in London, hoping to obtain a commission in a regiment of the Guards and intent on enjoying everything the capital had to offer—​including prostitutes, the playhouses (he was besotted by David Garrick’s performances in Henry IV Part 2 and King Lear), and the company of celebrities of all sorts. Above all, however, he wished to make the acquaintance of the greatest of England’s men of letters, Samuel Johnson. He succeeded at last on May 16, 1763 through a chance meeting in a bookshop owned by the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, recording his first impressions in his journal: Mr. Johnson is a Man of a most dreadfull appearance. He is a very big man[,]‌is troubled with sore eyes, the Palsy & the King’s evil. He is very slovenly in his dress & speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge, and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has 3 

The fullest account of Johnson’s Devonshire tour is the chapter “Trip to Devon,” in James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 278–​95.

Age   51 great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is dissagreeable.4

When Boswell revised his account of the meeting for publication in his magnificent Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he moved the description of Johnson’s physical appearance to the very end of the work and elevated it in various ways. “He is a very big man,” for instance, becomes “His figure was large and well formed,” while “a most dreadfull appearance” is turned into “a countenance of the cast of an ancient statue” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 425). Johnson had long since ceased to be a source of alarm for Boswell, and throughout his vast biography the “roughness of manners” which Boswell had at first found offensive becomes instead an emblem of Johnson’s sturdy independence and refusal to conform to social norms. Boswell would never be as important to Johnson as Johnson was to Boswell, but he soon became a trusted friend. Less than a month after their first meeting, Boswell records Johnson’s telling him, “Come to me as often as you can. I shall be glad to see you” (Life, vol. i, 399). And only six weeks later, when their talk turned to “the Western Islands of Scotland,” Johnson declared that they would one day journey to the Hebrides together (vol. i, 450), a project that would be realized ten years later.

The Club In winter 1764, Johnson and Reynolds conceived the idea of founding a literary club, which would gather together every Monday in a private room of the Turk’s Head tavern in Gerrard Street (see Chapter 24, “Sociability”). Its motto would be esto perpetua (“let it be perpetual”), and it would be limited initially to nine carefully chosen members.5 The first members included the political thinker Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, who would soon make his reputation as a poet, playwright and novelist, and John Hawkins, who would publish the first book-​length biography of Johnson in 1787, four years before Boswell’s. Hawkins, however, had withdrawn from the Club by February 1768, describing himself as the “only seceder from this society.”6 Hawkins attributed his resignation to the Club’s late hours, which disturbed his domestic routine. Boswell, however, relying on information from Reynolds, declared that Hawkins’ rudeness to Burke 4 Boswell, London Journal, 1762–​1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (London: Penguin, 2010), 220. See also Turnbull, “Keeping Boswell ‘in Constant Repair’: The Life of Johnson in Manuscript” (Melbourne: The Johnson Society of Australia, 2018). 5  The fullest account of the founding of the Club is the chapter “The Club is Born,” in Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 123–​37. See also Charles Saumarez Smith, “The Age of Reynolds and Johnson, 1764–​1784,” in New Annals of the Club (London: The Club, 2014), 10–​57. 6  The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by Sir John Hawkins, Knt., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 255 and n. 543.

52   Peter Sabor one evening made him persona non grata, and led to Johnson’s celebrated remark that Hawkins was “a very unclubbable man” (Life, vol. i, 479–​80 and n. 1). Johnson, in contrast, was clubbability personified; the Club was founded “for his gratification and the mutual entertainment and delight of its several members” (Hawkins, Life, 249). After Hawkins’ departure it gradually increased in size, with three members added in 1768; election was by ballot, with a single black ball by a member being grounds for exclusion. The editor and antiquarian Thomas Percy, one of these new members, later claimed that Johnson wished that “the Club should consist of such men, as that if only Two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other, without wanting the addition of more Company to pass the Evening agreeably.”7 By December 1777, the Club had twenty-​one members, with Garrick (later than he wished), Boswell (to his great satisfaction), the historian of ancient Rome Edward Gibbon, and the philosopher and economist Adam Smith (whom Johnson thoroughly disliked) all joining the ranks—​and by February 1784, the year of Johnson’s death, the membership had swollen to thirty-​five, with the historian of music Charles Burney a surprisingly late addition. For Johnson, however, this was too much of a good thing. As the Club grew ever larger, his attendance at its meetings declined, and in April 1783 he complained that it was “now very miscellaneous and very heterogeneous, it is therefore without confidence, and without pleasure. I go to it only as to a kind of publick dinner” (Letters, vol. iv, 126).

The Thrales of Southwark and Streatham Park In January 1765, Johnson first met the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale and his wife, the hostess and sparkling conversationalist Hester Lynch Thrale. A close friendship soon developed; that winter, Johnson dined with the Thrales every Thursday at their house in Southwark, and when Henry Thrale stood for Parliament in September 1765, Johnson assisted him in his campaign. The Thrales also invited Johnson to their country estate, Streatham Park, ten miles south of London, where he was welcomed as a resident. Johnson was given his own rooms there, a chemical laboratory was set up for him to undertake experiments (chemistry was among his numerous interests), and he was encouraged to select books to furnish the library. Streatham Park became, for many years, his second home. Here he had what Boswell terms “all the comforts and even luxuries of life,” in stark contrast to the drabness of his own accommodation in London, and here “he was treated with the utmost respect, and even affection” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 495). He respected Henry Thrale and admired his business acumen, calling him 7  Thomas Percy to James Boswell, February 29, 1788, in The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the “Life of Johnson,” ed. Marshall Waingrow (London: Heinemann, 1969), 268.

Age   53 “Master” or “my Master,” as did Hester Thrale herself. Johnson’s relationship with her was far deeper and more complex: she was the most important woman in his life after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1752. In his diary for March 31, 1771, Johnson wrote “De pedicis et manicis insane cogitation” (mad reflection on shackles and hand-​cuffs) (Yale Works, vol. i, 140); later, in her Thraliana for December 7, 1779, she opined that “the Fetters & Padlocks will tell Posterity the Truth.”8 From these and other references in both Johnson’s and Hester Thrale’s diaries and letters, it seems possible that there was an element of sadomasochism in their relationship, with Hester (whom Johnson habitually termed “my Mistress”) playing the dominant role. “How many Times,” she declared, “has this great, this formidable Doctor Johnson kissed my hand, ay & my foot too upon his knees!”9 Whatever the nature of his friendship with Hester Thrale, Johnson’s life was undoubtedly enriched by his repeated and extended stays at Streatham Park. He was enchanted by Hester Maria Thrale, the Thrales’ eldest daughter, whom he dubbed “Queeney” after the biblical Queen Esther. Their birthdays fell on consecutive days and were celebrated together at Streatham from September 1766, when Hester Maria turned two and Johnson fifty-​seven. A few years later he began sending her delightfully kind and affectionate letters, while often complaining that her letters to him were too brief and infrequent. Their correspondence continued until September 1784, within three months of Johnson’s death; his quasi-​paternal or grand-​parental tenderness toward her reveals an often-​neglected side of his character.

Shakespeare During his first year at Streatham Park, Johnson at last completed his long-​delayed edition of Shakespeare, which he had been working on intermittently since 1745, when he published Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, together with a proposal for a ten-​volume edition that did not then get underway (see Chapter 9, “Scholarship,” and Chapter 11, “Criticism”). In June 1756, he produced a revised plan for an eight-​volume edition, with publication by subscription scheduled for the following year. The subscribers, however, who paid two guineas for the set, would have to wait far longer than this, and disappointingly for them, no subscription list appeared at the head of the edition. As Johnson declared disarmingly in 1763: “I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers;—​one, that I have lost all the names,—​the other, that I have spent all the money” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 111). Although he had completed 8 

Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–​1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. i, 415, n. 4. 9  Thraliana, vol. i, 415; see also Balderston, “Johnson’s Vile Melancholy,” in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), 3–​14.

54   Peter Sabor the editorial task by July 1764, a year later “not a line of the Preface” had been written, as the publisher Jacob Tonson complained.10 By September, however, the preface was complete, and the edition was finally published in October 1765—​three years after the satirist Charles Churchill had caricatured Johnson as “Pomposo” in his poem The Ghost and mocked him in the couplet: He for Subscribers baits his hook, And takes their cash—​but where’s the Book?11

Johnson, however, had the last laugh. The first edition of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, of which 1,000 copies were printed, sold out in less than a month; a second edition was published in November, with 750 copies printed. Accounts of Johnson’s earnings from the edition differ, but he seems to have made between £262 10s. and £375 from the first edition,12 the equivalent of close to a full year’s pension, or perhaps considerably more. Despite its brisk sales, Johnson’s Shakespeare received several negative reviews. The superbly incisive preface, among Johnson’s finest accomplishments, received due praise, although his temerity in attributing a variety of vices to Shakespeare was generally condemned; George Colman, for instance, complained that Johnson writes “of Shakespeare’s Beauties too sparingly, and of his Faults too hardly.”13 More aggressively hostile was the critic and dramatist William Kenrick, author of a thirty-​page diatribe against Johnson’s edition in the October and November issues of the Monthly Review. This was immediately supplemented by a 150-​page pamphlet, stridently entitled A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare: In Which the Ignorance, or Inattention, of That Editor Is Exposed, and the Poet Defended from the Persecution of His Commentators (1765), and then by yet another belligerent publication: A Defence of Mr. Kenrick’s Review of Dr. Johnson’s Shakespeare: Containing a Number of Curious and Ludicrous Anecdotes of Literary Biography (1766).14 Despite its shortcomings, however, Johnson’s Shakespeare is one of his major achievements. He provided a concluding note to each play, expressing his own highly personal reaction to the characters and plots, such as the shock he experienced when he first read of Cordelia’s death in King Lear and his admiration of Shakespeare’s power in depicting Iago in Othello, with his “cool malignity . . . silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 10  Quoted in Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974–​ 81), vol. v, 19. 11  Charles Churchill, The Ghost (1762–​63), in Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), book 3, lines 801–​2. 12  See Fleeman, “Revenue,” 215 and n. 18. 13  George Colman, unsigned review in St. James’s Chronicle, October 10–​ 15, 1765, in Vickers, ed., Critical Heritage, vol. v, 181. 14  See Peter Sabor, “ ‘Armed with the Tomahawk and Scalping-​Knife’: William Kenrick versus Samuel Johnson,” Poetica, 84 (2015), 45–​54.

Age   55 1047). In his commentary on the plays, Johnson often throws light on obscurities that had defeated previous editors, and in general he accepted the text as printed in the First Folio, rather than proposing ingenious emendations when difficulties presented themselves. In a memorable passage in the preface, he declares: As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less; and after I had printed a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readings in the text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for every day encreases my doubt of my emendations. (vol. vii, 108)

Subsequent editors of Shakespeare, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, have rightly taken this doctrine to heart.

Johnson’s Court A month before his edition of Shakespeare was published, in September 1765, Johnson moved from his rooms in the Temple to a much more salubrious dwelling: a house in the aptly named Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street. Here he would remain for over ten years. His companion, the blind poet Anna Williams, occupied a room on the first floor, the unlicensed medical practitioner Robert Levet took the garret, while Johnson’s Black servant and friend Francis Barber, who had come to England from Jamaica as a child and been in Johnson’s employ since 1752, slept in the basement.15 Johnson turned an upper room into a study, which he termed his “Novum Museum.” In a letter of 1766 to Bennet Langton, he told his friend, “I wish you were in my new study, I am now writing the first letter in it. I think it looks very pretty about me” (Letters, vol. i, 265). Had he wished, he could have presided at Johnson’s Court as Dr. Johnson, since Trinity College, Dublin, had unexpectedly made him Doctor of Laws in July 1765, but his “attachment to Oxford,” according to Hawkins, “prevented Johnson from receiving this honour as it was intended, and he never assumed the title which it conferred” (Hawkins, Life, 268). Among Johnson’s first literary activities after his move to Johnson’s Court was one that he kept concealed from everyone except Hester Thrale:16 assisting his friend Robert Chambers, Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, in writing a series of lectures on the common law (see Chapter 19, “Law”). Chambers was appointed to his chair in May 1766 at the age of twenty-​nine, succeeding the eminent jurist Sir William Blackstone. As Vinerian Professor, Chambers was required to deliver sixty lectures on English law every year. After failing to do so at the outset, he called on Johnson’s aid. 15 

See Lyle Larsen, Dr. Johnson’s Household (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1985), 51. Hester Thrale’s knowledge of Johnson’s collaboration with Chambers, see Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, ed. Thomas M. Curley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), vol. i, 5–​6. 16  For

56   Peter Sabor Johnson responded by coming to Oxford in October 1766 and spending a month there, time enough to help Chambers make a belated plan for the lectures. The collaboration continued for several years, with frequent meetings both in Oxford and London. As late as January 1770, Johnson seems still to have been aiding his friend; during a brief visit to Oxford that month, he told Hester Thrale that “we have so much to do, or do our little so lazily that I have been forced to delay my return” (Letters, vol. i, 333). Neither Johnson nor Chambers ever revealed the extent of Johnson’s contribution, but it was probably substantial.17 The lectures would not be published until 1986, but they were heard by numerous law students, and the two-​thousand-​page manuscript reveals the magnitude of their authors’ labors.

Politics In February 1767 there occurred what Boswell terms, with some exaggeration, “one of the most remarkable incidents of Johnson’s life,” one which “gratified his monarchical enthusiasm, and which he loved to relate with all its circumstances when requested by his friends” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 33). Johnson was reading in the King’s Library, located at the Queen’s House (now Buckingham Palace); he might well have been studying law books there for his collaboration with Chambers. In Boswell’s account, George III had told the librarian that he wished to speak to Johnson and approached him in “courteously easy” fashion. A lengthy discussion ensued, recorded by Boswell in minute detail. The conversation reveals the King’s familiarity with Johnson’s works: His Majesty enquired if he was then writing any thing . . . Johnson said, he thought he had already done his part as a writer. “I should have thought so too, (said the King,) if you had not written so well.”—​Johnson observed to me, upon this, that “No man could have paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay. It was decisive.” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 35)

Boswell based his vignette on various sources, including a “minute” recorded by the printer William Strahan, one of several friends to whom Johnson recounted the event.18 He also recorded Johnson’s remark to a group gathered at the home of Joshua Reynolds: “I find,” declared Johnson, “it does a man good to be talked to by his Sovereign.” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 42).

17 

An attempt to establish Johnson’s part in the lectures, based on internal evidence only, is made by E. L. McAdam, Jr., Dr. Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1951), 65–​122. 18  See O M Brack, Jr. and Lawrence G. Blackmon, Samuel Johnson’s Private Interview with George III: The Strahan Minute (Tempe, AZ: privately printed for the Friends of the Arizona State University Library, 1993).

Age   57 As he suggested in telling George III that he had “already done his part as a writer,” the late 1760s were a fallow period for Johnson. In January 1768, he contributed a prologue to Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy The Good-​Natured Man, one of several that Johnson wrote for the London stage. As Boswell notes, however, Johnson lacked the light touch that this genre required (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 45). The tone of the opening couplet—​“Prest by the load of life, the weary mind | Surveys the general toil of human kind”—​is closer to that of “The Vanity of Human Wishes” than to something appropriate for a theater audience settling in to enjoy a comedy. More congenial to Johnson were the dedications for others that he continued to write during these years. One was undertaken for George Adams, mathematical instrument maker to George III. Johnson’s dedication to the king of A Treatise Describing and Explaining the Construction and Use of New Celestial and Terrestrial Globes (1766) was the third of six that he addressed to George III, following his dedication for Charlotte Lennox’s translation The Greek Theatre of Father Brunoy (1759, when George was still Prince of Wales) and his dedication (as well as the concluding paragraph) for John Kennedy’s A Complete System of Astronomical Chronology Unfolding the Scriptures (1762) (Yale Works, vol. xx, 520–​1 and n. 3). Another of Johnson’s dedications to George III appeared in the same year, 1766, prefixed to London and Westminster Improved by the architect John Gwynn; in both pieces, Johnson deftly and succinctly links the author’s subject to the King’s own accomplishments and interests. Also from this period are three dedications that Johnson wrote for works by his friend John Hoole: to Queen Charlotte for Hoole’s translation of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1763), to the Duke of Northumberland for Hoole’s translation, The Works of Metastasio (1767), and to the Duchess of Northumberland for Hoole’s Cyrus: A Tragedy (1768). Neither George III nor the other dedicatees had an inkling that Johnson, not the ostensible author, was responsible for these elegant miniatures. In January 1769, Johnson was appointed professor in ancient literature in the newly instituted Royal Academy of Arts (of which Joshua Reynolds was made president), a position that sounds impressive but that carried no responsibilities. At this time, Johnson’s pen was turning not to literature but to politics. His first substantial publication since his edition of Shakespeare was a political pamphlet, The False Alarm, published anonymously in January 1770 but soon discovered to be his (see Chapter 13, “Polemic,” and Chapter 20, “Politics”). It was the first of four pro-​government pamphlets that Johnson produced over a five-​year period: its successors were Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771), The Patriot (1774), and Taxation No Tyranny (1775). Johnson collected these pieces in revised form as Political Tracts (1776), with a telling quotation from the Latin poet Claudian on the title page: “Whoever thinks it slavery to be under an outstanding monarch is mistaken; no more delightful liberty exists than under a virtuous king” (Yale Works, vol. x, 313). Johnson wrote The False Alarm in response to popular protests over the government’s exclusion of John Wilkes from Parliament, despite his having been elected as Member for Middlesex. Wilkes had previously been expelled from the House of Commons after being convicted on charges of seditious libel and obscenity (for the publication of his

58   Peter Sabor notorious Essay on Woman), and the House now declared him ineligible to represent his constituency. In 1769 and 1770, a flurry of pamphlets appeared, both pro-​and anti-​ Wilkes, who was supported by the radical Society for the Defence of the Bill of Rights—​ anathema to Johnson. Johnson’s position, condoned by Hawkins but condemned by Boswell, was that the government’s actions in this case were justified, and the protests merely a “false alarm.” Johnson’s next political tract, Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands, concerned the ministry’s actions in negotiating with Spain over its claim to the Falkland Islands, following the landing of a naval expedition sent from Buenos Aires, then a Spanish colony. The negotiations led to a withdrawal of the Spanish forces, but the opposition accused the government of cowardice for failing to oust them by force. Unlike both its predecessor and its successors among Johnson’s political writings, this one was relatively well received. Hawkins and Boswell, for once, concurred in their admiration for Johnson’s eloquence in depicting the miseries of war. A few days after its publication in January 1771, William Strahan wrote to the Treasury recommending Johnson, who held “perfect good affection to his Majesty, and his government,” as a Member of Parliament (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 286). The plan came to nothing, but Johnson continued his series of pro-​government pamphlets, of which the third was The Patriot. The term “patriot” was commonly used to describe a member of the opposition; Johnson’s pamphlet redefines it “in the original and genuine sense” as “a sincere, steady, rational, and unbiassed friend to the interests and prosperity of his King and country” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 286). Addressed “to the Electors of Great Britain,” it was written with a view to persuade voters to support the government in the general election of October 1774. In doing so, it takes aim at those in Britain and in America who opposed the Quebec Act of 1774 and at those who supported American claims to independence: “we have always protected the Americans; we may therefore subject them to government” (Yale Works, vol. x, 397). A year later, in 1775, Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny developed this argument at length. It was much the most controversial of the four pamphlets, receiving more hostile responses than perhaps anything else Johnson ever wrote. Boswell records Johnson’s satisfaction with the outcry: “I think I have not been attacked enough for it. Attack is the re-​action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds” (Life, vol. ii, 335).

Travels with Boswell and the Thrales In August 1771, Johnson wrote to Bennet Langton, telling him, “My summer wanderings are now over, and I am engaging in a very great work the revision of my Dictionary from which I know not at present how to get loose” (Letters, vol. i, 381–​2). This revision was for the fourth edition of the Dictionary, published in January 1773 (see Chapter 17, “Language”), which unlike the second and third was substantially altered—​ earning Johnson a payment of £300 from the publishers (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 498). It is

Age   59 fascinating to see Johnson changing and expanding definitions here in response to the changing times (twenty-​eight years had elapsed since the first edition was published). A few months later, a heavily revised and enlarged edition of Johnson’s Shakespeare was also published, with his friend George Steevens contributing most of the new material. There were also, however, some eighty new notes by Johnson, and at least some of the changes to existing notes were his. The new edition, which would be further revised by Steevens in 1778, 1785, and 1793, marked a considerable advance in Shakespeare scholarship, and would remain unchallenged until Edmond Malone’s edition, first published in 1790. With these two projects behind him, Johnson could now indulge his love of travel, with “wanderings” more ambitious than those in Staffordshire and Derbyshire mentioned in his 1771 letter to Langton (see Chapter 14, “Travel”). The first of these tours, to the Hebrides, was arranged by Boswell. Johnson left London on August 6, 1773, accompanied by Robert Chambers, meeting Boswell in Edinburgh eight days later. He and Boswell then set off together on August 18, traveling up the east coast of Scotland and visiting the universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen, where Johnson was well received. They continued to Inverness and Glenelg and then set sail for the Isle of Skye, the largest of the Hebridean islands. They also visited the isles of Raasay, Col, Mull, Ulva, Inchkenneth, and Iona, where Johnson was eager to see the “illustrious ruins” of the famous monastery. They returned via Glasgow and Auchinleck, arriving in Edinburgh on November 9 after a journey of eleven weeks. Both Boswell and Johnson kept detailed journals of their expedition, in which Johnson, who celebrated his sixty-​fourth birthday on the Isle of Skye, showed remarkable resilience to hardships of all kinds. And both published accounts of their travels, although Boswell printed his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides only in 1785, a year after Johnson’s death. Johnson, in contrast, produced A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland with exceptional speed, drawing on both his manuscript book of remarks (not extant) and a series of letters to Hester Thrale, which she preserved and copied for his use. A Journey was published in January 1775, just over a year after Johnson’s return to London, receiving generally positive, though restrained, reviews in London. In Scotland, however, Johnson’s many disparaging remarks about Scots and their culture caused widespread offense. Several Scottish reviewers denounced Johnson for roundly denying the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, supposedly translations by James Macpherson from a third-​century Gaelic bard but in fact mostly Macpherson’s own fabrications. In his account of the controversy, Boswell printed Johnson’s memorable letter of 20 January 20, 1775 to Macpherson, who had threatened him with violence after reading Johnson’s book. Johnson’s reply, which includes the remark “I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 298), is magnificently defiant. Johnson earned the substantial sum of 200 guineas from the book, which has come to be recognized as one of his greatest works. In July 1774, while in the midst of reading proofs of the Journey, Johnson set off for North Wales with Hester and Henry Thrale, together with the precocious nine-​year-​old

60   Peter Sabor Queeney. The Thrales wished to take possession of an estate at Bachygraig, near Denbigh, that Hester had inherited on the death of her uncle, Sir Thomas Salusbury, and Johnson, always eager to see new sights, accompanied them as their guest. They traveled through Lichfield, where Johnson introduced the Thrales to his relatives and acquaintances, continuing through Ashbourne, Derbyshire, where they stayed with Johnson’s old friend John Taylor. From Ashbourne they proceeded to Lleweni Hall, near Denbigh, staying there for three weeks with Robert Cotton, Hester Thrale’s cousin. They also journeyed along the rugged North Wales coast, before returning to London via Birmingham and Oxford after a journey of almost three months—​leaving Streatham on July 5 and returning to Southwark on September 30. Both Johnson and Hester Thrale kept diaries of their Welsh expedition, although neither was intended for publication, and neither Hawkins nor Boswell knew of the existence of Johnson’s account.19 It is disappointingly brief, in contrast to Thrale’s fuller and livelier report, Wales failing to appeal to Johnson’s imagination in the way that the Hebrides had. He was, as he wrote to Boswell on his return, pleased to have seen “a new part of the island” and to have visited “five of the six counties of North Wales,” but the country, he believed, “is so little different from England that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveler” (Letters, vol. ii, 149). Less than a year after returning from Wales, Johnson embarked on another tour with the Thrales, this time to Paris, for what would be his only continental journey. Together with Queeney and her tutor in Italian, the author Giuseppe Baretti, they set off from Streatham on September 15, 1775, landing in Calais two days later and arriving in Paris on September 28. They remained there for over a month, until November 1, returning to Streatham on November 13 after an absence of almost two months. Both Johnson and Hester Thrale, as they had in Wales, kept diaries of the tour, and again hers is ampler and more animated.20 Johnson was generally unimpressed by the churches and palaces that he visited (his poor eyesight limited his capacity for sightseeing), although he enjoyed the menagerie at Versailles and took an intense interest in French libraries; books, as ever, were his constant solace. As Robert DeMaria remarks: “bumping along in a coach in Wales, crossing a Hebridean channel, or sitting in the cell of a French Benedictine monastery, Johnson could by reading enter his intellectual homeland in a moment.”21

19  Hester

Thrale’s Welsh diary was first published in A. M. Broadley’s Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale (London: Bodley Head, 1909). Johnson’s diary first appeared as A Diary into North Wales in the Year 1774, ed. Richard Duppa (London, 1816). The two accounts are brought together in Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale’s Tour in North Wales, 1774, ed. Adrian Bristow (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 1995). 20  Part of Johnson’s Paris diary was first published by Boswell in his Life (vol. ii, 389–​401). It covers only the period October 10 to November 4; as Boswell noted, the remainder has been lost. Hester Thrale’s account was first published in The French Journals of Mrs. Thrale and Doctor Johnson, ed. Moses Tyson and Henry Guppy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1932), which brings the two diaries together. 21  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 274.

Age   61

Bolt Court and the Burneys In March 1775, Johnson was made Doctor of Laws by Oxford University, a distinction that he valued much more highly than his doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, although he chose not to use the title. “He did not,” writes Boswell, “vaunt of his new dignity, but . . . he was highly pleased with it” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 331). Johnson took no such pleasure in the famous portrait of him by Joshua Reynolds made in the same year, showing him as near-​sighted and grasping a book close to his face. According to Hester Thrale, Johnson protested that “he would not be known by posterity for his defects only, let Sir Joshua do his worst . . . I will not be blinking Sam.”22 The portrait, however, engraved by John Hall as the frontispiece to Hawkins’s Life, volume one of the first collected edition of Johnson’s works, is wonderfully evocative in its depiction of the reader’s seeming to squeeze the matter out of the book in his possession. His acquaintance Mary Knowles observed to Boswell: “He knows how to read better than any one . . . he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 284–​5). Reynolds painted three other portraits of Johnson, who also sat for several other painters, as well as for an imposing bust by his friend, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, completed in 1777.23 A year after receiving his doctorate, in March 1776, Johnson moved from Johnson’s Court to his final residence, rented from the printer Edmund Allen: a larger, three-​ story house in Bolt Court, off the north side of Fleet Street, close to his former home. Johnson’s household continued to expand. In addition to Levet, Williams, and Barber, it now included Poll Carmichael (possibly a former prostitute), Elizabeth Desmoulins (an old friend of Johnson’s wife Tetty, now a penniless widow), as well as Desmoulins’s daughter Elizabeth, Francis Barber’s wife Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1773, and finally their infant children: Elizabeth, born in November 1781, and Samuel, born in December 1783. Accompanying the oddly assorted group (four of them named Elizabeth) was Hodge, Johnson’s celebrated black cat, commemorated today with his own statue opposite Johnson’s house in Gough Square. Summarizing the household dynamics, Johnson remarked in 1778 in a letter to Hester Thrale: “We have tolerable concord at home, but no love. Williams hates every body. Levet hates Desmoulins and does not love Williams. Desmoulins hates them both. Poll loves none of them” (Letters, vol. iii, 140).

22 Hester

Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 313. The fullest account of the painting, now at the Huntington Art Gallery, is that by its previous owner, Loren Rothschild, Blinking Sam: The True History of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 1775 Portrait of Samuel Johnson (Los Angeles, CA: privately printed for the Samuel Johnson Society of Southern California, 2002). 23  See Herman W. Liebert, Lifetime Likenesses of Samuel Johnson Reissued with Additional Plates (privately printed for the Johnsonians, 1974), and Liebert, Johnson’s Head: The Story of the Bust of Dr. Samuel Johnson (privately printed for the Johnsonians, 1960).

62   Peter Sabor During his first year at Bolt Court, Johnson took up the cause of the fashionable cleric and minor author William Dodd, who, after forging a bond in the name of his former pupil, Lord Chesterfield, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Johnson wrote various items on his behalf, including a speech to the judge before his sentencing and several subsequent letters and petitions (Yale Works, vol. xx, 551–​73). For all his rhetorical powers, Johnson’s pleadings were in vain; Dodd was hanged at Tyburn in June 1777. A mile to the west of Bolt Court, Charles Burney and his family had, since 1774, resided in a large house on St Martin’s Street, Leicester Square, the former home of Sir Isaac Newton. Burney had first made himself known to Johnson in 1755, complimenting him in a letter on the newly published Dictionary, and a friendship between them subsequently developed. Johnson admired Burney’s “elegant and entertaining travels,” The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany (1773), and, according to Boswell, “had them in his eye, when writing his ‘Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’ ” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 186). When Burney published the first volume of his magnum opus, the History of Music, in January 1776, it was equipped with a dedication to Queen Charlotte by Johnson, offering a vigorous defense of the centrality of music in our lives: an astonishing tour de force by an author notorious for his indifference to music. Burney first met the Thrales a few weeks before the publication of his History of Music; in 1776 they engaged him as music tutor to Queeney, to whom he gave weekly harpsichord lessons at Streatham Park, where Burney encountered Johnson frequently. In March 1777, when the Thrales and Johnson visited the Burneys at St. Martin’s Street, Burney’s daughter Frances met them for the first time. She recounted her initial impressions of Johnson in a letter to Samuel Crisp: He is, indeed, very ill favoured,—​he is tall & stout, but stoops terribly,—​he is almost bent double. His mouth is in perpetual motion, as if he was chewing;—​he has a strange method of frequently twirling his Fingers, & twisting his Hands;—​his Body is in continual agitation, see sawing up & down; his Feet are never a moment quiet.

Frances also draws attention to Johnson’s eccentric clothing, with his “large Wig, snuff colour coat, & Gold Buttons,” to his extreme near-​sightedness, evident as he pores over the books in her father’s library, “almost brushing the Backs of them, with his Eye lashes,” and to his deafness.24 Frances was quiet and retiring, but after the publication of her best-​selling first novel, Evelina, in January 1778, she became a celebrity, with both Johnson and Hester Thrale among her admirers. Like her father she was now a regular visitor to Streatham Park, and from May 1779 Frances at the age of twenty-​six and Queeney at fourteen became co-​pupils of Johnson, who undertook to teach them Latin.

24 

The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. ii, 1774–​1777, ed. Lars E. Troide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 225–​6.

Age   63 Johnson’s friendship with both Charles and Frances Burney continued until his death. In February 1782, he gave her a portrait, designed and engraved by Thomas Trotter, depicting him in old age, looking careworn, and, at the request of Frances, he presented her with the proofs of the Life of Pope, the single most important part of what would be his last substantial publication, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works (1779–​81).

Lives of the Poets In 1777, a group of over forty London booksellers and printers decided to publish a comprehensive new collection, to be entitled The Works of the English Poets, beginning in the mid-​seventeenth century and continuing almost to the present, although living poets would be excluded. After preparing a preliminary list of authors whose works would be represented, in March three of the booksellers asked Johnson to write brief prefaces to each selection. He agreed to do so and, having been invited to name his own terms, he requested two hundred guineas. Edmond Malone found Johnson’s “moderation in demanding so small a sum . . . extraordinary. Had he asked one thousand, or even fifteen hundred guineas, the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would doubtless have readily given it” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 111). In the event, Johnson was paid £315 for his work, as well as a further £100 on revising it for a new edition: twice the sum he had requested. Since Johnson, characteristically, procrastinated in writing the prefaces, the booksellers published the texts separately early in 1779. Fifty-​two poets were represented, chosen by the booksellers with the exception of five added at Johnson’s request (Blackmore, Pomfret, Thomson, Watts, and Yalden). Johnson’s lives appeared separately in two installments, four volumes in March 1779 and a further six in May 1781, under the title Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, followed by a second edition of four volumes in June 1781. In February 1783, a revised third edition of the Lives, also in four volumes, was published under a new title, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (see Chapter 11, “Criticism,” and Chapter 15, “Biography”). Shortly after accepting the commission from the publishers, Johnson wrote to Boswell, in May 1777, telling him that he was “engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets” (Letters, vol. iii, 20). The edition, in fifty-​six volumes with two further volumes of index, was little in format (small octavo volumes) but not in extent, and the prefaces were similarly voluminous, growing to a length far beyond that initially envisaged by the publishers and by Johnson—​as he acknowledged in an advertisement to his work, where he writes of having been “led beyond my intention” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, [1]‌). Some of the lives of minor poets are as brief as originally intended. That of John Pomfret (one of Johnson’s own selections), for instance, fills a scant two pages, leading to an uncharacteristically bland conclusion: “He pleases many, and he who pleases many must have some species of merit” (xxi, 327). At the other extreme, however, are the lives of Cowley,

64   Peter Sabor Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Savage—​each of the last three extending to around a hundred pages. Savage is a special case: here Johnson merely reprinted his much earlier publication, An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744), thus giving grossly disproportionate space to a distinctly minor writer. In the case of Cowley, Johnson engaged not only with his ostensible subject but also with metaphysical poetry as a whole, providing some wonderfully incisive analyses of Donne. The greatest of the lives are those of Milton, Dryden, and Pope. For all his antagonism to Milton’s republican politics, as well as to Lycidas and to much else in Milton’s oeuvre, Johnson’s subtle and strikingly original analysis of Paradise Lost is on a par with his earlier exploration of Shakespeare’s dramas. In his lives of Dryden and Pope, Johnson is also at his best; the protracted comparison that he draws between the two in the course of his essay on Pope exemplifies his critical method, with antithesis after antithesis piled up yet always under control. “Dryden often surpasses expectation,” declares Johnson, “and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1192). The contemporary reception of Lives of the Poets was mixed. Not surprisingly, Johnson’s vituperative remarks on Swift and on Gray gave widespread offense, as did his condemnation of much of Milton. Significantly, however, Hawkins and Boswell both regarded the Lives as Johnson’s greatest achievement. Hawkins found it “a finely written, and an entertaining book . . . likely to be coeval with the memory of the best of the writers whom it celebrates” (Hawkins, Life, 323); Boswell, likewise, pronounced it “the work which of all Dr. Johnson’s writings will perhaps be read most generally, and with most pleasure” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 34).

Final Years Johnson’s last years were darkened by the deaths of several of his oldest friends and by his own increasing infirmity. Garrick, whom he had known for over forty years and with whom he had set off from Lichfield for London in 1737, died in January 1779 at the age of sixty-​one. Henry Thrale, after suffering a series of strokes, died in April 1781 at the age of fifty-​two, with Johnson at his bedside. Johnson wrote a fine Latin epitaph for him, engraved by John Flaxman on a monument in St. Leonard’s church, Streatham (Yale Works, vol. xix, 518–​20). In January 1782, it was the turn of Robert Levet, aged seventy-​ six, who had shared accommodation with Johnson for some twenty years. His death occasioned one of Johnson’s best poems, a moving elegy on his companion (vol. iv, 313–​ 15). Johnson’s household was further reduced with the death of Anna Williams, aged seventy-​seven, in September 1783, while Johnson was in severe pain himself, suffering from a swollen testicle. A stroke in June 1783 had temporarily deprived him of speech; Boswell was astonished by the speed of his recovery, “such was the general vigour of his constitution” (Life, vol. iv, 233). Johnson’s mental capacity was undiminished too; he

Age   65 completed a prose translation from the Latin of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (Conspiracy of Catiline) in September 1783.25 He continued to translate from Greek and Latin in his final year; in the winter of 1783–​4 he produced nearly one hundred Latin versions of Greek epigrams, and in November 1784, just a month before his death, he wrote an elegant English version of one of Horace’s odes: “The snow dissolv’d no more is seen” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 315–​40, 343–​4). In August 1784, Johnson wrote what was probably his final prose composition for publication: a dedication to George III for Charles Burney’s Account of the Commemoration of Handel (1785). A counterpart to his earlier dedication of The History of Music to Queen Charlotte, it too contains a profound meditation on the nature of music and its universal appeal. Johnson’s friendship with Hester Thrale, who outlived her husband by thirty years, ended bitterly. In the years following the death of Henry Thrale, she developed a passion for the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi, Queeney’s singing teacher, which inevitably damaged her relationship with Johnson. No longer welcomed as a resident at Streatham Park and receiving little pleasure from meetings of the ever-​expanding Club, Johnson, together with his physician and friend Richard Brocklesbury, founded a new club, which in December 1783 began meeting thrice a week at the Essex Head pub, close to Bolt Court. Boswell and Burney both became members. Johnson now had only a year to live. He attended the Essex Head club regularly and, despite suffering from dropsy, asthma, and other ailments, continued to travel with surprising frequency. In June 1784, he set off with Boswell for Oxford, where they remained for over two weeks. On his return, he attended a meeting of the Club for the last time; then, a week later, he received a letter from Hester Thrale, telling him of her intention to marry Piozzi. Johnson’s outraged and outrageous reply, denouncing her decision, was met with a dignified response from Thrale, defending her actions. Although Johnson wrote back with a more tempered and conciliatory letter, it was too late to save their friendship. They would never meet or correspond again. After much further suffering, Johnson died on December 13, at the age of seventy-​five. His last words, according to Hawkins, were “Jam moriturus” (Now am I about to die), although several other deathbed remarks have also been attributed to him.26 In his will, he left bequests to many friends and the bulk of his estate to Francis Barber, “a substantial and enormously generous bequest” in the view of Barber’s biographer.27 With Burke and other members of the Club as pallbearers and Reynolds among the mourners, Johnson was buried at Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner, close to Garrick and Goldsmith and at the foot of the memorial to Shakespeare.

25 See Samuel Johnson’s Translation of Sallust, ed. David L. Vander Meulen and G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: privately printed for the Johnsonians, 1993). 26  See Hawkins, Life, 357 and n. 742. 27  Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 174.

66   Peter Sabor

Further Reading Bundock, Michael. The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Johnson’s Heir. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Clifford, James L. Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years. New York: McGraw Hill, 1979. Damrosch, Leo. The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Fleeman, J. D. “The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings.” In Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, edited by R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip, and R. J. Roberts, 211–​30. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975. Greene, Donald J. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. 2nd ed. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Hawkins, Sir John. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Larsen, Lyle. Dr. Johnson’s Household. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1985. Thrale, Hester Lynch. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi): 1776–​ 1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.

Chapter 4

Lives Lisa Berglund

Early Lives At least seventeen formal or semi-​formal biographies of Johnson were published between 1762 and 1787. Apart from the well-​known work of James Boswell, Hester Piozzi, and Sir John Hawkins, these lives are collected in O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley’s anthology The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson.1 They range from a few paragraphs to around fifty pages in length. As Brack and Kelley discuss in a companion volume, Samuel Johnson’s Early Biographers, many of these narratives are unreliable, having been generated in haste to meet demand for information about Johnson following his death in 1784, an event that, according to Arthur Murphy, “kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited so much attention.”2 (That attention proved too much for some observers of what the satirist Peter Pindar called “Johnsonomania”: “Dr Johnson,” spat Horace Walpole in June 1785, “is going to have as many lives as a cat.”3) Often the goal of these works is to celebrate Johnson as a moral hero; aspects of his life and career are therefore chosen or omitted to strengthen this narrative, particularly on the part of those biographers who struggled to reconcile Johnson’s celebrated virtue with his rooted melancholy. For modern scholars, the value of these works resides in the context they provide for the more substantial life writing of Boswell, Piozzi, and Hawkins. The most interesting 1 O M Brack, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974), and Samuel Johnson’s Early Biographers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1971). 2  Robina Napier, ed., Johnsoniana: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson LLD by Mrs. Piozzi, Richard Cumberland, Bishop Percy and Others: Together with the Diary of Dr. Campbell and Extracts from That of Madame D’Arblay (London, 1884), 362. 3 Peter Pindar [John Wolcot], Bozzy and Piozzi: or, The British Biographers: A Town Eclogue (London, 1786), line 22; John Wiltshire, The Making of Dr. Johnson: Icon of Modern Culture (Crowham Manor: Helm, 2009), 44.

68   Lisa Berglund of the early lives are those by Thomas Tyers (1785), William Cooke (1785), William Shaw (1785), and Joseph Towers (1786).

Bozzy, Piozzi, and Hawkins The first substantial biographical study of Samuel Johnson was James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. A revised version of the diary that Boswell had kept during their three-​month trip in 1773, the Journal was published in 1785 as a kind of trial balloon for the Life of Johnson. It was an immediate success, as much for its provokingly candid depiction of Johnson as for Boswell’s apparently guileless privileging of himself as a companion, witness, and interlocutor. John Radner has argued that the Journal was in fact a “collaborative construction” with Johnson, as the latter consciously “help[ed] his traveling companion produce and correct this fullest account of their collaborative tour.”4 The book remains compulsively readable and is frequently published and taught together with Johnson’s more sober account of the trip, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). Hester Lynch Piozzi wrote her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson in the Last Twenty Years of His Life (1786) while enjoying a protracted European honeymoon with her second husband, Gabriel Piozzi. For material, she relied on her memory and Thraliana, six volumes of memoirs, reflections, and anecdotes. As Mrs. Thrale, she had spent two decades as Johnson’s hostess, muse, friend, courtly love object, correspondent, and nurse. Beginning in 1765, Johnson effectively lived with the Thrales four days of every seven, either in their comfortable townhouse or in the luxurious villa at Streatham, where Mrs. Thrale hosted a salon frequented by luminaries such as David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, and Charles and Frances Burney. Their relationship was characterized by intellectual excitement and sincere affection, as well as complicated by the tension created by Johnson’s abject demands upon her while she was enduring the frustrations of a loveless marriage, the requirements of running a household, threats to her husband’s business and parliamentary ambitions, and the grief of giving birth to a seemingly endless series of sickly, often dying, children. Anecdotes is not a comprehensive biography. Piozzi herself describes it as “a mere candle-​light picture of his later days, where every thing falls in dark shadow except the face, the index of the mind, but even that is seen unfavorably and with a paleness beyond what nature gave it.”5 Nevertheless, Johnson’s many years as a member of the Thrale household provided Piozzi with material to spin into engaging anecdotes, and their personal intimacy gave her the opportunity to learn about Johnson’s childhood, marriage, 4  John Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 7. 5  Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 310.

Lives   69 and other private matters. As later biographers have conceded, Johnson confided in Thrale as he did not in Boswell or other male friends. Anecdotes also gains from Piozzi’s willingness to present Johnson “warts and all”; though not completely candid, she does not refrain from sharing stories to challenge the prevailing view of the author of the Rambler as a moral philosopher of uncomplicated virtue. Assailed by some contemporary readers as ungenerous in its portrayal of Johnson, Anecdotes nevertheless sold out on the day it was published, immediately went into three further impressions, and has seldom since been out of print. It remains a valuable corrective to the hagiographic narratives that preceded it, and particularly to the brilliant but partial work of James Boswell, as well as being significant as an early modern biography of a male subject written by a woman who was no relation. So negative is the reputation of Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. that its designation as the “authorized” biography of Johnson has become a reproach. Hawkins, one of Johnson’s oldest friends and his executor, was ill-​suited for the project and the book was quickly panned as tedious at best and offensive at worst. Hawkins could speak with authority about Johnson’s early years in London, and he was interested, as other biographers were not, in the scholarly aspects of Johnson’s literary output. In his Life, for example, Hawkins prints the entire Latin text of Ad Urbanum, the poem that seems to have secured Johnson permanent employment with Edmund Cave, along with an English translation, and later he provides the full text of two of Johnson’s Lilliputian Senate speeches and long excerpts from the political pamphlets. These texts are valuable and interesting—​but they also retard the progress of the biographical narrative, as do frequent interjections and digressions. In his introduction to the first (and only) scholarly edition of Hawkins’ Life, editor O M Brack emphasizes that the friendship of Johnson and Hawkins was grounded in shared religious beliefs; he asserts the value of the biography for illustrating this and other aspects of Johnson’s personal life, and for supplying a powerful narrative of Johnson’s last days. At the same time, Brack concedes the pervasive problems with structure, style, and tone. Unlike Piozzi’s Anecdotes, Hawkins’ Life has little to offer a general reader.

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. “I am lost without my Boswell,” Sherlock Holmes tells Watson; these six words confirm the extraordinary success of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), a success that not only earned it accolades as the greatest biography ever written, but also transformed its author into an eponym for a biographer. According to John Radner, Boswell decided in 1772 to become Johnson’s biographer;6 he devoted the time they

6 

Radner, 4.

70   Lisa Berglund spent together during the next twelve years to securing Johnson’s tacit agreement to the plan; staging conversations and events that might supply useful “copy”; interrogating Johnson about his childhood, family, and beliefs; even assuming outrageous opinions to provoke a response from Johnson worth recording for the Life. As Radner and others have argued, Johnson’s implicit cooperation makes the narrative unique. Boswell also—​unlike Piozzi, Hawkins, and other early biographers—​diligently sought out documentary evidence of events in Johnson’s life and interviewed surviving friends. Not surprisingly, Boswell has sometimes been credited with inventing modern biography. Boswell’s Life also is biased, lopsided, and unreliable. More than five-​sixths of the book focuses on Johnson’s life after 1763, the year he and Boswell met. The account of a single day the two men spent together occupies as many pages as Boswell devotes to the first twenty years of Johnson’s life. In furious competition with Piozzi and Hawkins, Boswell discredits, misrepresents, or omits information about them and their rival biographies. The book is shaped, often misleadingly, by Boswell’s prejudices, such as his support for the slave trade, his reluctance to recognize the role of sex in Johnson’s life, and above all by his own need to represent Johnson as a complex but morally authoritative figure, even when his own notes and journals suggested otherwise. Yet Boswell was a superb storyteller who had chosen the perfect subject. As John Wiltshire notes, “the story of ‘Dr Johnson’s making’ is partly at least the story of how Boswell’s biographies became the authoritative text—​supplanting not only all other records of Johnson, but for many years in the nineteenth century, even Johnson’s work itself.”7 By the mid-​nineteenth century, among biographers one might paraphrase the quip about the greatest racehorse of all time: Boswell first, and the rest nowhere. Boswell’s success ironically was enabled by one of his most savage critics, Lord Macaulay, who famously wrote: “We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all.”8 For generations of readers, and even for subsequent biographers, Boswell became the most important person in Johnson’s life, his arrival the most consequential event, because their meeting occasioned the Life of Johnson. For its impact on Johnson’s actual lived experience, the meeting with the Thrales matters much more, but history chose to record the advent of Boswell as crucial, as in the use of chapter headings like “A Young Man from Edinburgh” (Hibbert), “Enter James Boswell” (Krutch), “Enter Boswell” (Nokes), and, more broadmindedly, “Boswell and Mrs. Thrale” (Martin). (No biographer has yet headed a chapter “Enter Hawkins.”)

7 

Wiltshire, 5. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Life of Johnson, ed. Albert Perry Walker (Boston, MA: D. C. Heath & Co, 1908), 55. 8 

Lives   71

Edging Away from Boswell The popularity of Boswell’s Life long discouraged subsequent biographers from offering a rival perspective. As Robert Folkenflik observes, “To write a life of Johnson is potentially the most ambitious undertaking for a biographer, since Boswell’s Johnson is by consensus the greatest of English biographies.”9 That consensus stifled innovation. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most biographers deferred to Boswell’s emphases and contented themselves with producing comparatively short, accessible narratives comprising highlights of the Life. A typical example, the biography that Leslie Stephen wrote in 1879 for John Morley’s English Men of Letters series reads like a distillation of Boswell, beating the track of the Life of Johnson through predictable chapters like “Johnson and his Friends” and “Johnson as a Literary Dictator.” The only truly original chapter is the last, a mostly hostile assessment of “Johnson’s Writings.” Stephen, however, does make one notable statement: “In following Boswell’s guidance,” he acknowledges, “we have necessarily seen only one side of Johnson’s life; and probably that side which had least significance for the man himself.”10 With this recognition, the dominion of Boswell begins to recede. The late nineteenth century saw the publication or republication of earlier accounts of Johnson’s life that contradicted Boswell or provided new insights. The first was a collection of early biographies, including Piozzi’s Anecdotes and Arthur Murphy’s Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1792). Though deferential to Boswell, editor Robina Napier modestly suggests in her introduction that “We sometimes fancy that another hand might give a different, not a better or a fuller representation than Boswell’s.”11 Murphy certainly does, by minimizing Boswell’s role in Johnson’s life and emphasizing the importance of the Thrales. Murphy also structures his narrative like Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets, with the life followed by a short character sketch and then a review of literary works. Murphy thus focuses attention on Johnson as a writer, arguing that “The Rambler may be considered, as Johnson’s great work” and neatly remarking that the Idler “is the Odyssey, after the Iliad.”12 Similarly, Frances Reynolds’s brief “Recollections of Dr. Johnson” emphasizes aspects of Johnson’s life scanted or ignored by Boswell, such as her observation that “Dr. Johnson set a higher value upon female friendship than, perhaps, most men.”13 In this context, John Wiltshire has noted that “Boswell was never very interested in Johnson’s friendships with literary women . . . as with many other instances, Boswell’s editors have made up his deficiency.”14 Reynolds also describes Johnson’s ability to recite poetry from 9 Robert

Folkenflik, “Johnson’s Modern Lives,” in Johnson after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 3–​23, at 21. 10  Leslie Stephen, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1879), 142. 11  Napier, 5. 12  Napier, 431, 435. 13  Napier, 329. 14  Wiltshire, 58.

72   Lisa Berglund memory, while reporting that he read prose aloud poorly; and she details how Johnson’s weak eyesight affected his social conduct, ranging from bad table manners to ignoring people, and rendered him unable to recognize social and facial cues. In 1897, George Birkbeck Hill published two monumental works, his edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Johnsonian Miscellanies. The Life boasts copious footnotes that undergird Hill’s presentation of the work as a masterpiece of biography. Yet ironically, as with John Wilson Croker’s omnibus edition from earlier in the century, the narrative of Boswell’s unique role as Johnson’s biographer cannot be fully sustained when other voices make themselves heard, albeit from the appendices and footnotes. The Johnsonian Miscellanies add to the cacophony, offering nearly 1,000 pages of alternative biographies, including the material previously collected by Napier and anecdotes by more than thirty contemporaries of Johnson. It was beginning to be possible to imagine a “Life of Johnson” that would not be a distillation of Boswell. The first significant biography to appear in the twentieth century was Hugh Kingsmill’s Samuel Johnson (1934). A popular biographer, anthologist, and wit, famous for observing that “friends are God’s apology for relations,” Kingsmill takes a light-​handed approach, providing a familiar narrative punctuated with smart, original observations. Kingsmill, for example, proposes that in performing his penance at Uttoxeter Johnson was apologizing not to his father but to God. He also makes the intriguing suggestion that Johnson may have welcomed the unlikelihood that Elizabeth Porter would bear him children, because of his own physical problems.15 Johnson’s domestic arrangements interest Kingsmill more than his literary achievements; he makes the sensible observation that as a childless widower without siblings, Johnson had to create his own family, and he takes Boswell and Hawkins to task for their jaundiced portrayals of the situation at Bolt Court. Kingsmill shrewdly observes, of the friendship with the Thrales, “The value which Johnson, after his life of poverty and with his dread of solitude, attached to his connexion with Streatham was so great that he sacrificed some of his self-​respect to preserve it, and turned a blind eye on what it was not to his interest to see clearly.”16 In a long and sympathetic analysis of Johnson’s dependence on Hester Thrale, Kingsmill unequivocally states, “The chief happiness of Johnson’s later years, and therefore of his whole life, came from his friendship with Mrs. Thrale.”17 Significant portions of Kingsmill’s text are taken from earlier biographies, either verbatim or very loosely revised, without citation (there are no notes). Unlike other biographers (except for John Radner), Kingsmill devotes a chapter to the Life of Johnson, granting its importance but also putting it in its place, as when he wittily observes of Johnson’s cutting remarks about Garrick and other rivals that “Boswell was a tireless messenger of these sallies” or in his epigram “With her [Hester Thrale], he was a man, with Boswell he was a character.”18 15 

Hugh Kingsmill, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 27. Kingsmill, 135. 17  Kingsmill, 139. 18  Kingsmill, 85, 174. 16 

Lives   73

Breaking Free of Boswell The “first serious modern biography of Johnson,” according to Robert Folkenflik, was Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson (1944). Folkenflik writes, “In his autobiography More Lives than One, Krutch says his intention was both to ‘write a full biography’ incorporating new knowledge and to ‘revise as far as possible the popular notion of Johnson as hardly more than the convenient subject of Boswell’s amusing portrait.’ ”19 Krutch’s introduction similarly acknowledges the “tremendous reputation of Boswell’s Life” which has “tended to discourage any attempt in recent times to produce a large inclusive book” about Johnson.20 It is not surprising that his depiction of Boswell is highly unflattering; Frederick S. Troy remarks that “Krutch presented him as a figure of monstrous vanity, coarseness and crapulence; an autograph hunter and an intellectual parvenu.”21 Krutch’s goal, in other words, is to rescue Johnson from Boswell’s clutches by writing a serious, comprehensive, and dignified book while diminishing Boswell’s legitimacy, and in this he succeeds, although Kingsmill’s volume remains more amusing, and Walter Jackson Bate’s ultimately has proved more valuable. The 1970s saw the publication of at least half a dozen biographies of Johnson, some scholarly and some aimed at a general audience. Christopher Hibbert’s Personal History of Samuel Johnson is an effective narrative by a professional popular biographer.22 It lacks the citations that a scholar would require and offers no original insight, but it is competent, thorough, and well, if predictably, written. Even without examining Johnson’s literary output, it is nevertheless a better introductory narrative for the non-​specialist than many others, except those of Margaret Lane and (with reservations) Jeffrey Meyers, discussed below. Margaret Lane was another popular writer of biographies and novels, and the lavishly illustrated Samuel Johnson and His World is one of her best-​remembered works. Lane’s book stands out for its concrete focus on the world in which Johnson lived—​no biographer has bettered her description of scrofula, the immunological disease that Johnson contracted as an infant. She tells us concretely what Dead Man’s Place was like and what being a freshman at Oxford entailed. Other biographers illuminate Cornelius Ford’s role as a mentor to the youthful Johnson (see, in particular, Walter Jackson Bate and Meyers), and nearly all remind us that Ford was the (posthumous) model for the inebriated parson in Hogarth’s Modern Midnight Conversation; but it is Lane who informs us that Ford expired in Hummums Covent Garden bagnio at the age of 37, “so corpulent” as to appear aged 50.23 19 

Folkenflik, 5. Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), vii. 21  Frederick S. Troy, “Samuel Johnson in Modern Perspective,” The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 3 (1978), 517–​41, at 535. 22  Christopher Hibbert, The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (London: Penguin, 1984). 23  Margaret Lane, Samuel Johnson and His World (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 30. 20 

74   Lisa Berglund Samuel Johnson and his World devotes little space to Johnson’s works, except as they occur as events in their author’s life, and none to literary analysis. More interested in Johnson’s relationships, Lane emphasizes the opposition of the Porter and Johnson families to Samuel and Tetty’s marriage, making their union more romantic but also more real. She offers a sympathetic assessment of Tetty, and a useful discussion of Anna Seward. In common with her biographical contemporaries, Lane describes Johnson’s strong sexual desires and speculates on their influence upon his experiences as a young man, a husband, and a widower. Having written the first scholarly biography of Hester Thrale, later Mrs. Piozzi, in 1941, James L. Clifford turned his attention to Johnson. Young Sam Johnson (1955) offers a leisurely review of Johnson’s formative years; when the volume ends in 1749, major accomplishments—​the Rambler, the Dictionary, Rasselas, the edition of Shakespeare, and the Lives of the Poets—​are all to come. Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years followed twenty-​four years later, devoting more than 300 pages to a study of fourteen years of Johnson’s life (1749–​63).24 Clifford is most interested in the writer and the lexicographer, as the title of his work indicates, and as he is not covering Johnson’s entire life, he has the luxury of devoting an entire chapter to the Literary Magazine and another to the Idler. The narrative in both volumes is clear, engaging, and informative, but it must be said that biographies that spend a mere 200 rather than 600 pages on the first fifty years of Johnson’s life do not all suffer by comparison. The poet and novelist John Wain wrote Samuel Johnson: A Biography for the “intelligent general reader,” to whom the author hoped to present “a picture of Johnson as he actually was instead of as he is thought of. The average reader’s picture of Johnson is still very much the one he gets from Boswell, or from one of the countless popularizers of Boswell.” That picture, Wain writes, must be effaced, else “we lose . . . the deeply humanitarian Johnson, the man who from first to last rooted his life among the poor and outcast.” He cites his own personal identification with Johnson, which included having attended the same university and “hav[ing] lived the same life of Grub Street, chance employment, and the unremitting struggle to write enduring books against the background of an unstable existence.”25 Wain’s connection to Johnson vividly colors the biography, as when he uses his own experience as a freshman at Oxford to interpret Johnson’s feelings upon matriculating in 1728. These engaging personal interjections may strengthen the book’s appeal to the non-​specialist reader, but they also weaken its claims to being a portrait of “Johnson as he actually was.” More often, the biography represents Johnson as Wain imagines he was.

24  James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1955), and Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1979). 25  John Wain, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 13–​4.

Lives   75

Johnson on the Couch “A troubled Johnson, a Johnson simultaneously revealed and disguised in his own writings, gradually became more current, as Boswell’s Life became less and less generally read,” John Wiltshire writes. “In the middle years of the twentieth century he developed into a figure whose suppressed anguish, whose battles with passions like envy and anger and with sexual desire became deeply interesting to a generation of critics familiar with Freud, and who saw in him a mirror image of the literary scholar struggling against destructive forces within himself.”26 George Irwin’s slim volume Samuel Johnson: A Personality in Conflict dramatically illustrates this trend. The book focuses on how Johnson was shaped by childhood trauma, with a grotesque emphasis on Johnson’s mother as a destructive harpy: “she, whose presence had become internalized as an inexorable conscience, she, whom he could neither exorcize nor appease, seldom ceased to torment him when he was alone.”27 Interestingly, despite this horror story, Irwin does not make allowances for Johnson; he offers a notably critical assessment, especially of the lexicographer’s self-​absorption. For example, Irwin writes, At his wife’s death as during her life it was his own feelings that were his primary concern. He did not grieve for Tetty as for one whose life had ended; it was not Tetty he felt for. Johnson’s prayer of 24 April 1752, the first he wrote after his wife’s death, is a supplication for his own welfare . . . There is not one mention in this prayer of the deceased Tetty—​except in the heading which was added a fortnight later.28 (p. 100)

The psychoanalytic focus leads Irwin to consider women as important forces in Johnson’s life, more so than previous biographers (even Piozzi). This emphasis ultimately leads to a remarkable characterization of Hester Thrale as Johnson’s analyst. Irwin writes: Urged on by a friendly curiosity, which Johnson was not unwilling to gratify, Mrs. Thrale encouraged him to talk about himself. She could not, had she been an analyst, have done more to create the permissive atmosphere in which a patient feels sufficiently released from his customary self-​defensive tensions to talk freely about himself.

26 

Wiltshire, 10. Irwin, Samuel Johnson: A Personality in Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1971), 46. 28  Irwin, 100. 27  George

76   Lisa Berglund Irwin continues: The manner in which Johnson in the early years of his friendship with Mrs. Thrale, flew from one extreme to the other, at one time beseeching for her care and protection, imploring her to help him; at another time scolding her harshly, accusing her of neglecting him, is, in psychotherapy, characteristic of the transference formed by the most severely disturbed patients. Mrs. Thrale, not knowing the origins of these outbursts of love and hate, was, of course, unable to control the transference by referring it back to its source, but the manner in which she was able, through not becoming emotionally involved herself, to accept his outbursts of rudeness and resentment is characteristic of the experienced analyst who remains free from counter-​transference.29

Fifty years later, it is difficult to read these musings with a straight face. Even a contemporary like Margaret Lane called Irwin’s approach “great nonsense.”30 Still, Irwin’s single-​mindedness led to valuable insights. In addition to recognizing the centrality of Johnson’s relationships with women, Irwin is the first biographer since Hawkins to mine the Rambler for autobiographical material; while everyone recognized Johnson’s self-​portrait in the Idler’s Mr. Sober, Irwin shows (not always convincingly) how Johnson uses the Rambler and other texts to conduct vicarious self-​examination, an approach later followed by Robert DeMaria and Peter Martin. In service of his hobbyhorse, Irwin also makes old information newly significant, as when he flatly states that Johnson did not see his mother for the last nineteen years of her life, or that in May–​ June 1775 Johnson wrote Hester Thrale thirty-​one letters in sixty-​six days. Though a more sophisticated and scholarly biographer than Irwin, Walter Jackson Bate shared his Freudian approach, which means that portions of Samuel Johnson (1975) are dated, even risible. We are told that “Johnson himself was aware of the paralytic effects that can result from the crushing demands of what Freud called the ‘super-​ego.’ ”31 In a chapter titled “Psychology of the Young Johnson,” Bate offers an explicitly Freudian analysis of Johnson’s breakdown after leaving Oxford and his fears of becoming a failure like his father, an argument that now is almost unreadable. Bate also asserts that Johnson’s notorious tics were psychological and “not . . . of organic origin.”32 This interpretation has been undermined by the widely accepted theory that Johnson suffered from the neurological disorder Tourette’s Syndrome, first proposed in 1979, four years after Bate’s book appeared. (Of course, the experience of suffering from then unexplained tics and compulsions must have left its mark on Johnson’s mental state.) Despite these caveats, Bate’s biography is arguably the most complete, effective, and valuable study of Johnson since the triumvirate of Piozzi, Hawkins, and Boswell. Unlike most other biographers, Bate strikes a balance among Johnson’s personal life 29 

Irwin, 126, 130–​31. Lane, 22. 31  Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 19. 32  Bate, 127. 30 

Lives   77 and friendships, his intellectual and professional life, and his moral and spiritual life. As Paul Alkon notes, in Bate’s work “Boswell recedes to something like the dimension of his appearance during Johnson’s lifetime,” as other relationships are privileged and explored.33 Samuel Johnson also recalls the work of Piozzi, Hawkins, and Boswell in portraying Johnson as an active influence upon the intellectual and moral life of the biographer. This is not to say that other biographers do not have a personal stake in Johnson (Wain and Lawrence Lipking in particular identify with him). Still, Bate is as interested in learning from Johnson as learning about him. For example, Bate writes: More than that of most human beings, his life from thirty-​six into his early fifties—​ and most of what he wrote—​must be seen in the light of all that we know of what it means to enter and pass through middle age . . . And the way in which he was like at least some of us was in the fearful experience of his fifties, when, after keeping things at bay by the achievement of his forties, life caught up with him, and—​with the revenge of what he accumulated through postponement—​exacted a fearful psychological toll.34 ()

In comparing the reader to Johnson, recognizing Johnson as an Everyman rather than unique genius, Bate makes a very Johnsonian appeal to what Rambler 60 calls the “uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 320). Other highlights of the biography are the chapters on Johnson’s “Moral Landscape” and on “Wit and Humor,” which combine literary with psychological and other analytical approaches. No other biography manages such readable and illuminating synthesis.

The Life in the Works Two scholars in the 1990s sought to recontextualize Johnson, eschewing both the jovial, eccentric companion of the fading post-​Boswell narratives and the tortured genius of the psychoanalysts. Both DeMaria and Lipking reject these contexts and deliberately focus on Johnson as a writer and, particularly, as a scholar. In The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (1993), DeMaria presents Johnson as a frustrated Latinist. “One of my principal objects in this book,” he writes, “is to resituate Johnson and his works in a European cultural context.”35 DeMaria

33 

Paul K. Alkon, untitled review of Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 12, no. 1 (1978), 131–​4, at 132. 34  Bate, 233–4. 35  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), xv.

78   Lisa Berglund insists on downplaying the psychological or social interpretations offered by previous biographers. Refusing to speculate as to how the infant Johnson contracted scrofula, for example, he simply reports that Johnson had the disease. One of the first biographers to accept the diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome, DeMaria uses this insight to make lemons out of lemonade: “His incapacity to work in more public positions happily pressed Johnson toward the invisible occupation of authorship.”36 Some details of Johnson’s life are presented in truncated or allusive form, while textual analysis is elaborate. The Life of Samuel Johnson is written for an informed scholar, not for a novice seeking to learn the story of Johnson’s lived experience. DeMaria spends as many pages conducting a close reading of the unsuccessful play Irene as he does on Johnson’s entire childhood. In this narrative, projects appear and demand the critic’s attention; they are rarely contextualized into Johnson’s life. Similarly, DeMaria is uninterested in the people important to Johnson; he spends a page on Johnson’s friendship with Hester Thrale and barely more on Boswell even given a chapter devoted to their shared trip to the Hebrides. DeMaria, the author of Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (2000), is perhaps the first biographer to recover the signification of “sensible” in Elizabeth’s Porter’s famous assessment upon first meeting with her future husband—​that is, “capable of delicate or tender feeling.”37 Despite spending comparatively little time on Johnson’s personal, as opposed to intellectual, life, DeMaria is careful to debunk the masochism narrative as mere social ritual. He acknowledges that “Johnson may be mimicking the complex pose that he strikes, but he is not doing so coolly. He was an emotional person, the most ‘sensible’ or feeling, man his wife had ever met.” DeMaria concludes of Johnson’s submission to Hester Thrale, perhaps wishfully: “There is no convincing evidence that it was realized in anything beyond polite behavior and a kind of country-​house theatrical life.”38 Lawrence Lipking begins with a close reading of the letter to Lord Chesterfield, deliberately using the version recorded by Giuseppe Baretti rather than that of Boswell. A series of literary critical essays strung loosely on a chronological survey, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author will prove inaccessible to readers unfamiliar with either Johnson’s writings or the details of his life. This is not a conventional biography, if a conventional work describes the people, places, and things that influenced the life of its subject. Lipking is almost resentful of those people whose demands on Johnson’s intellectual and moral energy threaten to distract us from literary critical analysis—​for example, Hill Boothby, whom Johnson loved and may have hoped to marry, is dispatched in a brisk eleven words.39

36 

DeMaria, 5–​6. DeMaria, 33. 38  DeMaria, 260–​1. 39  Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 156. 37 

Lives   79 Lipking’s hostility to the tradition of Johnsonian biography is particularly notable as he writes fantastically of Johnson’s impeding death: While the great man arranged his affairs and destroyed private papers, inquisitive writers prowled around the house in Bolt Court, hoping to get their hands on something newsworthy. Meanwhile a coven of more respectable biographers—​Boswell, Hawkins, Mrs. Piozzi—​gathered their notes and waited for their time. Like Johnson’s life, his death would soon belong to literature.40

This characterization of past biographers as a “coven” dramatically revives the “rival biographers” of Peter Pindar’s satirical poem “Bozzy and Piozzi, or the British Biographers” (1787), reminding us that Johnson’s value as a biographical trophy did not diminish with the years. True, as discussed above, the late Samuel Johnson was immediately the subject of enterprising biographers, with a dozen different volumes rushed into print less than three years after his demise. Lipking also concedes the value of his greatest predecessors, while smearing them with an uncharacteristically careless brush. The prowler to whom he alludes was in fact Hawkins, who actually pocketed some personal documents, ostensibly to keep them out of the hands of servants. Of the rest of the “coven,” Hester Piozzi was enjoying her second honeymoon in Italy, unaware of Johnson’s imminent death, and Boswell was planning the deployment of his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

Joint Biographies Although the scope of this chapter does not allow for discussion of the numerous group biographies published about the Johnson Circle, two such books must be recommended as among the most appealing biographies of Johnson. In Doctor Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), Richard Holmes explores a friendship that dismayed Hawkins and baffled Boswell: the young Johnson’s association with the poet, wastrel, murderer, fabulist, parasite, and wit Richard Savage. No other biographer provides this degree of insight into this relationship; in the 324 pages of Young Sam Johnson, for example, Clifford spends fewer than twenty on Savage. Holmes’s thoughtful, elegant volume significantly contributes to our understanding of Savage’s role in Johnson’s growth as a poet, writer, and man.41 Johnson and Boswell: A Portrait of Friendship (2012) narrates a competitive 20-​year partnership, or what John Radner characterizes as “an evolving, multi-​faceted collaboration.”42 Radner’s book is exhaustively researched, sympathetically narrated, absorbing, and

40 

Lipking, 295. Richard Holmes, Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (New York: Pantheon, 1993). 42  Radner, 6. 41 

80   Lisa Berglund illuminating. While Radner has written a scholarly biography and Holmes a popular one, these books serve as complementary studies of biographer and subject, with Johnson assuming first one role and then the other in his relationships with Savage and with Boswell.

Johnson at 300 As the first decade after Johnson’s death witnessed three definitive biographies by Piozzi, Hawkins, and Boswell, so the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth was marked by three new biographies, which in their way mirror characteristic elements of their predecessors. The anniversary year of 2009 brought us a solemn, forgettable biography (Samuel Johnson: A Life by David Nokes), a careless, intermittently insightful biography (Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin), and a highly readable and provocative biography (Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers).43 As the counterpart to Hawkins’s Life, Nokes’s volume, which assembles details of Johnson’s life in a perfunctory fashion, is the least successful of the three contemporary lives. (Its cursory approach may be related to the fact that Nokes died shortly after completing the book.) Like Lipking and DeMaria, and Hawkins before them, Nokes is interested in Johnson as a scholar; his volume forcefully represents the Dictionary of the English Language as sustaining Johnson’s mental and psychological powers at a low point in his life. The biography’s other chosen emphases, though, are odd: Nokes spends roughly the same number of pages analyzing translations from the Latin poets, which Johnson completed in his school and college years, as he spends on Rasselas. Moreover, Nokes assumes a reader familiar with the details of Johnson’s life, as when he devotes just one sentence to the influence of William Law’s Serious Call on Johnson’s religious development, a sentence that does not describe Law’s teachings. The focus on Johnson’s lesser-​known works and lack of context for significant events results in a confusing first biography to read, and a frustrating tenth or fifteenth. Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography begins strangely, with an epigraph that combines two quotations without any indication that it is doing so: To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next, is to strive and deserve to conquer. Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms, of hope: who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.44

43 David Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2010); Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), 2008; Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 44  Martin, vii.

Lives   81 The first two clauses are the first half of a sentence taken from Adventurer 111. The second sentence, of course, is the famous opening to Rasselas. Were two separate epigraphs inadvertently merged by a careless typesetter? Or does Martin mean to temper the notorious pessimism of the novel by imposing upon it a heroic image of striving, conquering, and deserving? Either way, a reader with basic familiarity with Johnson’s writings will recognize the Rasselas passage, be disconcerted by the encroachment of the Adventurer, and become justifiably wary of the chapters that follow. Martin’s book is careless as to quotations, peppered with grammatical errors, and misleading in representing details of Johnson’s life. Martin, for example, writes, “Another classmate, John Taylor, deserves mention. He was second only to Mrs. Thrale and Boswell as a correspondent, receiving one hundred known letters from Johnson.”45 While it is true that Taylor received a hundred letters from Johnson, so did Boswell (Letters, vol. v, 60–​1). Hester Thrale, by contrast, received more than three hundred letters, and a more impartial biography would acknowledge her primacy among Johnson’s correspondents. Martin’s anecdotes also veer away from generally accepted accounts, as when he oddly credits a woman on the stagecoach, rather than Johnson’s mother, with buying the infant Johnson a silver cup, or when he proposes that Johnson’s notorious fetters were occasioned by a fear of sleepwalking. Martin occasionally offers neat insights, like the parallel he draws between Johnson throwing away a pair of donated shoes at Oxford, and Savage’s resentment that “they had sent a tailor to measure him.” Martin is immediately hostile to Tetty and uninterested in her perspective, but he does acknowledge (as few biographers do) that Johnson may have been an unbearable husband. The 1770s tend to weary even the best of Johnson’s biographers: Martin’s account of that decade likewise bogs down, but he provides a glint of amusement at Boswell’s discomfiture when he observes that “Boswell did not anticipate the extent to which Johnson, even in the remote Hebridean islands, would keep thinking about Mrs. Thrale.”46 Nevertheless, one gets little sense of engagement with the challenges of Johnson’s character or genius, unlike, say, in Bate’s biography, which, with all its outrageous elements, is profoundly interested in understanding Johnson. Of our trio of contemporary biographies, Jeffrey Meyers’s Samuel Johnson: The Struggle is the parallel to Boswell: detailed, dramatic, and over the top. From the opening pages, Meyers focuses on Johnson’s sexuality, observing that “Johnson’s covert sexual life was far more interesting than Boswell’s own frantic fornication and punitive doses of clap” and asserting that Johnson’s alleged masochism (first proposed by Katharine Balderston in 1949) should be taken both seriously and literally.47 Meyers’s book is aimed at the general reader. The author begins with a useful summary of the books on which he relied, outlines his goals, and proves an effective storyteller. Meyers provides clear background and context for the people introduced in the narrative and for the works being discussed. Unlike Martin, for example, Meyers 45 

Martin, 45. Martin, 424. 47  Meyers, 5. 46 

82   Lisa Berglund offers insightful analysis of Johnson’s response to William Law, arguing that Johnson was drawn to Law because Law demanded exactly what Johnson was unable to perform. (Meyers hints but doesn’t make explicit that Johnson’s attraction to Law’s book was part of the masochism he discusses elsewhere.) On the other hand, sources of quotations are rarely identified; contextual material is supplied from sensational popular histories; and, as in Martin’s book, there are numerous errors: Meyers remarks that Boswell’s studies in Holland “came a distant second to wenching and drinking” when in fact for his year in Holland Boswell was celibate, and he attributes to Henry Thrale a cruel comment that Hester Thrale records as uttered by Johnson.48 While not salacious, the emphasis on Johnson’s supposed sadomasochistic relationship with Hester Thrale (which I do not find persuasive) threatens to overwhelm the book’s valuable insights into Johnson’s character, such as Meyers’s thoughtful observation that “Johnson could be censorious in print, yet in social life his sympathetic tolerance enabled him to form close friendships with men whose moral standards were dubious, whose professions he deprecated and even disdained, and whose politics he hated.”49

Further Reading Berglund, Lisa. “Life.” In Samuel Johnson in Context, edited by Jack Lynch, 3–​ 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Brack, O M, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley, eds. Samuel Johnson’s Early Biographers. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1971. Brack, O M, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley, eds. The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1974. Brownley, Martine W., ed. Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s “Life of Johnson.” Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Folkenflik, Robert. “Johnson’s Modern Lives.” In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 3–​23. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Greene, Donald J. “’Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, But—​.” In Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”: New Questions, New Answers, edited by John A. Vance, 110–​46. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Sisman, Adam. Boswell’s Presumptuous Task. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. Wiltshire, John. The Making of Dr. Johnson: Icon of Modern Culture. Crowham Manor: Helm, 2009.

48  49 

Meyers, 297, 344. Meyers, 213.

Chapter 5

Editions Robert DeMaria, Jr.

In his Oxford D.Phil. dissertation (1965), Johnson’s greatest bibliographer, J. David Fleeman, describes and discusses all the editions of Johnson’s collected works, the last of which of any note was the so-​called “Oxford Edition” of 1825. One avowed point of Fleeman’s dissertation is to show that “Textually the 1825 edition is valueless,” except as “an object lesson in the delusive fascination which printed copy-​text has exerted over generations of printers and editors.” As a small but representative part of his case against the 1825 edition, Fleeman says, the editor’s “extravagant punctuation allowed him to add fifty-​five superfluous commas to Chapter 1 of Rasselas.” He states further that “no reprinted text, unless there is evidence of authorial revision, can or ought to be trusted,” and “none of the extant collected editions of Johnson’s Works supplies a reliable text.”1 The point is that the editors of Johnson’s works have generally taken their texts from reprints, and as time has passed, Johnson’s texts have therefore got further and further away from what Johnson himself wrote and submitted for publication. Despite Fleeman’s findings, many scholars have continued to quote the Oxford edition, and many editors of collections of Johnson’s works, even quite recent collections, have drawn texts from it.2 The obvious excuse for this has been that

1 

J. David Fleeman, “A Critical Study of the Transmission of the Texts of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (D.Phil. diss., Oxford, 1965), 407 and vii. Here and occasionally elsewhere in this chapter I draw on my essay “A History of the Collected Works of Samuel Johnson: The First Two Hundred Years,” in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014), 343–​66. Some of this material also appeared in my essay “The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1958–​2018,” The Book Collector 69, no. 3 (Autumn 2020), 486–​96. 2  The most recent example of wholesale reliance on the discredited text is Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, ed. Peter Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), but most other anthologies of Johnson’s works have also relied on the Oxford Edition of 1825 for at least some of their texts.

84   Robert DeMaria, Jr. many of Johnson’s writings are unavailable elsewhere, although, as electronic databases such as Eighteenth-​C entury Collections Online (ECCO) have become available, earlier, more reliable editions have been at the fingertips of most scholars and editors. Consulting early editions, of course, has its own liabilities: one has to decide which edition is best, to begin with, and whether or not to take into consideration readings in other editions. This vexatious task is the duty of scholarly editors, and what Fleeman regretted along with the preeminence of the 1825 edition was the vast extent to which Johnson’s works had not had the benefit of professional scholarly editing. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, which Allen T. Hazen formally proposed on December 10, 1951, was designed to address this sorry situation, and Fleeman was hopeful that it would. Only three of the eventual twenty-​three volumes were published when Fleeman finished his dissertation, however,3 and as more volumes came out and Fleeman had time to consider them, he was critical of both their editorial principles and their practice. He exchanged heated letters with the first general editor, Allen T. Hazen, concerning the choice of texts, the treatment of spelling and capitalization, and the textual apparatus in the Yale Edition. Fleeman’s criticism of the Yale Edition’s text almost ruined his friendship with Hazen.4 Despite not living up to Fleeman’s editorial ideals, however, the Yale Edition, which is now complete, has editorial principles; it provides professionally edited texts in which an informed choice of copy-​text was made, other editions taken into account, and significant (if not all) variants recorded. Various editors over the sixty-​ year period of production have interpreted the editorial principles of the edition differently, but none has simply fallen back on the “delusive fascination of printed copy-​text.” Many of the later volumes follow more rigorous editorial principles than those dictated at the start of the edition, and they are editorially more in line with what Fleeman would have wished from the beginning. In any case, with all its inconsistencies and shortcomings, the Yale Edition is still the best edition of Johnson’s works ever compiled, and the most complete edition ever likely to be compiled. It is the foundation of the current state of the texts of Samuel Johnson, even though some scholars will understandably prefer one or another edition of various works that it includes. Hence, much of the rest of this chapter will be concerned with outlining what is in the Yale Edition only; what is in the Edition and also available in competing editions; what is not in the Edition and must be sought elsewhere; and what cannot be found in any edition.

3 Yale Works, vols. i (Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, 1958), ii (The Idler and The Adventurer, 1963), and vi (Poems, 1964) were published before 1965, but Fleeman mentions only the Idler in his dissertation. 4  See the correspondence in the Fleeman archive at St. Andrews: e.g., Hazen to Fleeman on December 13 and 21, 1971, and Fleeman to Hazen on January 10, 1972. In his letters, Hazen was reacting to Fleeman’s review of the Yale Rambler (vols. iii–​v), which concludes, “we are as far from a definitive and critical text of Johnson today as we have ever been” (RES 22 [1971], 348–​52).

Editions   85

The Major Works As of September 14, 2018 The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson was complete in twenty-​three volumes (1958–​2018). A couple of months later the digital version of the edition (free and open to the public at www.yalejohnson.com) was also complete. (The digital edition corrects and improves some aspects of the print edition, though it naturally has errors of its own.) For most of the major works and for virtually all of the minor and fugitive prose works, the Yale Edition is clearly the best and sometimes the only text available. For, among others, the Rambler (Yale Works, vols. iii–​v), the Idler and the Adventurer (vol. ii), Johnson’s debates in Parliament (vols. xi–​xiii), his sermons (vol. xiv), his translation of Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (vol. xv), his translation of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man (vol. xvii), the Plan of the English Dictionary and its preliminary preface, grammar, and history of English (vol. xviii), and the preface and commentary on Shakespeare (vols. vii–​viii), the Yale Edition provides the only texts that have been established through the application of modern editorial principles (though scholars differ on the definition of those principles). In addition to the complete volumes in Yale, there is a selection of the periodical writing, edited by W. J. Bate (1968), and Samuel Johnson: Selected Works (2021), both of which borrow their texts from the Yale Works and are published by Yale University Press. These selections employ a higher percentage of texts edited on scholarly principles than other selections, although some of these other selections are certainly valuable alternatives.5 Concerning Johnson’s major works in the Yale Edition, it must be admitted that several have shortcomings. The most salient fact is that the texts taken from the Dictionary and those from Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare are not complete. The whole body of Johnson’s Dictionary—​the wordlist with all the definitions and illustrative quotations—​ is missing from Yale. There have been many selections and abridgments of Johnson’s great work, most recently Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language, edited by Jack Lynch (New York: Walker and Co., 2003). This selection has replaced E. L. McAdam and George Milne’s Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection (Pantheon Books, 1963) as the most complete and desirable available. Even with a lavish 3,100 entries, however, Lynch’s abridgment falls far short of the Dictionary itself, which is 2,300 double-​column folio pages, and Lynch’s selection has no pretensions to being a scholarly edition. It simply takes its copy from the first edition. There are complete reprints of the Dictionary online, and there was a CD-​ROM with both the first edition of 1755 and the revised edition of 1773 edited by Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), but it is now out of print and out of 5  The

principal competitors of Yale’s Selected Works are the University of California Press edition, Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose (1978), edited by Frank Brady and William Wimsatt; the Oxford University Press text, edited by the late Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson, the Major Works (1984; rpt. 2009); and Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley, in the Twenty-​First-​Century Oxford Authors series (2018).

86   Robert DeMaria, Jr. platform. With a team of scholars and support staff at the University of Birmingham, McDermott came close to completing the heroic task of actually editing the Dictionary (collating the first and fourth editions and providing commentary), but the project failed because of software problems and has apparently not survived changes in technology that ensued. There is currently another project under way to achieve this great goal at the University of Central Florida. The project already offers a “page-​view” of both the first and fourth editions and searchable transcriptions of the first edition (see https://​ johns​onsd​icti​onar​yonl​ine.com/​). It is hoped that this will gradually grow into a scholarly edition. As it does so, the edition will be able to draw for commentary on the sources of Johnson’s illustrations collected by Brian Grimes on his website, Samuel Johnson Dictionary Sources—​https://​www.sjdi​ctio​nary​sour​ces.org/​. The Yale Edition of Johnson’s edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare contains a higher percentage of the original work than its edition of the Dictionary, but, despite occupying two large volumes, it too is incomplete. The Yale editor, Arthur Sherbo, was obliged for reasons of economy largely to omit Johnson’s citations in his footnotes of other Shakespearean critics as well, of course, as the text of Shakespeare’s plays, except for excerpts needed to make sense of Johnson’s notes. Johnson’s quotations of other critics are the feature that make his work so clearly a precursor to the Variorum Shakespeare begun by F. J. Furnivall in the nineteenth century and continually updated since then. Without this feature and most of the text, the selection clearly presents the original work as something different from what it is in the eight-​volume octavo first edition. There is no way of seeing the complete edition except in a special collections department or through an online source. The Yale edition of Johnson on Shakespeare is clearly superior to all the anthologies of Johnson’s works that include parts of Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare and some of his summary notes on the plays, but it is still incomplete. Moreover, with a good deal of help from his friends, Johnson published a major revision of his Shakespeare in 1773, and there was another, largely managed by George Steevens, in 1778. The Yale Edition takes account of the revisions and adopts parts of them, but it does not provide full comparison with, or the full text of, the revisions. Publishing costs and time constraints prohibit comprehensive inclusion, but any editor with the resources to achieve that goal would encounter another problem as well. Pursuing this editorial grail would lead one into the hall of mirrors that editors find when they try to sort out whose work is whose in Johnson’s many collaborative works. I will return to this problem later in this chapter. Of the major works that are complete in the Yale Edition perhaps the Rambler has been most often and most justly criticized, although it has also retained relatively high sales figures over the years. Fleeman and other scholars criticized the decision to use as copy-​text Johnson’s revised, “fourth” edition (1756), the second London duodecimo edition, published after the original series, which appeared twice weekly in folio from 1750–​52, was finished. He and others have also criticized the general policy of the edition to modernize capitalization, contraction, and italicization, which is evident in these volumes. The policies of retaining original spelling in most but not all instances, and not to note all differences in spelling and punctuation among editions, have also been

Editions   87 criticized. Fleeman’s quite reasonable belief is that the first edition of the Rambler has a greater vivacity and dynamism than later editions—​it feels more like writing in the heat of the moment, with the ever-​resourceful writer up against a deadline—​and that the Yale Edition does not properly represent this. Readers interested in the first edition can find it in ECCO or in a facsimile edition overseen as part of a series presented by Donald D. Eddy, an excellent Johnsonian bibliographer.6 Another criticism of the Yale Rambler is that the annotation is excessively “lean,” to use a word that the Yale editors sometimes employed to describe their policy on annotation. The criticism is certainly just, but the point of the edition, especially at its inception, was to provide reliable, highly readable texts for an informed general audience, and even the most heavily criticized of the volumes in the series achieve that despite their shortcomings from a rigorously bibliographical point of view. Many of the criticisms of the Rambler are also applicable to the Yale edition of the Idler, but Johnson’s contributions to the Adventurer, prepared under the direction of Fleeman’s dissertation director L. F. Powell, is more in keeping with the standards for critical editing espoused by Fleeman. There are Clarendon Press editions of two of Johnson’s major works and of his poems that are, for many scholars, preferable to the Yale editions of the same works. David Fleeman prepared an edition of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) with much richer commentary than the corresponding volume of the Yale Edition, and with an approach to the text that sees scholarly editing as an attempt to recover the original manuscript of the work, even when this is not fully possible, and even though one acknowledges that such a recovery would not render a more useful, consistent, or readable text.7 The Yale Edition pointedly decided to provide texts representing Johnson’s final thoughts and final revisions. There are texts in the edition that use first editions rather than later ones as their basis, but only rarely are manuscripts, on the relatively rare occasions where they survive, taken into account. Yale editors observe a usually tacit assumption that Johnson was not finished with his initial composition until he read proof, though that proof is also in almost all cases lost. In his edition of the Journey, Fleeman uses evidence from Johnson’s letters to work his way back toward the lost manuscript. There are resulting differences in his text from that of Mary Lascelles in the Yale Edition (Yale Works, vol. ix), but what most readers will notice first is the vast increase in commentary in Fleeman’s edition, and for that reason most scholars will prefer it to the Yale Edition. By far the most prominent and important of the alternative editions to Yale of a major Johnsonian work is Roger Lonsdale’s Clarendon Press edition of The Lives of the Poets.8 6 The

facsimile Rambler is part of a set of volumes with no proper editing, but with solid bibliographical information and an extensive introduction to Johnson’s book reviews in the Literary Magazine: Samuel Johnson & Periodical Literature: A Collection of Facsimile Editions of Newspapers, Magazines, and Periodical Essays Written by or Associated with Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald D. Eddy, 16 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979). 7  A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 8  The Lives of the Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

88   Robert DeMaria, Jr. This work preceded by four years the publication of the Yale Edition, edited by John H. Middendorf and others (Yale Works, vols. xxi-​xxiii). Both editions are products of nearly a lifetime of work by excellent scholarly editors. Johnsonian scholars and general readers alike are fortunate to have both of these editions available: although they naturally overlap in many ways, they are also complementary. One of the most obvious differences between them is that Lonsdale puts his commentary and notes, each in separate sections, at the rear of each volume, leaving Johnson’s text in full command of the page one is reading. Like other volumes in the Yale Edition, Middendorf ’s Lives uses a tripartite page layout with text above, followed by a band of textual notes in a smaller font, followed by footnotes also in a smaller font. Reasonable readers and editors can disagree about the desirability of one layout over the other and, thanks to the existence of the two editions, they have their choice. Lonsdale was perhaps following in the opinion of the great bibliographer D. F. McKenzie in sweeping his page clear of notation,9 but one reason he favored this form for this book is that his commentary is so extensive, much more extensive than that in the Yale Edition. Middendorf and the other editors of the Yale Lives do not provide merely “lean” annotation; it is rich by the standard of many volumes in the edition and by almost any standard but Lonsdale’s. In all the editions of Johnson’s works, his Lives have attracted the most commentary. In the earliest editions, they are the only parts of his works that have commentary at all. In the late nineteenth century, George Birkbeck Hill, after completing his heavily annotated edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, worked for many years on an edition of the Lives of the Poets in three volumes. He died before he could complete it, but the work was finished by his nephew in 1905, and stood for more than a century as the standard edition. The founders of the Yale Edition were determined to avoid the kind of discursive notes in which Hill and many of his admirers luxuriate, but rich annotation of the Lives is inevitable. Lonsdale, while trimming some of Hill’s rambling, takes modern annotation to its nth degree. To a greater extent than Middendorf, Lonsdale provides commentary on the poets and their works as well as on what Johnson says about them, but the biggest difference derives from the lengths to which Lonsdale goes in following the themes of his notes, allowing them to become in many cases short essays on Johnson’s intellectual history. For example, early in the first of the Lives, that of Abraham Cowley, one finds the oft-​quoted remark: “The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.” Middendorf comments, “Cf. Papilius’s letter to the Rambler (No. 141): ‘Whoever shall review his life will generally find, that the whole tenor of his conduct has been determined by some accident of no particular moment . . .’ ” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 6 n. 6). He also cross-​references a passage in Pope. Lonsdale, on the other hand, begins by quoting Johnson on “genius” in his Dictionary, and follows it with quotations from Pope’s Essay on Criticism, Rambler 25, Rambler 141,

9 See,

for example, McKenzie’s magisterial, posthumously published edition of Congreve, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014).

Editions   89 Idler 61, and several reports of Johnson’s conversation on the subject in Boswell’s Life and other sources. In addition, he quotes Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius (1774) for an opposing view. Still not finished, he quotes Edward Gibbon on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s view of genius, and pursues the sources of Gibbon’s belief in Reynolds’s own statements about his finding his inspiration as a painter in Charles Richardson’s essays on painting (Lives, ed. Lonsdale, vol. i, 309–​10). Overall, Lonsdale’s commentary on Cowley, not including textual notes, occupies fifty pages, more than the life itself, which takes up about forty-​five pages. The ratio of commentary to text in the Yale Edition is more like 1:3. In textual matters, the two editions are more closely equal. If anything, however, the Yale edition is more rigorous in recording variants and reveals, at least in some instances, a more thorough inspection of the corrected proofs. A comparison of Lonsdale’s textual notes on paragraph 57 of The Life of Cowley with Yale Works, vol. xxi, 26–​27, suggests that there is a slightly stronger effort in this Yale volume to get back to the manuscript, in the way that Fleeman believed scholarly editing should, than in the Oxford volume. A thorough demonstration of this suggestion would require the kind of collation that is inappropriate in this context, but Middendorf ’s textual notes often overflow their bounds and spill over into his commentary, thus rivaling it in importance, whereas Lonsdale keeps textual notes steadily in their place and clearly subordinate to his magisterial commentary. The choice of Yale or Oxford continues into abridgments of the Lives: there is a selection in the Oxford World Classics series, edited by Lonsdale and John Mullan (2009), and there is a very large selection in Yale’s Samuel Johnson: Selected Works. Oxford and Yale also provide readers with a choice of editions of Johnson’s poems. The Poems of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Nichol Smith and E. L. McAdam, was first published by Oxford in 1941. It was thoroughly revised and, in fact, anonymously re-​edited through examination of all the extant manuscripts and relevant printed texts by Fleeman in 1974. Fleeman acknowledges in his addendum to the original introduction, “For the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. vi (1964), the late E. L. McAdam, aided by Mr. George Milne, prepared a modernized text of the whole body of Johnson’s verse as it was then known. Their edition reflected the many discoveries of new pieces made in the intervening twenty-​three years.” The key word here is “modernized.” It is not incorrect to characterize the Yale edition in that way, but close examination of the text shows that “modernized” gives the wrong impression in some respects. There are, after all, many different degrees of modernization, and different parts of a text may be modernized to differing degrees. For example, Yale makes few changes in spelling, except those involving contraction, but it makes many more in the areas of capitalization and italicization. The virtues and defects of modernizing capitalization, as the Yale Edition does, may be felt most strongly by readers of Johnson’s poems, but some examination of the contemporary choices in typography is illuminating. Much can be shown about the differences between the twentieth-​century Oxford editions of Johnson and the Yale Edition of the works by comparing the texts of The Vanity of Human Wishes that each provides. The comparison is especially valuable because both editions use Johnson’s revised version of

90   Robert DeMaria, Jr. 1755, prepared for Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, as copy-​text. The opening lines in the Oxford edition are: Let Observation with extensive View, Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife, And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life; Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate, O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate.

The same lines, based on the same copy-​text, are rendered in the Yale Edition: Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crouded life; Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate,

It looks as if Yale has modernized capitalization, but in this case the Yale edition is actually closer to the copy-​text than the Oxford edition, which has departed from its copy-​ text to follow the first edition folio of 1749 in capitalization and italicization. Arguably, the abstractions in Johnson’s lines should be felt as personifications, and therefore capitalizing them leads to better reading. On the other hand, arguably, the capitalization is merely standard compositorial practice, like the italicization of place names, and therefore the capitalization of “Hope” means no more than the capitalization of “Scenes”; whether or not either should be felt as a personification is a matter of readerly discretion that cannot be aided by typography. There is a tacit assumption in the Oxford edition that, although the verbal text of Dodsley’s Collection is better, the typography of the first edition is more authoritative or closer to what Johnson wrote. If we look at the manuscript—​a first draft of the Vanity survives and there is a transcription of it in the Oxford edition—​we find that Johnson capitalized most of the nouns in the opening lines of the Vanity, but not all (not “toil,” for example). He may have been anticipating the practice of the compositor, or he may have felt the capitals provided clues to proper reading of his poem, or he may not have had strong opinions about capitalization. I think it is unclear. When Dodsley removed the capitalization in his Collection of Poems, he was following a trend toward abandoning capitalization in printing that was taking hold at this time.10 In a sense, then, Dodsley anticipated the 10  For

an account of a shift in the printing of capital letters at mid-​century, see Richard Wendorf, “Abandoning the Capital in Eighteenth-​Century London,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 72–​98; repr. in The Scholar-​Librarian: Books, Libraries, and the Visual Arts (Boston, MA: Boston Athenaeum; and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), 202–​41.

Editions   91 kind of “modernization” that Yale adopted, and his choices in 1755 should be taken into consideration before branding the Yale texts as modernized.11 In the case of the Vanity, at least when it comes to capitalization, the Yale text is merely following a different contemporary convention from Oxford. If we look at another pair of texts in the Oxford and Yale editions—​those for London—​we find a slightly different story. Oxford uses the 1738 folio as copy-​text, whereas Yale uses the text in the first edition of Dodsley’s Collection (3 vols., 1748). In this case, both editions follow their copy-​texts in capitalization (though Yale removes the small caps used for proper names in 1748), but the texts are typographically different in just the ways that their texts of the Vanity are different from each other. Although a good case can made for 1748—​in fact it was the copy-​text for the Oxford edition of 1941—​its greater consistency with the Yale protocols for capitalization probably increased its attraction for the Yale editors. This copy-​text made it possible for Yale to be both “modern” and faithful to a contemporary, authoritative text, but for a textual purist like Fleeman, such practical considerations only interfere with the production of a critical text. One other point in the comparison between the Yale and Oxford editions of the Vanity should be mentioned. In their respective first footnotes, both editions refer to complaints made by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others about the redundancy in the opening lines of the poem: “Let observation with extensive view | Survey mankind from China to Peru.” After mentioning the plaintiffs, the Yale editors say, “the curious may survey this waste of genius in the note in Poems [1741].” The Oxford edition, on the other hand, actually quotes William Shaw, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as providing references for the comments of Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincy, and Richard Sharp. This difference in annotation foreshadows the difference between Lonsdale’s and Middendorf ’s editions of the Lives of the Poets, though the overall differences between the two volumes of Poems are not as great.12 Even in comparing the two editions of the Lives, the differences should not be exaggerated: it should be remembered, for example, that Lonsdale’s very extensive introduction compared to Middendorf ’s slender one accounts for a substantial portion of the difference in bulk between the two. Although both the Yale and Oxford editions of the poems are fairly comprehensive, one important part of Johnson’s poetic canon gets more careful treatment in two editions of his Latin poems: Barry Baldwin’s for Duckworth (1995) and Niall Rudd’s for Bucknell University Press (2005). Both of these include modern, largely literal translations, whereas Oxford includes no translations of the Latin, and Yale’s

11  In

his introduction to his edition of the English poems for the Yale English Poets series (1971), Fleeman makes the case for recording original spelling and capitalization in all instances. 12  The Oxford edition of the poems is about 20 percent larger than the Yale edition, which covers about the same canon. About half of the difference in size results from Oxford’s inclusion of transcribed drafts of the Vanity and London.

92   Robert DeMaria, Jr. translations, when present, are often paraphrastic translations from the eighteenth century, which are not useful for readers with little Latin and no Greek who want to know what exactly Johnson wrote. Fleeman’s paperback edition, Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems, with close observation of original spelling, of course, is also very much worth noting.13 With the possible exception of the Dictionary, Rasselas is Johnson’s most famous work, and there are Yale and Oxford editions to choose from for this work as well. Gwin Kolb, who made fewer concessions to the Yale Edition protocols than any other Yale editor, provides the most rigorously edited text, but he agrees in the main with the textual decisions made by R. W. Chapman, which are also followed by subsequent Oxford editors, J. P. Hardy (1968) and Thomas Keymer (2009). Kolb’s notes are the most extensive of any, even though Keymer has been able to improve on the Yale annotation in many particular instances. No Oxford edition of Rasselas, unlike its editions of the Lives and the Journey, is an attempt at a scholarly edition to rival Yale, it should be noted. The Oxford editions are excellent paperbacks in the World’s Classics series, but not full-​scale scholarly treatments.

Minor Works For Johnson’s minor and fugitive works the Yale Edition is certainly now the standard, alleviating scholars of the need to cite the poor 1825 edition of his works. The last two volumes of the Yale Edition to be completed—​Biographical Writings: Soldiers, Scholars, and Friends (2016) and Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-​ Writings (2018)—​provide the greatest number of these minor prose works, being originally drawn largely from a pair of volumes projected in the 1970s by O M Brack, Jr. and Donald J. Greene, called The Shorter Prose Works of Samuel Johnson.14 The Yale volumes, totaling almost 1,300 pages, contain, in addition to the genres named in their titles, dedications, epigraphs, advertisements, proposals, public letters, political campaign statements, newspaper editorials, charitable appeals, obituary notices, and minor prose translations. Some of these works were earlier edited with great clarity by Allen T. Hazen, the first general editor of the Yale Edition, in Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces & Dedications.15 The Yale versions in vols. xix and xx supersede Hazen’s in most cases, but

13 

The Complete English Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Robert D. Brown and Robert DeMaria, Jr. are currently preparing an edition of Johnson’s poems in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. The annotation in this edition will be considerably more extensive than that in Yale or Oxford. 14 In A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999–​2000), Fleeman refers to these volumes as though they were published, but they never were. It is likely that he saw something like “camera-​ready” copy. 15  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937.

Editions   93 there are some differences of opinion concerning what Johnson wrote, and Hazen’s editorial work is remarkably accurate. Some earlier volumes in the Yale Edition also include fugitive and minor works. Volume x, Political Writings, edited by Donald J. Greene (1977) is similar to volumes xix and xx in this regard, and draws largely, like those volumes, on Johnson’s pamphlets and periodical writing. Yale vol. x also includes the four major political pieces that Johnson wrote between 1770 and 1775. In the presentation of these works, the Yale Edition is certainly supreme, and in 2000 the Liberty Fund reprinted this volume, with a few corrections by Greene, as a very inexpensive paperback. The first volume of the Yale Edition, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, edited by E. L. McAdam, Jr. with Donald and Mary Hyde (1958), also contains many miscellaneous writings, but it is unique among volumes in the series in its heavy reliance on manuscript sources. Much of the material had been printed before but none of it in Johnson’s lifetime or on his authority, so it was imperative for editors to turn to the manuscripts. Besides, the Hydes had collected Johnsonian manuscripts assiduously, and were in a position to bring several largely unknown manuscripts of Johnson’s prayers and diaries to light. There are some manuscript copy-​texts in other volumes of the Yale Edition—​notably vol. xx—​and some manuscript evidence is admitted in the preparation of other texts (proof page notes, for example, in the Lives of the Poets)—​but there is nothing like the wholesale reliance on manuscripts in vol. i anywhere else in the Yale Edition. The volume was controversial from the start for this and related reasons. The venerable R. W. Chapman was against its publication as part of the Yale Edition, partly because of the personal and private nature of the material. These writings had not been part of earlier collections of Johnson’s works, and indeed the publication of his Prayers shortly after his death had been met with a good deal of disappointment,16 so their placement at the head of the new edition was surprising and to some dismaying. When the volume came out (priced at $10), Fredson T. Bowers attacked its editorial approach, and both he and Fleeman found a great many errors in the transcriptions.17 Both scholars also had complaints about the introduction and commentary. For those wishing to test their eyesight and paleographical skills against the experts, it is possible to consult very high-​quality, life-​size facsimiles of the bulk of the manuscripts, those held by Pembroke College, in a collection published in thirteen parts by Oxford in 1985. There are no transcriptions or notes in this set of documents, however, and the best hope for an improvement of these texts for scholars and general readers is for their shortcomings to be redressed in corrections to the Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 16 

On the reception of this work in the context of the history of handwriting, see Aileen Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–​1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 103–​22. 17  Fredson T. Bowers, JEGP, 57 (1959), 132–​7; J. D. Fleeman, “Some Notes on Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 19 (May 1968), 172–​9.

94   Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Collaborations and Contributions to the Works of Others Like many authors, but to a greater degree than most, Johnson often wrote or edited in silent collaboration with others. In some cases, the collaboration is actually just ghostwriting, in which Johnson may have picked up some ideas from his friend or colleague, but the writing is all his. Many such pieces are collected in Yale Works, vol. xx, as are a great many of Johnson’s book reviews not included elsewhere in the edition, although some of these include a high percentage of quotation (some of which the Yale editors exclude). There are many other cases in which Johnson’s contribution is fairly clear but constitutes only a small portion of the overall composition. Both the Oxford and the Yale editions of Johnson’s poems collect the appropriate works of this kind and print Johnson’s part: the lines Johnson wrote for Oliver Goldsmith’s poems The Traveller and The Deserted Village are good examples. Not many of Johnson’s contributions to larger prose works have been collected, however: Johnson’s contributions to the biography of Zachariah Pearce is a good example. Although it is fairly clear that he contributed about thirty-​nine paragraphs, there is a good deal of material intervening and following these paragraphs that are needed for comprehension, and the Yale editors of vols. xix and xx decided to defer publication to a prospective work entitled “Contributions to the Works of Others.”18 Seven sentences of Johnson’s contributions to the Life of Pearce appear in an appendix to the Hill-​Powell edition of Boswell’s Life (vol. iii, 489–​90),19 and both the notes and the text of Boswell’s Life provide texts of many of Johnson’s fugitive compositions. The Life is the only source in many instances of prose that he composed for Boswell, usually in the form of legal arguments—​sometimes written, sometimes dictated. Boswell’s petition for Joseph Knight, a slave suing for liberty before a court of sessions in Edinburgh in 1777, which Johnson evidently dictated, is an excellent example, although there are several others, none of which has ever found a place in an edition of Johnson’s works.20 Johnson also embedded some writing for publication in his letters, all of which have been edited by Bruce Redford in the Hyde Edition.21 In reviewing many of the candidates for inclusion in a collected edition of Johnson’s works, editors have been discouraged because it is hard to discern Johnson’s part from that of his collaborator. The most important Johnsonian collaboration of this kind, 18 

On Johnson’s contributions to Pearce’s biography, see Yale Works, vol. xx, 548–​9. In the Johnsonian News Letter 59, no. 2 (Sept. 2018), 2–​6 and 60, no. 2 (Sept. 2019), 5-​10 I printed many of Johnson’s paragraphs from the Life of Pearce. 20  For other examples, see Life, vol. ii, 183–​ 5, 372–​4. Samuel Johnson: Selected Works includes the arguments on behalf of Knight. 21 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992–​ 94); Redford’s edition replaces R. W. Chapman’s, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), which is still valuable for its commentary and for its inclusion of many letters to Johnson. 19 

Editions   95 however, is in print. From 1767 to 1769 or early 1770, Johnson helped his friend Robert Chambers to compose the second Vinerian Law lectures at Oxford. The manuscript of these lectures has been edited in two volumes by Thomas M. Curley.22 Detached from Johnson’s works, the manuscript does not have to be separated into Johnson’s part and Chambers’s, which would be largely impossible. Some other, much less important collaborations of this kind appear in the Yale Edition, but they are rare for obvious reasons. The letters from Misargyrus in The Adventurer (nos. 34, 41, 53, and 62), for example, appear in Yale vol. ii, although they were very probably written collaboratively with and for Richard Bathurst.23 A very large number of such collaborative works, however, have never appeared in any edition.

Probably, Plausibly, and Doubtfully Attributed Works There are a great many works on the radar of Johnsonians to which Johnson definitely or probably made contributions, although their extent is hard to ascertain. Among the most important or interesting of such works are The History of Tahmas Kuli Khan, the Sophi of Persia (1740);24 some lives of physicians in Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary (1741), other than those included in Yale vol. xix;25 entries throughout the 1740s in sections of the Gentleman’s Magazine entitled “Foreign Books,” “Foreign History,” “Register of Books,” and “Books Published”; descriptions of books in the Harleian Catalogue, 5 vols. (1741–​3); paragraphs in Saunders Welch, A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan, to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of This Metropolis (1758);26 notes and corrections to Lord Hailes’s Annals of Scotland (1776);27 the introduction to Giuseppe Baretti’s Guide through the Royal Academy (1781);28 the revision and the “Reply to John Clark” in William Shaw, Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Ascribed to Ossian

22 

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. recent article makes the case for collaboration very convincingly: see Peter Dixon and David Mannion, “Johnson, ‘Misargyrus,’ and Richard Bathurst,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34, no. 3 (Sept. 2019), 482–​92. 24  This work, unmentioned by Fleeman in his Bibliography, was privately printed for the Samuel Johnson Society of Southern California (now the Samuel Johnson Society of the West) in 1993, with an introduction by O M Brack, Jr. 25 For a survey of the possible attributions, see Yale Works, vol. xix, 201–​ 2, which relies on the extensive treatment by O M Brack, Jr. and Thomas Kaminski in “Johnson, James, and the Medicinal Dictionary,” Modern Philology, 81 (1984), 378–​400. 26  On this piece, see Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. i, 779–​80. 27  See Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1255–​ 6. Johnson’s notes are on proofs of Hailes’ work in the National Library of Scotland. 28  Fleeman attributes “at least” the first sentence to Johnson (Bibliography, vol. ii, 1532). 23  A

96   Robert DeMaria, Jr. (2nd ed., 1782);29 Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “Presidential Discourse” of December 10, 1782;30 and Erasmus Darwin’s translation of Linnaeus, A System of Vegetables (1782–​83).31 To this list could be added many smaller works, some of them overlapping with works of dubious authorship, which form another large category of uncollected Johnsonian writing. Among the dubious but plausible attributions may be mentioned the preface to Abbé Prévost’s Memoirs of a Man of Quality (1738); “Dissertation on the Amazons” (Gentleman’s Magazine 11 [1741], 202–​ 8); “Remonstrance to the French King” (Gentleman’s Magazine 11 [1741], 641; Monarchy Asserted (1742); “Observations on the Scheme [for Preventing the Exportation of Wool]” (Gentleman’s Magazine 12 [1742], 147–​50); Richard Bathurst’s “Scheme for a Geographical Dictionary” (1753); parts of Giuseppe Baretti’s Introduction to the Italian Language (1755); the preface to William Chambers’ Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757); parts of Sir John Hawkins’ Memoirs of the Life of Sig. Agostino Steffani (1758); the translation or revision of the History of the Marchioness de Pompadour (1758);32 the translation of Brumoy’s “Dissertation on the Greek Comedy” and the “General Conclusion” in The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy, trans. Charlotte Lennox, 3 vols. (1759);33 John Gwynne’s Thoughts on the Coronation (1761); “An Account of the Detection of the Imposture in Cock-​Lane” (Gentleman’s Magazine 32 [1762], 81–​2); the review of James Grainger’s Sugar-​Cane in the London Chronicle (July 1764); help with Francis Fawkes’s translation, The Idylliums of Theocritus (1767); fictitious newsletters and reports in the Public Advertiser (1770);34 revision of the inscription for the monument to Tobias Smollett (1773);35 help with Henry Lucas’s Poems (1779); assistance with Thomas Davies’s Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (1780); and assistance with Frances Reynolds’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Taste (1785).36 This list is far from comprehensive; many other items could be mentioned. Moreover, the value of the works and the degree to which they are Johnson’s or may be Johnson’s varies. Like those of many other eighteenth-​century authors, including Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, the Johnsonian canon is likely never to be settled. Fleeman’s Bibliography is certainly the most reliable general guide, but concerning many items that he treats there is disagreement, and there are works, which, uncharted by Fleeman, have nevertheless been admitted into the canon by other scholars. Differences of both kinds

29

  See Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1538–​9. draft with MS corrections by Johnson is preserved at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1559). 31  Darwin acknowledged Johnson’s contribution (Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1560–​1). 32  See Gwin Kolb, “Johnson’s ‘Little Pompadour’: A Textual Crux,” in Carroll Camden, ed., Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 125–​42. 33  The theory that Johnson wrote the last chapter of Lennox’s Female Quixote has been exploded. See Yale Works, vol. xx, 205 n. 2. 34  These were published by Betty Rizzo, The Library, 6th series, 8 (1986), 249–​64. 35  See Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1192. 36  Except where noted, these doubtful attributions are treated, usually skeptically, by Fleeman in Bibliography. 30  The

Editions   97 are reflected in Yale, especially in vols. xix and xx. To provide just one example, though one of the most significant ones, the Yale editors of vol. xx accept Johnson’s authorship of an “An Address to the Publick in Some Remarks on the Progress of Learning Since the Reformation” (1746), whereas Fleeman does not list the work at all. The editors, however, recognize that Johnson’s authorship is merely plausible and clearly not proven.37 Fleeman considered more cases of plausible Johnsonian authorship than anyone, and he was stricter than the other distinguished bibliographers who have looked at these questions, including Allen T. Hazen, Gwin J. Kolb, Arthur Sherbo, O M Brack, Jr., Donald J. Greene, and Thomas Kaminski. Greene, perhaps Johnson’s most assiduous bibliographer, after Fleeman, compiled a typescript bibliography of Johnson’s works in which he accepts scores of works rejected by Fleeman.38 Although Fleeman is certainly discerning in the identification of Johnsonian stylistic elements, in most cases he rejects authorship unless there is also external evidence—​some acknowledgment by Johnson (preferably directly, but sometimes through a close associate) that he wrote the work. Kolb, Sherbo, Greene, Brack, and DeMaria have all been less demanding than Fleeman in that regard, but I think everyone who has worked on these problems realizes the limitations of stylistic and circumstantial evidence.

Lost Works A final problem in surveying Johnson’s texts is that some are lost, apparently forever. We know from the reliable report to James Boswell by Edmund Hector, a lifelong friend of Johnson’s, that he wrote articles for the Birmingham Post in 1733, but only one number of the journal from that year survives, and it does not appear to have anything by Johnson in it.39 To give another, smaller example, we know, based on a letter from Johnson to Hester Thrale, that he may have written an epitaph for Dr. Arthur Collier, Jr., a classics teacher for the Thrales’ children, but no trace of the work survives.40 More importantly, we know that Johnson burned a great many papers in the months before his death. These may have comprised mostly letters and journals, but it seems likely that some other pieces of writing were among them. We have, for example, about half of Johnson’s translation of Sallust’s War with Catiline, and it appears that the other half occupied the lost part of the same notebook.41 It is also likely that there are Johnsonian works hiding in 37  A review of volume xx by F. P. Lock plausibly refutes the attribution; see The New Rambler F XXI (2017-​18), 59-​64. 38  This typescript entitled “A List of the Writings of Samuel Johnson” was passed on to O M Brack, Jr. by Greene and by O M Brack, Jr. to me, and is now in my possession. 39  See Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. i, 3–​4. 40  See Redford, Letters, vol. iii, 126 and n. 2. 41  For details, see Yale Works, vol. xx, 584–​5, which draws largely on the introduction to a facsimile reproduction of the translation prepared by Thomas Tanselle and David Vander Meulen for the Johnsonians in 1993.

98   Robert DeMaria, Jr. plain sight among the published works of the time. Fleeman discovered one such work even as he was trying desperately to complete his vast Bibliography and not looking for another item to treat. In what appears to be the unique copy of Hospitality: A Discourse Occasioned by His Majesty’s Letter in Behalf of the Emigrant French Clergy by John Moir (1793), Fleeman found printed a short piece entitled “On the Character and Duty of an Academick,” and admitted it into the canon at the eleventh hour. Published posthumously by Moir, a clergyman who occupied for a time the very rooms in which Johnson lived at the time of his death, this item is the last in the last volume of the Yale Edition to be published (vol. xx, 610–​12). It seems likely that other works like this are out there somewhere. Johnson said he wrote or perhaps dictated some forty sermons, of which we have twenty-​eight (see Chapter 12, “Sermons”). The others, if they ever existed, may be lost forever, but they may also be found one day. In any case, because some of Johnson’s works are lost; because Johnson’s authorship of many works is uncertain; because he contributed to many works in ways that are impossible to disentangle from the work of his collaborator or the person whose work he corrected or edited—​for all these reasons, the canon of Johnson’s writing will never be entirely settled. Because that is the case, and because so much of Johnson’s writing, like his Dictionary, is too voluminous for print publication, there will never be a print edition of his collected works more comprehensive than the Yale Edition. The future of Johnsonian texts is probably restricted to a few categories: (1) improvements and additions to the Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (yalejohnson.com); (2) online editions of large works such as the Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and the Harleian Catalogue; and, possibly, (3) new print editions of discrete parts of the Johnsonian canon with editorial protocols different from Yale’s.42 Textual scholarship advances and so does the kind of knowledge represented in scholarly commentaries; there is always room for improvement; and “standard” editions succeed one another over the decades and centuries, but there are authors, such as Johnson, whose unwieldy and illimitable body of work is not suitable for containment in a collection confidently advertised as “The Works.”

Further Reading Brack, O M, Jr. “The Works of Samuel Johnson and the Canon.” In Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, edited by Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, 246–​61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. “A History of the Collected Works of Samuel Johnson: The First Two Hundred Years.” In Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, edited by Howard D. Weinbrot, 343–​66. San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. “The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1958–​2018.” The Book Collector 69, no. 3 (Autumn 2020): 486–​96.

42 

See n. 13 above.

Editions   99 Fleeman, J. D. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Greene, Donald J. “No Dull Duty: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.” In Editing Eighteenth-​Century Texts, edited by D. I. B. Smith, 92–​123. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968. Hazen, Allen T., ed. Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces & Dedications. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937. McLaverty, James. “Fixity and Instability in the Text of Johnson’s Poems.” In Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, edited by Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, 154–​67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

PA RT I I

GENRES

Chapter 6

Jou rnal i sm Paul Tankard

The Periodicals With regard to the eighteenth century, the word journalism is an anachronism. It is not in Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), which cites the first usage in the relevant sense as from 1833, shows this was no oversight. Johnson gives the word journal: “1. A diary; an account kept of daily transactions. 2. Any paper published daily.” Both definitions are still current, but clearly the second is the sense relevant to what we think of as journalism today.1 Johnson’s Dictionary also has an entry for journalist: “A writer of journals,” but does not specify which of the two different varieties of journal a journalist writes, and gives no illustrative quotations. However, when Johnson began his career in London in 1737, journalism—​ the thing itself—​was firmly established. The OED defines journalism as “The occupation or profession of a journalist; journalistic writing; the public journals collectively,” which merges three phenomena. In the eighteenth century, there were both “public journals” and, within such journals, there was “journalistic writing”; but there was not an “occupation or profession of a journalist.” Writing for newspapers and magazines was just one of a number of ways in which a jobbing writer could earn a living. A better location in Johnson’s Dictionary for his thoughts on the less prestigious end of the market for print culture of his time is the entry for Grubstreet: Grubstreet n.s. Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries [my emphasis], and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet. 1  The assertion of daily publication is rightly qualified by David Nichol Smith, “The Newspaper,” in Johnson’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, ed. A. S. Turberville, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), vol. ii, 339, who points out that newspaper had long referred as well to weekly and bi-​or tri-​weekly publications.

104   Paul Tankard Χᾶιῤ Ιθακὴ μετ᾽ ἄεθλα, μετ᾽ ἄλγεα πικρὰ Ἀσπασίως τέον οὗδας ἱκάνομαι.   The first part, though calculated only for the meridian of grubstreet, was yet taken notice of by the better sort. Arbuthn[ot]. I’d sooner ballads write, and grubstreet lays. Gay.

In wry self-​mockery, the lexicographer implies that the Dictionary presently in the reader’s hands is a “mean production”; but he then switches registers to balance this with one of the Dictionary’s few lines of gratuitous personal commentary: the lines in Greek translate as, “Hail, Ithaca! After pains and bitter hardships, I happily reach your soil,” and are from the Greek Anthology in which they are attributed to Odysseus, arriving home after ten years of trials and voyages. Thus Johnson pays a poignant mock-​ heroic tribute to the grubstreet world, acknowledging it as his milieu, the particular piece of terra firma in the world of letters in which he found his feet as a writer. Some decades earlier he had made various attempts to escape this destiny; he was described in 1739, in an unsuccessful job application, as preferring “to die upon the road, than be starved to death in translating for booksellers.”2 Johnson did his share of “translating for booksellers”—​notably his anonymously published translations from the French, of Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (abandoned in 1738), and Jean-​Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man (1739)—​as well as poems, short histories and dictionaries; but the avenue he chose was journalism. It is hard to overestimate the presence of newsprint in eighteenth-​century London. When Johnson came to London in March 1737, there were at least twenty-​ four newspapers in circulation; there were daily papers, weekly papers, morning papers, evening papers. Almost the same number of London papers were being published when Johnson died in 1784, but only half a dozen of them were the same papers; literally dozens of others had both started and folded in the intervening period.3 The industry was very diverse and highly volatile: newspapers came and went; their names and subtitles were often confusing, and changed as the result of closures and amalgamations; their contents and politics varied, and they were subject to competition and changes in fashion and ownership. They were mostly owned by groups of shareholders, who were frequently printers and booksellers. Editorial responsibility was sometimes in the hands of a paid employee of the shareholders. The papers fought with each other, and also reprinted each other’s material without scruple or acknowledgment. Many were commenced with the ostensible aim of distinguishing themselves by addressing some perceived gap in the supply of information, but those that persisted for any period 2 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 133 (emphasis in original). He was thus described by Earl Gower, at the request of Alexander Pope, in a letter to a friend of Jonathan Swift, attempting to procure Johnson an MA degree from the University of Dublin, so he could apply for a position as a schoolmaster: the phrasing in italics presumably represents Johnson’s own expression. 3 See “London Newspapers,” in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), vol. ii, 1313–​39.

Journalism   105 beyond a decade mostly evolved to cover the same broad range of subjects: political controversy, business and commerce (advertisements), news (or “intelligence”), stock prices, notices of deaths and marriages, official promotions and court affairs, legal proceedings, essay series, comment and opinion, reviews of books, theater news, and pieces of verse and music. Apart from the newspapers, the other main ingredient of eighteenth-​century periodical culture was the magazines. In the 1730s, magazines were a recent innovation: the Gentleman’s Magazine—​founded by Edward Cave in January 1731—​was the first publication to use the word magazine (“1. A storehouse, commonly an arsenal or armoury, or repository of provisions”—​Johnson) in the derived sense, as Johnson notes, in his second definition: “2. Of late this word has signified a miscellaneous pamphlet, from a periodical miscellany named the Gentleman’s Magazine, by Edward Cave.” The publication had, so Boswell reports, “attracted the notice and esteem of Johnson, in an eminent degree, before he came to London as an adventurer in literature” (Life, vol. i, 129). By its own account, it was intended to be a digest “of all the pieces of wit, humour, or intelligence, daily offered to the public in the newspapers.”4 This plan enabled the magazine to trace the progress of issues, to sift the wheat from the chaff, and to be more formal and authoritative than the newspapers: more space could be devoted to extended accounts of less topical things, and it soon began to include original articles, including literary material and discussion. Cave’s scheme was immediately successful, beyond all expectations, as indicated by the demand for back numbers, the many and multiple reprintings of individual issues, ever larger issues of new numbers, and the publication of annual cumulative volumes.5 It was also promptly imitated by other publishers. In his preface to the 1738 volume, Johnson noted, “The success of the Gentleman’s Magazine has given rise to almost twenty imitations of it, which are either all dead, or very little regarded by the world.”6 After the award of his pension in 1762, Johnson did not need to work for Grubstreet, and mostly didn’t; but the Gentleman’s Magazine retained his loyalty.

Johnson in Grubstreet Johnson has long been regarded in the popular mind as something like the patron saint of Grubstreet,7 and our sense of his close involvement with the less august levels of

4 

Gentleman’s Magazine 1 (1731), 48. B. Todd, “A Bibliographical Account of The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–​1754,” Studies in Bibliography 18 (1965), 81–​109. 6 Yale Works, vol. xx, 30. Johnson’s assertion about the Gentleman’s Magazine’s competitors is an exaggeration: the London Magazine, which started in 1732 continued until at least 1785. 7  “The Patron Saint of Grubstreet” was the title of a presentation by journalist Bryan Reid in 1984, at the first seminar of what was to become the Johnson Society of Australia. 5  William

106   Paul Tankard Augustan literary life is easily accounted for. His biographers, the chief transmitters of his popular fame, depict him as an heroic figure who, by his energy, character, and genius, rose from anonymous scribbling at the lowest levels of literary labor to true and unparalleled eminence. There are, throughout his biography, memorable vignettes concerning his relationships with various colorful grubstreet figures: Samuel Boyse, who through having pawned his clothes was reduced to writing verses in bed with armholes cut in the quilt; Cave’s pet poet, Moses Browne, who won the Gentleman’s Magazine’s poetry prizes, but for the sake of an income was forced to abandon authorship to become a clergyman; the self-​destructive “bastard” poet, Richard Savage, with whom the young Johnson perambulated the squares of London at night; the irascible publisher Thomas Osborne, whom Johnson clobbered with a folio; and the former Formosan impostor George Psalmanazar, whom Johnson esteemed for his pious reformation and humble industry.8 Johnson was in this world but not of it. Almost from the start of his London career, through his sub-​or semi-​editorial roles with the Gentleman’s Magazine (1738–​47), he did not so much compete with these writers as assist and advise them with work and criticism. His friend and later biographer, the Irish playwright Arthur Murphy, depicts his situation in the mid-​1750s, after he had finished the Dictionary and was engaged upon the Literary Magazine (1756–​7): Authors, long since forgotten, waited on him as their oracle, and he gave responses in the chair of criticism. He listened to the complaints, the schemes, and the hopes and fears, of a crowd of inferior writers, “who,” he said, in the words of Roger Ascham, “lived, men know not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.” He believed he could give a better history of Grub Street than any man living.9

This reputation might account in part for the fact that Johnson was often, particularly in the last decade and a half of his life, a named presence in the newspapers, as the subject himself of news, anecdote, praise, gossip, and abuse.10 He remarked, “I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the newspapers” (Life, vol. iv, 127), and this is scarcely an exaggeration. He never forgot his professional roots in journalistic culture. In a letter of 1780 to Hester Thrale, Frances Burney tells of meeting Johnson at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds:

8  Hester Piozzi, “Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson,” in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 228 and n.1 (Samuel Boyse); Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 29 n., 30–​1 (Moses Browne); Boswell, Life, vol. i, 163–​4 (Richard Savage); Boswell, Life, vol. i, 154 (Osborne); Hawkins, 329–​ 30 (Psalmanazar). 9  “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson” (1792), in Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 414. 10  Helen Louise McGuffie compiled a book-​length (and certainly not comprehensive) bibliography of the mentions of Johnson in the press.

Journalism   107 He inquired if I had ever yet visited Grub-​street? but was obliged to restrain his anger when I answered “No,” because he acknowledged he had never paid his respects to it himself. “However,” says he, “you and I, Burney, will go together; we have a very good right to go, so we’ll visit the mansions of our progenitors, and take up our own freedom, together.”11

But with the newspapers per se, he was in fact less involved (and more skeptical of them) than we might imagine. His comment, “Of all publick transactions the whole world is now informed by the Newspapers” (Johnson to William White, March 4, 1773, in Letters, vol. ii, 13),12 has a bit of an edge to it, and he clearly thought that newspaper journalism was, perhaps constitutionally, subject to unreliability and a lack of discrimination. There is a story, related by both Hester Piozzi and (more obscurely) by Sir Brooke Boothby, that in 1770 Johnson inserted—​anonymously, of course—​a series of bogus news reports into the Public Advertiser in order to tease Piozzi’s mother for her “superfluous attention” to the newspapers.13 Most readers of the Anecdotes of Johnson will have passed quickly over what seems an amusing but probably inaccurate and unverifiable anecdote,14 but in 1989 Betty Rizzo found a third contemporary account of the incident and after a search of the newspapers was able to report the precise publication details of the articles themselves.15 There are seven articles, and they must have taken Johnson a considerable amount of trouble. Rizzo comments that Johnson could well have wanted to discredit the Public Advertiser, as the newspaper which hosted the virulent anti-​government letters of Junius, and was said to have been financed by the supporters of John Wilkes. The various political crises of the 1770s clearly reduced his respect for the papers, and he told a correspondent in 1782, “I am accustomed to think little of news-​papers” (Johnson to Lancelot St. Albyn, May 15, 1782, in Letters, vol. iv, 40). As Robert DeMaria remarked twenty-​five years ago, “Johnson’s works include a remarkable number of vast, generally unread tracts of writing.”16 Despite the attention Johnson’s biographers give to his grubstreet credentials, most of Boswell’s many thousands of readers will not have thought to inquire of what exactly Johnson’s journalistic work is comprised. With the recent completion of the Yale Edition of Johnson’s Works, identifying and accessing this material is no longer the issue it was. Nevertheless, this tract of writing remains awkward to negotiate, due to its size, generic diversity, items lost due to the haphazard preservation of the periodicals, and attribution problems 11 

Dr. Johnson and Fanny Burney, ed. Nigel Wood (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 62. the similar remark: “Knowledge is diffused among our people by the news-​papers” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 170, for March 31, 1772). 13  Hester Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 235. Sir Brooke Boothby’s account was contributed to Robert Anderson’s Life of Johnson, 3rd ed. (1815). 14  Neither Birkbeck Hill, in annotating Thrale’s Anecdotes and the relevant paragraphs of Boothby, nor Arthur Sherbo, in his edition of the Anecdotes, challenged or offered any evidence for the story. 15  For details see Betty Rizzo, “ ‘Innocent Frauds’: By Samuel Johnson,” The Library, 6th ser., 8, no. 3 (September 1989), 249–​64. It should be noted that the attribution of these texts to Johnson seems to have been rejected by the editors of the Yale Works. 16  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 186. 12  Cf.

108   Paul Tankard arising from an absence of records and the convention of anonymous publication. Lee Morrissey is right to observe that in Johnson’s journalism we will find “several different Samuel Johnsons.”17 We can begin by considering its sheer quantity. Of the twenty-​three volumes of the Yale Edition, nine are devoted—​mostly or wholly—​to material that had its origins in periodicals;18 the total of such items across all volumes of the edition amounts to something like 516 individual pieces.19 But to better estimate in what ways and to what extent Johnson was a denizen of Grubstreet, we need to burrow much further into this material. The periodical which Johnson virtually authored, The Rambler (1750–​2), and the similar project, conducted by his friend John Hawkesworth, to which he contributed, The Adventurer (1752–​4), were both what are now referred to as single-​essay periodicals. They must certainly be classed as “journalism”; but they have always been regarded, for their uniform generic character, high quality, visibility, and reputation—​and on account of their immediate and continued reprinting in volume form—​as distinct and major Johnsonian works, as has the series of similar essays, The Idler (1758–​60) which was originally contributed to a weekly newspaper, the Universal Chronicle (see Chapter 8, “Essays”).20 Two other bodies of generically constrained material in Johnson’s oeuvre, that were first published in periodicals but which it would be misleading to describe as “journalism,” are twenty-​six or so of his 123 poems (most first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine), and the triply voluminous accounts of the debates in the British Parliament, which comprise twenty-​eight lengthy compositions published in thirty-​eight monthly issues of the Gentleman’s Magazine (see Chapter 13, “Polemic”). Excluding these categories of material (c. 379 items), there are something like 137 items of what we might usefully call Johnson’s journalism. Of these items, forty-​five or so were contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine, and something like fifty more he contributed to six other magazines (mostly the Literary Magazine and most of those, book reviews). This leaves us with forty-​two or so pieces that were actually contributions to a dozen newspapers. These figures will always be imprecise and subject to readjustment but may be taken as indicative; the clear conclusion is that the magazines rather than the newspapers were Johnson’s preferred journalistic medium.21 This impression is confirmed by the nature of his newspaper publications 17 

Lee Morrissey, “Journalism,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 216–​24, at 217. 18  They are The Idler and The Adventurer (vol. ii), The Rambler (vols. iii–​v), Debates in Parliament (vols. xi–​xiii), Biographical Writings (vol. xix), and Johnson on Demand (vol. xx). Half of the material in Political Writings (vol. x) was first published in periodicals. 19  This is my own reckoning. A count based on individual items in the periodicals listed in Fleeman’s Bibliography of the Writings of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) produces a figure of c.600, but this includes a great many reprintings and items published in installments. 20  There was a further such series, soon-​abandoned and frequently overlooked, called the “Weekly Correspondent” (1760), of which Johnson contributed three numbers to the Public Ledger. 21  Cf. James Boswell, who contributed approximately 600 known items to the periodicals, of which only 130 or so went to the magazines (see The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. ii, 1218–​35).

Journalism   109 themselves. Many are entirely practical jobs of writing, in particular advertisements, announcements, addresses, and proposals on behalf of other people: John Milton’s elderly and impoverished granddaughter; the publisher James Crockatt, in jail for debt; the Society of Artists, for which he composed various pleas for favor and patronage; Henry Thrale, in connection with his election campaigns; his architect friend John Gwynn, defending his plans for a new bridge over the Thames; and concerning various projects of his publisher friends. The bulk of Johnson’s work for the newspapers and magazines consists of verse, accounts of parliamentary debates, editorial pieces, lives, and book reviews; those to be discussed—​in this chapter rather than elsewhere in this volume—​ are the last three of these categories of material.

Editorial Writings Soon after his arrival in London, Johnson became experienced in most of the modes of writerly activity that would, in effect, qualify him to be (as he told Murphy) the historian of Grub Street. Translating, summarizing, extracting, reviewing—​changing and repurposing texts for new formats and readerships: work of this kind took in much of what he did for Cave, and also for other publishers. The publications themselves seldom identify even their editors or owners, and the canon of this aspect of Johnson’s literary output will never be firmly established. But Johnson’s reputation has meant that even during his lifetime the task began of identifying the least items of his authorship. And that task continues. Some, few perhaps, of these pieces retain the interest of their original purpose, as political or social commentary, reviews, or biographies of now forgotten books or public figures. But Johnson wrote with his whole being, and in all this material we can discern and enjoy his engagement with his subjects, his wide-​ranging curiosity, his forensic intelligence, his characteristic modes of thought and expression. An important and under-​remarked way of appreciating the “vast, generally unread tracts” of Johnson’s miscellaneous prose is to consider how he turned his journalistic (and more broadly grubstreet) activity into his subject matter. Johnson often wrote in a professional capacity, or by invitation, as an editorial spokesman, to defend and pronounce on the role and values of the different elements of the print media of his day. As well as half a dozen prefaces to the annual volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and other virtually editorial pieces for that journal, he wrote the essay on “the Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces” for the Harleian Miscellany (1744); proposals for the short-​lived fortnightly magazine The Publisher (1744); “Reflections on the Present State of Literature” for the Universal Visiter (1756); “To the Public” in the Literary Magazine (1756); the “Preliminary Discourse” for the London Chronicle (1757); an “Introduction” for the Universal Chronicle, with the essay, “Of the Duty of a Journalist” (1758); and the “Preliminary Address, “To the Public” for the Public Ledger (1760). All of these texts are to be found in the last-​to-​ be-​published volume of the Yale Edition, Johnson on Demand (2019), and its editors

110   Paul Tankard observe, “it is clear that he contributed to the development of the editorial at a formative period in the history of newspapers and magazines” (Yale Works, vol. xx, p. xxx). By this sort of writing—​wide-​ranging, strategic, controversial, formally authoritative—​and, of course, that other huge grubstreet project, the Dictionary, Johnson rose above the translators, versifiers, paraphrasers, indexers, reviewers, and epitome-​makers, so that by 1759 he had earned Tobias Smollett’s description of him (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 348) as “that great Cham of literature.” The immediate practical purpose of Johnson’s editorials for the Gentleman’s Magazine, and his later proposals and preliminaries and introductions, was to defend the publications, and the schemes of their projectors, and to attack their competitors. Johnson fulfills these conventions, noting that it has come to be expected that such writings will “give an account of the importance of their design” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 392; see also 264). In what the Yale editors describe as one of his “salvos in the periodical war” of the time (vol. xx, 23), he calls the weekly paper Common Sense “malicious” and “despicable” (vol. xx, 31), and accuses the London Magazine of “deplorable stupidity” (vol. xx, 44). But characteristically, he takes the long view, encouraging readers to consider not simply whatever item or journal happens to be before them, but “to consider the present state of our periodical writing” (vol. xx, 34). He raises deeper issues and stakes out the moral high ground. A free press is, so Johnson argues, a necessary concomitant of Britain’s political and religious freedom. Under the British constitution and forms of government, as they have developed, “every man [has] . . . the right of enquiring into the propriety of public measures,” and the nation’s political leaders are “obliged to give an account of their conduct, to almost any man, who demands it” (vol. xx, 98). This calls for modes of publication that are capable of hosting an ongoing interchange of information and opinion, such as the pamphlets of the previous century—​of which in the early 1740s Johnson helped to catalog a vast collection and introduced a selection in the Harleian Miscellany (1744)—​and the periodicals, which he sees as their modern successors. Politics and also religion require debate and controversy, which cannot be conducted “where silence can be imposed on either party, by the refusal of a license” (vol. xx, 98). The ability to monitor through the periodicals the progress of any debate should alert readers to the transitoriness of received opinion (vol. xx, 100, 112). The purpose of writing, he insists, is the diffusion of knowledge. So, it is the duty of all writers, whatever their status, not “to thrust into the world pieces drawn up with, either an entire neglect of truth, or an indifference to it” (vol. xx, 34). In Britain in the eighteenth century, as society became more urbanized, the economy more centralized, and government more democratic and political, it was clear that “Political truth is undoubtedly of very great importance” (vol. xx, 35), and that the governance of Britain required an increasingly accurately informed citizenry. But Johnson also insisted that politics ought not “usurp the mind” to the exclusion of other topics; so, in 1744, he says that he and his coworkers on the Gentleman’s Magazine “have thought ourselves by no means negligent of the public happiness, when we have interspersed political controversies with dissertations on morality, commerce and philosophy” (vol. xx, 113). In an editorial

Journalism   111 of 1754, looking back on two decades of the Gentleman’s Magazine, Johnson remarks with satisfaction that their reports of scientific discoveries and industrial processes “have seldom failed to produce new knowledge” (vol. xx, 227). When, in 1756, he first addressed the public as the voice of the Literary Magazine, he undertook “to apply our care to the discovery of truth, with very little reliance on the daily historians” (vol. xx, 265), the “daily historians” being the newspapers. He was busy with this magazine when he was invited to provide the preliminary discourse for a new newspaper, the London Chronicle, and took the opportunity to set a high standard for its publishers.22 His dissatisfaction with previous newspapers, as opposed to the magazines, stems from their unreliability as sources of foreign and domestic “intelligence,” of which he says “an accurate account” is the “first demand made by a reader”; many contributors of news write merely to serve a political interest, “without a wish for truth, or thought of decency” (vol. xx, 392). Johnson was under no illusion that his grubstreet colleagues were to be regarded as “writers of the first class” (vol. xx, 38), but he nonetheless insists that even the writers of newspapers partake of the “character of an author,” which “conveys at once the idea of ability and good-​nature, of knowledge, and a disposition to communicate it (see Chapter 16, “Authorship”). To instruct ignorance, reclaim error, and reform vice, are designs highly worthy of applause and imitation” (vol. xx, 34). If writers have these high responsibilities, they also have rights. Johnson’s noble letter to Lord Chesterfield (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 261–​3) has long been seen as an instrument or a marker of the emergence of the profession of writing from its dependence upon patronage. But he sees that writers are now at risk of becoming slaves to booksellers; he writes, “nothing is more criminal in the opinion of many of them [‘the booksellers’], than for an author to enjoy more advantage from his own works than they are disposed to allow him” (vol. xx, 39). In 1739, he was engaged by Cave to prepare a series of points in defense of the magazine’s right to abridge (vol. xx, 47–​56), and he remained throughout his career interested in, and careful about, issues of copyright. Also integral to authorship, as Johnson depicts it, is the right to publish anonymously. Under despotic or “arbitrary” regimes, a writer may be punished—​or silenced by the threat of punishment—​for challenging those in authority (vol. xx, 99). In ways that may seem odd to us in a time of “identity politics,” when perhaps too much is made of the twin bogeys of transparency and accountability, Johnson was with most writers and booksellers of the time in regarding anonymous publication as an obvious and necessary characteristic of a free press. Throughout his work as an editorial writer for Grubstreet and its institutions, and indeed in all his subsequent career, Johnson exhibited an unsleeping awareness of the needs of “the common reader.”23 Speaking on behalf of the Gentleman’s Magazine 22 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 318, reports that the London Chronicle “was constantly read by Johnson himself; and it is but just to observe, that it has all along been distinguished for good sense, accuracy, moderation, and delicacy.” (It is also just to observe that this paper published almost a third of Boswell’s own identified journalistic output.) 23  This term, popularized by Virginia Woolf in her two series of essays with that general title (1925, 1932), is understood to have been coined by Johnson, in his Lives of Cowley, Pope, and Gray.

112   Paul Tankard editorial team, he aims “to convince the reader, that we who depend so entirely upon his approbation, shall omit nothing to deserve it” (vol. xx, 40). This dependence never rouses Johnson’s resentment, and he speaks contemptuously of writers who write only to please themselves, or who are unconcerned as to whether their work is interesting, or even intelligible; many years later, in his scholarly magnum opus, the Lives of the Poets, he asserts matter-​of-​factly that, when writing is “found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared: for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read?”24 Even poetry must pass before the same jury as newspaper writing. In mockery of the Gentleman’s Magazine’s rival Common Sense, which he lambasts for self-​indulgent prolixity, Johnson ironically confesses his “early prejudice in favour of brevity” (vol. xx, 24). He insists that readers and writers never forget that the high business of literature is subject to basely material considerations: he defended abridgment, knowing that readers prefer texts that are short; he justified the gathering of short texts into volumes because bulk rather than intrinsic worth better ensures sheer physical preservation on which reputation depends (vol. xx, 92); and recognizing that valuable texts may be unread simply because they are difficult to locate, he defends the preparation of such quintessentially grubstreet productions as indexes and catalogs (vol. xx, 37, 223, 80). Johnson is well known for his unromantic conversational opinions about literature—​“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” or “Sir, do you read books through?”—​and these are views he developed as a laborer in Grubstreet. Although Johnson’s own disposition was most emphatically that of a scholar, he wryly acknowledges that “the curiosity of the bulk of mankind” is far less engaged by the distant past than by what is current (vol. xx, 105). Unlike many academic writers, he knows that the study of the past is a minority taste, so that if the fruits of study and reflection are to be made socially useful, scholarly writers must study how to write; this he also emphasizes in his book reviews. Furthermore, the scholar’s single-​minded immersion in abstract subjects is not what pleases most readers, and the publications that are most generally attractive and approachable are those, such as magazines, which attempt to “exhibit a well chosen variety of subjects” (vol. xx, 64). These are the same terms in which he commends the Harleian Miscellany: that the “greatest variety” of materials will meet with a “more general reception” (vol. xx, 98). In his proposals for the magazine, The Publisher, he concedes that the “gay or the polite”—​by which he means the fashionable and middle-​class—​are likely to be frightened by “an austere adherence to scientific learning,” so “wit and humour” are necessary elements of a successful miscellany (vol. xx, 117). Humor, be it wry, affectionate, extravagant or satirical, is constantly bubbling beneath the surface of even the most serious of Johnson’s writing. His translation of “The Jests of Hierocles,” a set of ancient jokes about failures of common sense in scholarly pedants (Yale Works, vol. xx, 57–​62), seems an entirely characteristic contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine.

24 

Life of Akenside, in Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1451.

Journalism   113

The Magazine Work: Lives and Reviews From 1738 to 1745, Johnson was virtually the editor (Cave’s “regular coadjutor,” says Boswell; Life, vol. i, 115) of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and was throughout this time a notable contributor. When in June 1746 he signed a contract with a consortium of booksellers to prepare, in three years, a Dictionary of the English Language, he probably hoped and expected that this task would shelter him for some time from the necessity of undertaking other literary work for an income. In fact, in 1747 he was (according to John Nichols) again “employed to superintend the materials” of the Gentleman’s Magazine (Appendix G, in Boswell, Life, vol. i, 532). By 1751, the Dictionary was having financial (and other) problems; it appears that Johnson had spent most of the money advanced by the booksellers.25 In the next few years, before the Dictionary was finally published, he wrote many periodical items for ready cash, notably the 208 bi-​weekly essays in The Rambler (1750–​2), but also at least eighty items in the Gentleman’s Magazine.26 His most significant body of work for the Gentleman’s Magazine was a series of a dozen “Lives” (1738–​54; fair dinkum). After the folio Dictionary was published in April 1755 and the octavo abridgment in January 1756, Johnson almost immediately found regular employment in an editorial capacity with a new monthly journal, the Literary Magazine.27 His precise relationship with the journal is unclear but, according to the most thorough study of the situation, he wrote at least thirty-​six reviews (of thirty-​nine books) and eight other articles for it,28 before the journal folded in 1758. Magazines were not, in their early days, primarily venues for original composition: Sir John Hawkins describes Johnson as a frequent contributor to “such vehicles of literary intelligence as Magazines and other epitomes of larger works”29. The Lives that Johnson wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine were works mostly of translation, précis, and paraphrase.30 Of course, on their original publication, these (anonymous)

25  See

Johnson to John Newbery, April 15, July 29, and August 24, 1751, in Letters, vol. i, 48–​9; also Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s “Dictionary,” 1746–​1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59 ff. 26  J. D. Fleeman, “Samuel Johnson,” The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. ii, 1135–​43. 27 The editor was probably the printer, William Faden. Donald D. Eddy, Samuel Johnson: Book Reviewer in the Literary Magazine; or, Universal Review, 1756–​1758 (Garland: New York, 1979), 6, summarizes what can be known about Johnson’s role. 28  Eddy, 18. Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. i, 686, accepts Eddy’s findings. Brian Hanley, Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer: A Duty to Examine the Labors of the Learned (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 13, accepts forty reviews. The Yale editors accept Eddy’s thirty-​six, and add four attributed by Donald Greene (Yale Works, vol. xx, 263). 29 Hawkins, Life, ed. Brack, 212; my emphasis.. 30  Sarpi is a radical condensation of a French original; Boerhaave is an abridgment and translation of his long Latin funeral oration; Blake a narrative constructed from an encyclopedic summary and its plethora of notes; for Drake he mainly used four pamphlets found in one collection; Barretier—​Johnson anglicizes his name—​is derived from manuscript letters from the subject’s father; Morin is mostly a literal translation; Burman a translation and rearrangement of a single source; Confucius is a thorough

114   Paul Tankard writings offered only the information and edification intrinsic to their subjects. They were subsequently gathered in the earliest collected editions of Johnson’s works as “Lives of Eminent Persons”;31 and reading them as works of Samuel Johnson, there is for latter-​day readers, as Robert DeMaria remarks, “a degree of autobiography visible in his choice of subject” (Yale Works, vol. xix, p. xxv). Some subjects—​Sir Francis Drake, the seventeenth-​century English naval hero Admiral Robert Blake, the Prussian king Frederick the Great—​are military and national leaders, and their lives bear discernible relationships to contemporary public affairs; but the majority are persons eminent for learning, with whom Johnson can reasonably be presumed to identify. While not neglecting their achievements in literature (broadly understood)—​which he is mostly content simply to catalog—​Johnson is at all times interested in how they became eminent for learning: how they were educated and how they managed their day-​to-​day lives to accommodate scholarly endeavor. He introduces his account of the education of the German scholar and prodigy JeanPhilippe Baratier, by saying that there are “few things more worthy of our curiosity” (vol. xix, 173); a successful method of enriching life, he argues, is of more use than unsuccessful methods of merely lengthening it. Herman Boerhaave, whom Johnson later described as the “learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave” (Rambler 114, in Yale Works, vol. iv, 242), he clearly admires for his successive mastery of divinity, languages, mathematics, medicine, chemistry; he notes that “he did not suffer one branch of science to withdraw his attention from others” (vol. xix, 33–​4), and he depicts study—​ varied by recreation and supported by industry—​as the basis of Boerhaave’s works and reputation.32 In the life of the pioneering physician and medical researcher Thomas Sydenham, Johnson devotes six (of the twenty-​four) paragraphs—​and a great deal of rhetorical energy—​to refuting the rumor that Sydenham “was made a physician by accident and necessity, and . . . engaged in practice without any preparatory study” (vol. xix, 235). For Johnson, the casual pretense that eminence is fortuitous and knowledge is guesswork plays into the hands of the enemies of scholarship and of truth. Learning is always under siege: in two of the few original interpolations in his “Life of Confucius” Johnson honors the sage’s persisting, in the face of sensual temptation and poverty, to teach and pursue philosophy (vol. xix, 225, 226). But he knows that the worst enemies of learning are sometimes the philosophers themselves, particularly those who are—​ in words he puts in the mouth of Boerhaave—​“better pleased with the delightful amusement of hypotheses, than the toilsome drudgery of amassing observations” (vol. xix, 40–​1).33

rearrangement and rewriting of materials from a translation (published by Cave) of a French original; for Sydenham he used a short encyclopedia entry, augmented a little by details from other sources. 31 

Or “Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons”: they are (with some lives from other sources) gathered thus by Hawkins (1787), Murphy (1792), Chalmers (1806), Lynam (1824), Walesby (1825), and subsequent editions using those texts. See Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. ii, 1625, 1646, 1666, 1687, 1694–​5. 32  The term study and its derivatives occurs twenty-​eight times in this life. 33  The term drudgery will rightly remind us of Johnson’s self-​deprecating definition of lexicographer.

Journalism   115 Johnson’s lives are notable for his attention to scholarly method. The “Life of Boerhaave” was introduced in the Gentleman’s Magazine by a note claiming that, rather than bulking out the text with “flying reports, and . . . unattested facts; a close adherence to certainty has contracted our narrative” (vol. xix, 26 n. 1). Where he has no evidence, he does not embellish with speculation: of Blake’s childhood, he says, “we have no account, and therefore can amuse the reader with none of those prognosticks of his future actions, so often met with in memoirs” (vol. xix, 60). When of Sydenham he finds no report of his childhood, education, “domestic life, or private transactions,” he regrets the lack but says we must “repress . . . curiosity” and hints that we should, like Sydenham himself, “dispel the phantoms of hypothesis” (vol. xix, 232–​3). Even when he has evidence, he will not be uncritical: the account that Baratier’s father gives of his nine-​year-​old son’s proficiency with languages Johnson says he finds “incredible”; but neither will he suppress the account, as his incredulity may itself proceed from prejudice (vol. xix, 177). In his source for Boerhaave, there is an account of his marriage, which Johnson completely omits, presumably because it seemed to him to consist of such clichés of perfection as to be valueless (vol. xix, 20). But when he has to report how the pious Boerhaave’s career was almost ruined by a rumor (arising from Boerhaave’s fair-​minded suggestion that it would be best to read even the atheistic Spinoza before declaiming against him), his passions are clearly engaged by how easily true merit may be threatened by lies and malice, and he devotes six paragraphs to the subject (vol. xix, 34–​6). Johnson’s “early lives” at all times exhibit not only a vigorous and critical engagement with his materials, but also the virtues which, in his “Life of Father Paul Sarpi,” he attributes to Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent: “the judicious disposition of the matter, and artful texture of the narration” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 16). Even in a quotation like this we can discern characteristically Johnsonian diction and values. The effort and interest he expended on them is reflected in his preface to the 1742 volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine, in which it must have pleased him to remark that of the magazine’s “many original pieces . . . the lives of celebrated men have been thought worthy of particular attention” (vol. xx, 108). Johnson’s book reviews, like his journalistic lives, “consist mainly of paraphrase and quotations” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 263–​4).34 The reviews will seem, to modern readers, even more generically unevolved than the lives: in the lives, Johnson’s materials are more or less melted down into new, free-​standing compositions, whereas the aim of the reviews is less to engage thoroughly or critically with the books in question, like modern reviews, than to introduce, sample and (only if necessary) comment on them. The Yale editors observe that Johnson’s review of the memoirs of the Duchess of Marlborough “unfortunately lacks a conclusion” (vol. xx, 66), but in fact a number of the reviews—​ such as that of Russell’s Aleppo (vol. xx, 315) or Whitehead’s Elegies (vol. xx, 380)—​terminate rather abruptly. And half of them simply terminate with an extract or extracts 34  In what follows I have provided references to Yale Works, vol. xx (Johnson on Demand), but have also used The Literary Magazine; or, Universal Review, 3 vols. (May 1756–​July 1758), to see the texts in full and in context.

116   Paul Tankard from the book under review, to which Johnson’s own paragraphs serve as introductions. Most of the book reviews are not crafted essays, and the proportion of each review that is Johnson’s own contribution varies greatly. In some, he thoroughly surveys and paraphrases the text, responds to various points, and writes a conclusion; in some he merely writes a sentence or two to frame the extracts. As with the lives, it can be presumed on the basis of Johnson’s role with the Literary Magazine that he could choose which books to review, and that he “chose most of the books because he was interested in their contents.”26 The books are on an unexpected range of topics, including science and geography, politics and current controversies, and history; there are noticeably few on literary or religious subjects. Those that have most attracted the attention of posterity are understandably those that are most substantial and self-​contained, and these are also the reviews in which we detect more of the presence of the writer himself. The two best-​known of Johnson’s book reviews are that of the second edition of Jonas Hanway’s Journal of Eight Days Journey . . . to Which Is Added an Essay on Tea (1757), and Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757). These very different books drew substantial essays from Johnson, mainly because they took positions which he found particularly provocative. Hanway was a trader-​ turned-​philanthropist, who had traveled to Russia and Persia and was a great writer of pamphlets. His Eight Days Journey is a digressive two-​volume account of a short coach trip, of which the second volume is a treatise on the evils of tea-​drinking. Hanway had already annoyed Johnson by rather peremptorily objecting to the Literary Magazine reviewing the private-​issued first edition of his book: this review consisted mainly (fifteen of sixteen columns) of extracts. When some months later the book was published in a second edition, Johnson took the opportunity (and eleven further columns) to thoroughly review the essay, first describing himself as “a hardened and shameless tea-​ drinker” (vol. xx, 360) and proceeding to examine and gently mock the exaggerated fears of Hanway, who seems to make tea responsible for “every mischief that he can find” (vol. xx, 361). Johnson also queried Hanway’s account of the Foundling Hospital, which involved him in further public correspondence with the irritable author. Johnson’s review of Jenyns’s Free Inquiry, his final piece of writing for the Literary Magazine, is a much more serious piece. Published over three issues (May, June, July 1757) and through twenty-​seven columns, it is Johnson’s longest review.35 Jenyns takes on one of the most important and perennial philosophical questions, the problem of evil, which is for Johnson not simply an intellectual question but a profound (and profoundly felt) existential concern.36 Soame Jenyns was a literary dilletante, a wealthy man and a member of parliament, who cannot be imagined to have felt the problem of evil particularly keenly. He comes to the discussion not as a professed enemy to true religion, 35  His

two next longest reviews, of Browne’s History of Jamaica (twenty columns) and the satirical political papers The Test and The Con-​test (seventeen columns), are mainly extracts; in Yale Works, vol. xx, they are represented respectively as including four and two paragraphs of Johnson’s own prose. 36  The Jenyns review is not with the bulk of the Literary Magazine reviews in Yale Works vol. xx, Johnson on Demand, but with Johnson’s translation of Crousaz on Pope, vol. xvii, 397–​432.

Journalism   117 but as a false friend—​hence “Free” Inquiry—​for whom God is not necessarily the loving and demanding Person revealed in the Christian Scriptures, and for whom therefore nothing of importance really depends upon the outcome of the inquiry. His facile optimism depicts a cosmos in which neither evil nor God’s goodness are realities: the things we think of or experience as evil may be necessary parts of life’s rich tapestry, and the discomforts we or any being perceives may be the pleasures of beings superior to themselves. Johnson will have none of this. He himself knew suffering, and throughout his life he compassionated the sufferings of others in the most practical ways he could. Jenyns speculates about the possible pleasures that may be experienced by the poor, the sick, the mad, and the ignorant: poverty he glosses as “want of riches,” to be reminded by Johnson that there is also “want of competence” and even “want of necessaries” (vol. xx, 406), and advised that “Life must be seen before it can be known.” Jenyns is content that every being, including human beings, stays undisturbed in its allotted place in the ontological (and economic) hierarchy. Johnson sees this as a rationalization for withholding healing or relief or education or charity. He samples and tests Jenyns’s arguments, approving what he finds unexceptional, but returning always to the circularity of his reasoning, his lack of a true sense of the tragic realities of human life, and a complacency unbecoming of a finite being engaging with divine mysteries. It is a magnificently tuned piece of prose, winding its way from rhetorical questions—​“Why he that has nothing to write should desire to be a writer?” (vol. xx, 400)—​through savage satire, to the aphoristic force of the Literary Magazine’s most resonant Johnsonian line: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it” (vol. xx, 421). At a less existential and more practical level, Johnson the reviewer is always impatient with authors who add nothing to the sum of human knowledge, complaining that Charles Parkin’s account of the Norman invasion aims “to prove what nobody will deny” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 348), and that Bourchier Cleeve’s pamphlet on the national debt asserts “what no man doubts, and no man pretends to doubt” (vol. xx, 349).37 He says the reader of Thomas Blackwell’s Memoirs of the Court of Augustus will find “disgusting” the impression the author gives that “here are some new treasures of literature,” when in fact he deals with a history that has been “examined and explained a thousand times” (vol. xx, 292, 293). Determining then that the book must “owe its value only to the language in which it is delivered, and the reflections with which it is accompanied” (vol. xx, 296), he devotes a third of the review (seven of its eight final paragraphs) to a catalog of Blackwell’s stylistic errors. The eight-​column review of Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope is—​in terms of Johnson’s own prose—​a substantial essay,38 and clearly of interest for its remarks on Pope and poetry in general. But because he recommends this book to the interested reader, Johnson does not epitomize the whole text: “we must pass over,” he says, the passages “to which we have not something to add or to object, or where this author does not differ from

37 

These two reviews come one after the other in the Literary Magazine.

38 Yale Works, vol. xx, 281–​91, gives the entire text.

118   Paul Tankard the general voice of mankind” (vol. xx, 286). If there is nothing “to add or to object,” and the book speaks for itself, Johnson is happy to extract and paraphrase it, and get out of the reader’s way: he describes William Borlase’s Observations on the Islands of Scilly as “one of the most pleasing and elegant pieces of local enquiry that our country has produced,” but in a review that spans fourteen columns of the Literary Magazine, Johnson is credited by the Yale editors with only three sentences (vol. xx, 320). He commends one of the more unexpected works reviewed, Stephen White’s Collateral Bee-​Boxes, and says, “No one . . . should be contented with this abstract, but consult the original treatise” (vol. xx, 278). In Johnson’s reviews, there is inevitably much that no Johnsonian would want to miss. When reviewing Warton, he remarks, “anecdotes . . . will delight more readers than naked criticism” (vol. xx, 281); apropos of Charles Lucas’s Essay on Waters, he asserts, “few faults [are] so likely to drive off the reader as perpetual and glaring affectation” (vol. xx, 341); Benjamin Hoadley and Benjamin Wilson’s Observations on Electrical Experiments provokes him to reflect on the spectacle of “a philosopher unwilling to be silent when he has nothing to say” (vol. xx, 354); reading Johann Georg Keyssler’s Travels through Germany [etc.], he asks, “But what can be thought of a man who lived in a cavern to rob, and robbed to live in a cavern. Surely in every sense all wickedness is folly” (vol. xx, 356); and Elizabeth Harrison’s Miscellanies draws from him the reflection that praise must be “given to writers who please and do not corrupt, who instruct and do not weary” (vol. xx, 357). But to truly appreciate what Johnson is doing we need to see the reviews in their original contexts, excerpts and all, and in relation to the books he reviewed. In so doing, we see that, as Johnson’s friend Mary Knowles remarked, “He knows how to read better than any one . . . he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears the heart out of it” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 284–​5).

Conclusion Johnson wrote much for the periodical press, and—​even excluding material that is more appropriately considered under other generic headings—​there are many pieces besides the selection of articles mentioned here, and the impossibility of dealing with their range, much less all of them, will be apparent. Johnson’s career as a journalistic writer is chronologically framed, not inappropriately, by some long-​lost essays in the Birmingham Journal in 1733 (Fleeman, Bibliography, vol. i, 3) and the one-​sentence death notice for Robert Levet, which in January 1782 he sent to the London Chronicle (Yale Works, vol. xix, 487). These invisible and hardly visible texts dissolve the whole idea of authorship, and show Johnson’s writing to be, as it was always, never far separated either from friendship and society, or the need to be making money. Between these publications, for most of his life, Johnson processed text at a remarkable rate, reading and writing one work after another and no doubt at times many simultaneously, particularly during the periods of his editorial or subeditorial engagements with the

Journalism   119 Gentleman’s Magazine and the Literary Magazine. After 1765, when that final need became less urgent, Johnson wrote less “on demand,” and more for choice. The material in the two volumes of his works that I have most discussed here, vol. xix, Biographical Writings, and vol. xx, Johnson on Demand, attract much less sustained attention than his more generically regular and classifiable works, such as Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes, or the Lives of the Poets.39 It is a body of work of which the precise limits can never be known, that drifts into and out of the work of other writers. But rather than being seen as Johnson’s literary leftovers, it should be valued and explored for its many layers of potential fascination, and for occupying the borderlands between ephemerality and literary immortality.

Further Reading Barker, Hannah, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–​1855. London: Longman, 2000. Bloom, Edward A. Samuel Johnson in Grub Street. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957. Clarke, Bob. From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Italia, Iona. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. London: Routledge, 2005. McGuffie, Helen Louise. Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 1749–​1784: A Chronological Checklist. New York: Garland, 1976. Rogers, Pat. Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. London: Methuen, 1972.

39  Donald Greene, in his large, wide-​ranging, and scholarly collection, Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; now in Oxford World’s Classics), included a significant sample of Johnson’s journalism, and gives the essay “Of the Duty of a Journalist,” two “early lives” (Cheynel and Boerhaave), and six reviews: Warton’s Essay on Pope, Blackwell’s Court of Augustus, Hanway’s Eight Days Journey, Jenyns’s Free Inquiry and Tytler’s Mary Queen of Scots (although Greene indicates that the review of the Duchess of Marlborough’s Memoirs is unabridged, his text omits nine lengthy footnotes, in which form the Gentleman’s Magazine presented Johnson’s excerpts and paraphrases from the text). These same items are in David Womersley’s 1300-​page edition for 21st-​ Century Oxford Authors (2018). The new Samuel Johnson: Selected Works, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr., Stephen Fix and Howard D. Weinbrot (2021), from Yale University Press, gives an extract from Jenyns’s Free Inquiry, but none of the other journalism discussed here.

Chapter 7

Verse David F. Venturo

In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defines verse as “Poetry; lays; metrical language” and “A piece of poetry.” All his life Johnson was ambivalent about verse, attracted and repelled by it as a rhetorical medium that could evince the sublimest truths and the grossest falsehoods. He wrote verse for over fifty years, from his adolescence in the 1720s to a few weeks before he died in December 1784, his poetic reputation among contemporaries secured early by his two imitations of Juvenal, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). He also became the foremost British critic of verse, or poetry, of his time, editing and annotating the Works of Shakespeare (1765) and concluding his career with the series of fifty-​two biographical and critical essays now known as The Lives of the Poets (1779–​81).

All or Nothing All his life, when reading poetry, Johnson responded with an almost neurasthenic sensitivity. It was virtually impossible for him to be indifferent. The “Ghost scene” in Hamlet prompted the boy Johnson to hurry “upstairs to the street door that he might see people about him” (Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 158). He showered praise on poetry, grandly defining it in the Life of Milton as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 182–​3). In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson declared that poetry, at its best, “instruct[s]‌by pleasing”; it both stimulates and satisfies—​no small feat—​“that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life” by “exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads [it] to read it through” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 67, 83; vol. xvi, 118). Johnson, however, could as easily write off poetry as purely aesthetic. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, he dismissed it as “merely a luxury, an instrument of pleasure.” If true, then poetry, he averred, “can have no value, unless when exquisite in its kind” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 351–​2). Thus it appears that, when Johnson judged a poem, the stakes were very high: all

Verse   121 or nothing. He attacked John Milton’s Lycidas for its “trifling fictions,” and worse, for mingling them with the loftiest truths of Christianity; objected to Alexander Pope’s imitations of Horace for confusing the manners and mores of historical eras; and groaned, in the Life of Cowley, at the clichés—​the sheer absence of freshness and originality—​in most contemporary poetry: “descriptions copied from descriptions, . . . traditional imagery, and hereditary similes” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 177, 29). Johnson’s ambivalence—​this mixture of admiration and contempt—​may help explain the modest quantity of poetry that he wrote (enough to fill one volume in the Oxford and Yale editions), the high quality of his verse, and the stringent standards that he applied to others’ poetry in the moral essays, his edition of Shakespeare, and The Lives of the Poets, as well as in conversations recorded by Boswell. Moreover, Johnson’s criticism and practice as a poet often conflict, his opinions changing over time and with circumstances. In Rambler 168 (1751), he tasks Shakespeare with violating neoclassical standards of decorum—​too often, for example, low diction undercuts lofty sentiments. Fourteen years later, in the preface to Shakespeare, he pointedly rejects similar arguments by Dennis, Rymer, Voltaire, and Corneille as “the petty cavils of petty minds” (Yale Works, vol. v, 125–​9; vol. vii, 65–​6, 74–​80).

Breaking with Neoclassicism Although Johnson is frequently classified along with Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope, and, to some extent, John Dryden, as an “Augustan” or “neoclassical” poet, the grouping, at best, is specious. Johnson loved the heroic couplet and celebrates the rise of couplet poetics in The Lives of the Poets. There he traces the evolution of the loose, enjambed couplets of Ben Jonson into the pointed, end-​stopped verse of Edmund Waller and John Denham, combining regularity with strength. For Johnson, Dryden marks the zenith of couplet poetics. Dryden invented “poetic diction,” the language that distinguishes poetry from prose, and, in so doing, earns Johnson’s praise that echoes Suetonius’s tribute to Octavius Caesar: he found the English literary Rome brick and he left it marble (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 494). Johnson also admires Pope, especially his Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, and Homer translations. He worries, however, that “to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity” (vol. xxiii, 1227). The statement turned out to be prescient. Among later eighteenth-​century poets, only Johnson himself, Oliver Goldsmith, and George Crabbe mastered the heroic couplet. Johnson senses the challenge of what W. J. Bate would term “the burden of the past” and Harold Bloom, “the anxiety of influence.”1 Later 1  W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

122   David F. Venturo poets were intimidated by Pope’s accomplishment. How could they compete with it? Among the Romantics only Keats achieved distinction in heroic couplets, and he did so by avoiding Pope’s example. After the flabby heroics of Endymion, Keats learned to write muscular, end-​stopped couplets by reading and studying the verse stories in Dryden’s Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700). He captured the spirit of Dryden perfectly in his own neoclassical myth, Lamia (1819), written in heroic couplets. After Keats, the heroic couplet largely fell into disuse. Johnson lauded both Dryden and Pope for their “genius,” what we might now call their creativity or originality. Indeed, he ends the last paragraph of the Life of Pope with the word genius (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1228). Despite Johnson’s love of the predictable closes and harmonious music of the couplet’s rhymes and caesuras, however, he most lavishly praises the genius of Shakespeare and Milton, who wrote in blank verse, before the vogue for “correctness.” He extols Paradise Lost, “Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest, and fancy to combine them” (vol. xxi, 195). Of Shakespeare, he notes, he is “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life” (vol. vii, 62). Although Johnson concedes that he strongly prefers rhyme (without which “the musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost”), he “cannot . . . wish that Milton had been a rhymer” (vol. xxi, 204) and he commends Shakespeare’s dialogue (chiefly written in blank verse) as “level with life” and “scarcely . . . claim[ing] the merit of fiction” (vol. vii, 64, 63). In fact, Johnson admires Milton and Shakespeare for avoiding—​despite being poets and therefore writers of fiction—​what he terms in the Life of Milton, the “licentiousness of fiction” and instead regards them almost as historians or biographers, which reflects Johnson’s lifelong Platonic ambivalence about the fictiveness of most poetry (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 195). (In the Dictionary, Johnson defines “poet” as “An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure.”)

Versatility Johnson was an extremely versatile poet, comfortable writing in a wide variety of genres. Besides his juvenilia—​which, with triplets and alexandrines interspersed among its couplets, evokes Dryden more than Pope—​Johnson wrote two brilliant formal verse imitations, the political London (1738) and religious and philosophical Vanity of Human Wishes (1749); a ponderous neoclassical tragedy, Irene (1749), perhaps modeled on Joseph Addison’s Cato; some outstanding theatrical prologues and an epilogue (1740s–​ 1770s); several poignant elegies and epitaphs (1740s–​1780s); much drawing-​room verse, mostly playful, some satiric (1760s–​1780s); a substantial number of fine neo-​Latin lyrics (1720s–​1784), including a series of deeply personal metrical prayers composed as his health worsened and his spirits wavered in his last years; and a handful of clean, terse,

Verse   123 eloquent translations of Horace’s odes, the earliest written in adolescence, the last less than a month before Johnson died.

A New Organic Poetics The Vanity of Human Wishes, his most famous and accomplished poem, epitomizes the complexity of Johnson’s poetry and poetics, and demonstrates why applying simple labels to him is a mistake. The poem is a neoclassical imitation, an updating of Juvenal’s tenth Satire, so that the Roman poet speaks as Johnson imagines Juvenal would were he living in Georgian England. Johnson takes Juvenal’s wry warning, When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our prayers, and rewrites it, wresting from it a surprising, new conclusion. Always an uneasy neoclassicist, he draws on other sources and inspirations, including the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes, Boethius’s late classical, quasi-​Christian Consolatio Philosophiae, and William Law’s evangelical Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). In addition, the poem’s Augustan verse form—​the heroic couplet—​and metrics—​scrupulously end-​stopped with mostly medial caesuras, that is, pauses after the fourth, fifth, and sixth syllables—​mask distinctively un-​Augustan technical features. For example, neoclassical or Augustan poetry typically is loosely organized into verse paragraphs connected by logical, rhetorical transitions similar to those in a prose essay. Dryden’s Religio Laici, Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, Gay’s Trivia, and Pope’s Essay on Man follow this pattern. But in Johnson’s poem we see a shift from loose “marbles-​in-​a-​bag” accretion to more organic structures that, by looking backward to the analogical conceits and recurring images of seventeenth-​ century Metaphysical and baroque poetry, participate in the new “literature of sensibility” and look ahead to Romanticism. In The Vanity, for example, Johnson repeatedly uses metaphors and images of fire, warmth, thirst, and burning to emphasize the futility of extinguishing, though not of temporarily managing, humanity’s fervent desires. These ligaments differ from anything found in the poetry of Swift, Gay, and Pope. Extended and recurring conceits also make Johnson’s “Drury-​Lane Prologue” (1747) and elegy, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” (1783), structurally more cohesive. The prologue, sixty-​two lines long and written, like The Vanity, in heroic couplets, repeatedly compares the history of English theater from Shakespeare’s era to David Garrick’s to a series of dynasties or “Reign[s]‌” (lines 5, 26, 35, and 57), each more decadent than the last.2 In the closing verse paragraph, Johnson turns the tables by declaring the theatergoers to whom Garrick recited these lines the real “Tyrants” who rule 2 For text of Johnson’s poems I have used Samuel Johnson, The Complete English Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman, The English Poets Series (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1971; repr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), because the editor retains eighteenth-​century spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

124   David F. Venturo over hapless playwrights who are merely “Tools of Guilt,” subject to the marketplace demands of fickle, imperious audiences (line 56). Audience members must take responsibility for this decadence and only they, by thoughtful patronage of worthy plays, can reverse it. The nine unpretentious quatrains of the Levet elegy are also organized around an extended, analogical conceit. Its first stanza grimly depicts all humankind (note the inclusive pronouns “we” and “our”) as prisoners sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor in a mine of hopeful self-​deception while our friends (decorously elevated to “social comforts”), also so sentenced, die either abruptly or gradually: Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts, or slow decline, Our social comforts drop away. (lines 1–​4)

Throughout this poem, alternatively biographical and mythic, its hero, the deceased Dr. Robert Levet, imaginatively restored to life by “affection’s eye” (line 9), is both humble physician and questing knight, working in “misery’s darkest caverns” (line 17), battling against disease and death. At the end of the poem, as in the “Drury-​Lane Prologue,” Johnson startlingly reverses the moral compass: death, the supposed enemy, suddenly, mercifully liberates Levet’s enslaved soul from its bodily prison: Then with no throbbing fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And free’d his soul the nearest way. (lines 33–​6)

Death commutes Levet’s sentence to time served on earth. It turns out that the life we cherish is also the source of our suffering. In the end, Johnson has one fewer social comfort, but Levet is freed from toil and pain.

From the Physical to the Metaphysical The Vanity of Human Wishes and “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” share another important feature that departs from neoclassicism. Each is informed by a metaphysics—​ a realm beyond the physical—​ something regularly absent from the skeptical, empirical poetry of Swift, Gay, and Pope, but commonly present in the verse of Edward Young, Christopher Smart, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In An Essay on Man, for example, Pope asks rhetorically, “What can

Verse   125 we reason, but from what we know?”3 The skeptical finitude of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, reflected in their hostility to metaphysics, which they regarded as an intellectual petri dish for cultivating personal madness, religious enthusiasm, and civil discord, was giving way by the 1740s to a philosophy that encouraged a new poetics of infinitude, vision, and expressionism and endorsed the reality of a realm beyond tangible sense experience. The Vanity of Human Wishes and the Levet elegy, which reflect a religious and philosophical perspective known as fideism, evince this new poetics. The fideist believes in God, but experiences Divinity in the mundane world as an absence rather than a presence, and so relies on faith in God’s existence in another realm. The emptiness of this world, and the fideist’s dissatisfaction with it, lead her or him to seek an infinite God whose plenitude can be experienced only in another world after one dies. Hence the calming assurance at the end of The Vanity of Human Wishes, that faith in God (“nor deem Religion vain” [line 350]) will help console the longing soul in a morally empty world, and the confidence at the end of the Levet elegy that Robert Levet’s soul, freed from the prison of “hope’s delusive mine” (line 1), now lives where no one suffers.

The History and Poetics of Imitation Johnson’s most famous and most highly regarded poems, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), are late examples of the poetic imitation, a genre that flourished for about a century, from 1650 to 1750. Imitation was related to translation, but its poetics were looser and more flexible. The poet would take a classical or occasionally a contemporary foreign poem and, instead of adhering closely to the language of the original, update it with modern, local parallels. The best justification for imitation was offered by the French Augustan poet-​critic Nicolas Boileau-​ Despréaux, based on the c. first-​century ce Greek rhetorical treatise, Περì Ὕψους [On the Sublime], at the time misattributed to “Dionysius” or “Longinus.” Modern scholars attribute the book to “Longinus” or “Pseudo-​Longinus,” although nothing is known about the author beyond the name. Boileau, whose French translation of Περì Ὕψους was published in 1674, began writing satires in the late 1650s, based on the poems of Juvenal and Horace. Boileau did not cautiously translate verbatim; rather, fired by Longinus’s broad definition of imitation, he gave himself much more latitude. Before Longinus, imitation (μίμησις in Greek) had usually reflected Aristotle’s conception of the term, in Poetics, to describe a poet’s refashioning, in words, something natural, external, and empirical, such as a human character or action. One’s pleasure came from comparing the artful copy with the native original. By contrast, Περì

3 

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1.18, in An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. iii, Part 1 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), 14.

126   David F. Venturo Ὕψους took imitation into the realm of the spiritual, the metaphysical. For Longinus, echoing Plato, imitation (in Boileau’s translation) does not involve the servile copying of words, “comme des bestes qui regardent toûjours en bas, & qui sont courbées vers la Terre” [like beasts that always look downward and are bent toward the earth], but noble emulation of a writer’s spirit, inspired by reading a great work.4 Such emulation is similar to the divine inspiration experienced by “la Prestresse d’Apollon sur le sacré Trepié” [Apollo’s priestess on the sacred tripod]. The very enthusiasm (from the Greek ἐνθουσιασμός, “filled with a god”) that Augustans satirized as a form of baroque madness thus slipped into their aesthetic through a side door: Car on tient qu’il y a une ouverture en terre d’où sort un souffle, une vapeur toute celeste qui la remplit sur le champ d’une vertu divine, & lui fait prononcer des oracles. De mesme ces grandes beautez que nous remarquons dans les Ouvrages des Anciens sont comme autant de sources sacrées, d’où il s’éleve des vapeurs heureuses qui se répandent dans l’ame de leurs Imitateurs, & animent les esprits mesmes naturellement les moins échauffez: si bien que dans ce moment ils sont comme ravis & emportez de l’enthousiasme d’autrui. (Longinus, 32–​3) [For there is an opening in the ground from which a breath, a most heavenly vapor rises, which fills the priestess on the plain with godly power, and makes her utter oracles. Thus, these grand beauties that we note in the Works of the Ancients are like so many sacred springs, from which fortunate vapors rise that infuse the soul of their Imitators, and animate spirits less naturally passionate, so at that moment they are rapt and transported with the enthusiasm of their inspirers.]

According to Ruben Quintero, “A poet . . . must intoxicate himself with sublimity.”5 Moreover, the Augustans embraced this new creative process because it was empirically sound—​it worked. Authors enjoyed freedom from the constraints of literalism (Dryden defended, with reservations, the new approach in his prefaces) and classically trained readers could compare departures from, and parallels with, originals. When John Oldham translated—​or rather imitated—​Horace’s Ars Poetica in 1681, he explained that he was “putting Horace into a more modern dress, . . . by making him speak, as if he were living, and writing now. . . the Scene [shifted] from Rome to London, . . . [with] English names of Men, Places, and Customs, where the Parallel would decently permit.”6 Oldham’s model for updating his classical source was almost surely Boileau’s Art Poétique (1674), which applies Longinus’s theory by transplanting Horace from Augustus’s Rome to Louis XIV’s Paris.

4 Longinus, On the Sublime: The Peri Hupsous in Translations by Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux (1674) and William Smith (1739), intro. William Bruce Johnson (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975). 5  Ruben Quintero, Literate Culture: Pope’s Rhetorical Art (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 108. 6  John Oldham, The Poems of John Oldham, ed. H. F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 87.

Verse   127 In the 1670s and 1680s, the imitation was refined and popularized in England by such poets as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and the above-​mentioned Oldham. In 1680, Dryden memorably described imitation as a “libertine” form of translation, counterbalanced by metaphrase, strict word-​for-​word rendering, at the opposite extreme, and paraphrase, “Translation with Latitude,” occupying the middle ground between the other two (Dryden, Works, vol. i, 117, 114). As a poet, Dryden claimed to prefer the moderate paraphrase, although as a playwright, his imitations of Shakespeare and Sophocles significantly diverge from the original plays, and many of his paraphrastic poetic translations, especially those written after he was stripped of his laureateship in 1689, following the Glorious Revolution, closely resemble imitation. The extended historical conceit or parallel remained the central feature of the genre from Cowley and Denham through Pope, and Johnson’s reservations about such conceits or parallels helped spell the end of such imitations.

London: Johnson’s Imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire Samuel Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal’s third and tenth Satires, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, were written in what would prove to be the closing decade of the genre’s century-​long lifespan. Yet, when Johnson wrote London in the late 1730s, few would have predicted that the imitation would run its course by the mid-​1750s. In fact, in the 1730s, the poetic imitation enjoyed its greatest popularity and critical acclaim thanks to Pope, who composed nine imitations of selected satires and epistles written by the Roman poet Horace. Pope brilliantly exploited historical parallels between Augustan Rome and his own London to create ironic contrasts between the political and cultural achievements of the classical past, and the political corruption and cultural decay of the world of George II and his prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, as part of a coordinated attack on the court and administration. In Epistle to Augustus (1737), his best imitation, Pope implicitly contrasts Horace’s respect for the princeps, who valued poets and poetry, with his contempt for King George Augustus II, indifferent to both. Horace—​who, as Suetonius explains, had been asked by Augustus to address him in a verse epistle—​graciously begs Augustus’s pardon for diverting his attention from state affairs before discoursing on the history and criticism of Roman poetry.7 A connoisseur of the arts, Augustus appreciated poets’ power to commemorate his achievements. By contrast, Pope’s fulsome opening and closing encomia ironically emphasize the inaptly named George Augustus’s preference for Hanover and his German mistress, Sophie von Walmoden, over the welfare of Britain 7 Suetonius,

Lives of the Caesars, V–​VIII, and Lives of Illustrious Men, rev. ed., trans. J. C. Rolfe, vol. ii (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 462, 464.

128   David F. Venturo and patronage of its arts. The stir caused by this and Pope’s other imitations made the genre seem intensely vital and relevant. Although conceived when Pope’s brilliant imitations of Horace were ascendant, Johnson’s London is closer in style and manner to Dryden’s great translations of Juvenal and Persius (1692), which offered veiled, ventriloquized criticism of the whiggish, Williamite world of the 1690s. Johnson, already keenly aware of Pope’s achievements in heroic couplets (discussed at length years later in the Life of Pope), elected to emulate the generationally removed Dryden rather than his older, living contemporary.

Angry, Nostalgic Nationalism Johnson’s London is very much a political poem, informed by angry, nostalgic nationalism. It captures much of the spirit of its classical source, Juvenal’s third Satire, but with a twist. Juvenal aims his satire primarily at social and cultural targets. The main speaker in that poem, Umbricius, bemoans the breakdown of traditional social and economic bonds between wealthy Roman patrons and their dependents, sometimes called clients, which makes it impossible for a Roman citizen of modest means to continue to live in the great city. Instead, Umbricius complains that he must now flee to the countryside, while Rome is flooded by Greek immigrants and crass nouveaux riches who enjoy the doles and perquisites that once were given by patrons to men, such as he, of old Roman stock. Johnson transforms Juvenal’s cultural critique into a poem that is primarily a political satire, by focusing on the corruption of the court of George II and the administration of Walpole, with only ancillary attention to the dangers and indignities of city life. Written in lively, end-​stopped heroic couplets, London begins with a thirty-​four-​line introduction spoken by a young, unnamed friend of the poem’s chief character, Thales, who is about to leave the city for self-​imposed exile in the Welsh countryside. The two friends stand on the banks of the Thames, in Greenwich, awaiting the “Wherry” (line 19) that will carry Thales and the “small Remains” of his “dissipated Wealth” (line 20) on his journey. Both men are noticeably upset: the friend refers to his own mixed emotions of “Grief and Fondness” (line 1) at the impending departure, and he characterizes Thales as “Indignant” (line 34) and “contemptuous” (line 33). As the friend approvingly explains, Thales is “Resolv’d at length, from Vice and London far, | To breathe in distant Fields a purer Air” (lines 4–​5). As the hendiadys in line 5 makes clear, for Thales and his friend, “Vice” and “London” have become synonymous, and thus no refuge in the city is possible for a virtuous man. Amidst this turmoil, the friends share a brief, powerful interlude, prompted by a recollection that Greenwich is the birthplace of Elizabeth I. They perform a reverential act that leads to a quasi-​religious, visionary moment during which they kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth; In pleasing Dreams the blissful Age renew, And call Britannia’s Glories back to view;

Verse   129 Behold her Cross triumphant on the Main, The Guard of Commerce, and the Dread of Spain, Ere Masquerades debauch’d, Excise oppress’d, Or English Honour grew a standing Jest. A transient Calm the happy Scenes bestow, And for a Moment lull the Sense of Woe. (lines 24–​32)

The interlude epitomizes themes, motifs, and rhetorical strategies that characterize the 263 lines of the poem: fierce anger at England’s present-​day moral, military, and political weakness and corruption; nostalgia for the military and political glory of the British past, encapsulated in the reference to Elizabeth (and to references later in the poem to Henry V, Edward III, and Alfred the Great); and an assertion that England, once singled out for God’s blessing, is now subject to divine wrath. These things, of course, are also part of the discourse of the Opposition to Walpole. The allusion to Queen Elizabeth and the blue-​water policies of the Elizabethan navy as a vehicle for attacking Walpole’s diplomatic efforts to avoid war with France and Spain would have been familiar to readers of The Craftsman and other Opposition newspapers. Complaints about cultural decadence imported from France and Italy—​“Masquerades” (line 29)—​and anger over Walpole’s tax proposals—​“Excise” (line 29)—​were also familiar parts of the Opposition agenda. In addition, the focus in the proem on Wales, as Thales’s destination, also reflects Johnson’s political agenda, since Wales was the home of Elizabeth’s Tudor family and a nation that traditionally enjoyed a reputation for fierce independence. The rest of the poem, lines 35 to 263, consists of a rhetorically sophisticated speech by Thales in which he details his reasons for leaving London. His rhetoric relies heavily on the language and conventions of seventeenth-​century jeremiad: he describes the walls of London as “curst” and the city as “devote”—​that is, damned or doomed—​to “Vice and Gain” (line 37). Like a harried ascetic, Thales prays for sanctuary from this corruption: “Grant me, kind Heaven, to find some happier Place, | Where Honesty and Sense are no Disgrace . . . | Some secret Cell, ye Pow’rs, indulgent give” (lines 43–​4, 49). He also implies that the current outbreak of public corruption is providentially sanctioned, an act of divine retribution for English misdeeds: “To such, a groaning Nation’s spoils are giv’n, | When publick Crimes inflame the Wrath of Heav’n” (lines 65–​6).

The Vanity of Human Wishes: Sober and Serious Imitation London was a polemical poem, crafted as part of the Opposition political discourse against Sir Robert Walpole, his corruption, and policies. It was part of the public debate. The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s second imitation of Juvenal, written a decade later, significantly differs from its predecessor. The angry rhetoric and political

130   David F. Venturo propaganda of London are replaced by a more sober rhetoric and serious philosophical purpose. These differences reflect changes in Johnson’s circumstances and outlook between 1738 and 1749, but also the very different rhetoric and purpose of Juvenal’s Satires 3 and 10. In Satire 10, Juvenal abandoned the angry invective of his earlier poems for a more elevated form of philosophical satire. He explores the irony of the relation of human happiness to human desires: because our passions often dominate our reason, he argues, we rarely understand what is good for us. Indeed, in the opening lines of the poem, he wryly claims that the gods, to punish us, grant our wishes. After surveying the five chief categories of wishes—​for political power, rhetorical skill, military glory, long life, and physical beauty—​Juvenal offers a solution to this problem: if you must pray, ask for a sound mind in a healthy body, for indifference to death, and, most important of all, freedom from the turmoil of passion. Consistent with classical Stoic doctrine, Juvenal’s narrator concludes by urging human beings to rely on themselves, not the gods, for their happiness. It is human beings themselves, he charges, who, by failing to exercise emotional self-​control, foolishly surrender their autonomy to the pseudo-​divinity, Fortune. In length and structure, The Vanity of Human Wishes closely follows Juvenal’s tenth Satire. At 368 lines, The Vanity is only two longer than Juvenal’s poem, a remarkable achievement considering the density of Juvenal’s Latin. By contrast, Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s tenth is 561 lines long. In terms of its structure, The Vanity is virtually identical to Juvenal’s poem: a brief introduction on the dangers of improvident wishing, followed by a long series of exempla divided into the same five categories that Juvenal used and presented to suggest comprehensiveness. In terms of its informing philosophical and religious perspective, however, The Vanity of Human Wishes could hardly be more different from Juvenal’s tenth Satire. In this imitation, Johnson wrote such a vigorous rejoinder to Juvenal’s classical argument for philosophical detachment and self-​sufficiency that it practically spelled the end of the poetic imitation as a viable genre.

Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Pauline Fideism Juvenal’s poem, especially its conclusion, is informed by the virtues of the two great classical philosophical schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism. Although these two schools were obviously very distinctive, they shared an important feature: both put a premium on emotional detachment and human self-​sufficiency as central to a virtuous life. By contrast, Johnson drew on Pauline, Christian tradition. Johnson believed that those very passions that Juvenal sought to eradicate in the service of reason, instead could be educated and put to use along with reason in the service of faith. This tradition, which profoundly shaped both Johnson’s religious perspective and his literary imagination, can be described as fideist. Fideism, as Blanford Parker defines it, exists “whenever God is perceived as an absence. This is not to say that God is perceived as not existing, but

Verse   131 rather that His empirical (and sometimes moral) absence from the world seems to be strong proof of His presence in another.”8 The opening paragraphs (lines 1–​72) of The Vanity of Human Wishes beautifully articulate the problem of human wishing. Because “Reason [rarely] guides the stubborn Choice” (line 11) and “Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate | O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate” (lines 5–​6), human beings suffer from a severely limited and distorted perspective on themselves and the surrounding world that leads to self-​ inflicted anguish. By presenting the problem in this fashion, Johnson seems to ally himself with the philosophical rationalism of Juvenal’s tenth Satire and with the popular neo-​Epicureanism of Rochester’s Satyr Against Reason and Mankind (1679) and Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–​4), as well as the classical Epicureanism of Rochester’s and Pope’s great Roman source, Lucretius’s philosophical poem, De rerum natura. Johnson establishes this alliance only so he can shatter it spectacularly in his conclusion (lines 343–​68). Above the figure of purblind “wav’ring Man” stands “Observation” (line 1), which enjoys an Olympian perspective that allows it to survey humanity “from China to Peru” (line 2), that is, as though looking from one end of a Mercator projection map to the other. Observation is seconded by the figure of “Hist’ry” (line 29). Together these two provide a comprehensive survey through space and time of the dangers of shortsighted wishing.

Five Kinds of Wishes, Comprehensively Surveyed Johnson satirically surveys, following Juvenal, the speciousness of five kinds of wishes: for political power (lines 73–​134), achievements in learning (lines 135–​74), military glory (lines 175–​254), longevity (lines 255–​318), and physical beauty (lines 319–​42). Major exempla, most of them historical, of approximately fifteen to thirty lines, are supported by shorter exempla and brief historical references. In satirizing those who pursue political power, for example, Johnson buttresses the central exemplum of Cardinal Wolsey (lines 99–​128) with brief allusions to the unfortunate careers of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham; Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford; Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford; and Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (lines 129–​31). Johnson constructs his five surveys to make them seem as comprehensive as possible. In satirizing military vainglory, his exempla range diachronically from the Persian general Xerxes, who lived in the fifth century bce, to Charles Albert, elector of Bavaria, who died in 1745, not quite four years before The Vanity was published. Other groups of exempla organized synchronically also suggest comprehensiveness. Under the 8  Blanford

Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 190.

132   David F. Venturo vanity of wishing for achievements in learning, Johnson tellingly links Thomas Lydiat (line 164), Galileo Galilei (line 164), and Archbishop William Laud (lines 165–​74), historical contemporaries, all of whom died tragically in the 1640s. Lydiat, eminent in mathematical circles, was virtually unknown outside of them; Galileo, of course, was one of the most illustrious scientists of the European Renaissance; and Laud rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury and a close advisor to Charles I. Yet, despite their learned accomplishments, all died in anguished circumstances in the 1640s after being persecuted by political and religious enemies—​the well-​connected Laud and the renowned Galileo as well as the obscure and impoverished Lydiat. Indeed, in the case of Laud, his connections to monarchical power directly led to his judicial murder by act of Parliament in 1645. Finally, Johnson emphasizes comprehensiveness by including female exempla, in contrast to Juvenal’s purely masculine focus. In the survey of military vainglory, Maria Theresa of Austria outwits, politically and militarily, Charles Albert, elector of Bavaria (lines 241–​54). By the time the reader reaches the end of the survey at line 342, she or he has been overwhelmed by a heartbreakingly comprehensive network of exempla.

Parting with Juvenal Then, at line 343 of The Vanity, a remarkable turn occurs, as Johnson definitively parts company with his Juvenalian model. No sooner does the survey end with the implication that all wishes are dangerous than an emotional voice demurs in a tumultuous six-​ line outburst: Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? Must helpless Man, in Ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the Torrent of his Fate? Must no Dislike alarm, no Wishes rise, No Cries invoke the Mercies of the Skies? (lines 343–​8)

Must we surrender, the voice objects, to Juvenal’s dismal ideal of emotional resignation, paradoxically both torpid and torrential? The very fervor with which this voice speaks mocks the possibility of Juvenal’s rational escape from desire. Immediately, this voice is answered by the consoling words of a second: “Enquirer, cease, Petitions yet remain, | Which Heav’n may hear, nor deem Religion vain” (lines 349–​50). Religion offers the potential of a safe harbor from vain wishing, although the voice makes no guarantees (“which Heav’n may hear”). The consoling voice urges humanity, “Still raise for Good the supplicating Voice, | But leave to Heav’n the Measure and the Choice” (lines 351–​2).

Verse   133 Because hope and fear are ineradicably parts of the human psyche, Johnson recognizes that these emotions must be tempered by education rather than repressed. Thus, the consoling voice advises: “when the Sense of sacred Presence fires, | And strong Devotion to the Skies aspires, | Pour forth thy Fervours for a healthful Mind, | Obedient Passions, and a Will resign’d” (lines 357–​60). That is, when your passions dictate that you must pray for something, pray fervently for the capacity wisely to manage your fervent desires. This activity is brilliantly circular and transforms the objects sought from products into a process. The act of prayer is conceived by Johnson not as something cool and detached, but warm and fiery, and becomes its own end. By so doing, the narrator of the poem avoids the foolishness of the Stoics in Johnson’s Rambler 32 and of Lemuel Gulliver in the fourth part of his Travels, who strive to suppress, rather than educate, their passions, and therefore deny half of their humanity. Johnson’s “Goods” (lines 365–​6) to be prayed for, “Love” (line 361), “Patience” (line 362), and “Faith” (line 363), all “transmute” (line 362) one’s perception of, and response to, the world, and therefore, although they do not eradicate life’s ills, they make them easier to bear. Finally, Johnson emphasizes in the closing lines of the poem the importance of cooperation between humanity and divinity. Juvenal declares, “I show you what you can give yourself.” By contrast, Johnson stresses that Love, Patience, and Faith are “for Man” but “ordain[ed]” by “Heav’n” (line 365). Thus, the human mind, in concert with divinity, avoids the fruitless pursuit of evanescent or changeable objects engaged in by the self-​deceived exempla by, instead, “mak[ing] the Happiness [one] does not find” (line 368).

Truth and Authenticity Curiously, Johnson published no further neoclassical imitations after The Vanity (1749), despite Boswell’s observation that “he had them all,” that is, Juvenal’s sixteen Satires, “in his head” (Life, vol. i, 193). Why not? Part of the answer likely lies in the Life of Pope, which reflects important changes in Johnson’s poetics as he grew older. Imitation, he decided, violates canons of truth and authenticity: “Between Roman images and English manners there will be an irreconcilable dissimilitude, and the work will be generally uncouth and party-​coloured; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1223). Thus, imitations disturbingly mingle fact and fiction not unlike Lycidas, although Johnson finds Milton’s elegy worse because it confounds fiction with sacred truth. Tellingly, Johnson loved Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard because it (like the Levet elegy) is domestic and biographical and therefore immediately useful to readers in its truthfulness. If Pope in his imitations distances truth by mixing it with fiction, Shakespeare makes his plays, especially his romances, seem more real by “approximat[ing],” that is, bringing closer, “the remote, and familiariz[ing] the wonderful” (vol. vii, 65). Johnson’s demand for truth in poetry also clarifies his objections to the Medieval Revival verse of his friends Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy:

134   David F. Venturo Wheresoe’er I turn my View, All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless Labour all along, Endless Labour to be wrong; Phrase that Time has flung away, Uncouth Words in Disarray: Trickt in Antique Ruff and Bonnet, Ode and Elegy and Sonnet. (“Lines on Thomas Warton’s Poems”)

Johnson pronounces it uncouth, which he defines in the Dictionary as “odd; strange; unusual,” one of the same adjectives he applies to Pope’s imitations of Horace. Thus Johnson, the supposed Augustan, shares concerns for authenticity with the German Romantic Friedrich von Schiller, who distinguished sentimental from naive poets, that is, sophisticated strivers after naturalness from those who, born to a tradition, cleanly, unself-​consciously work within it. Moreover, in the first age of self-​conscious historicism, Johnson, unlike Pope, understood that, as J. G. A. Pocock observes, “the more thoroughly and accurately the process of [neoclassical] resurrection was carried out, the more evident it became that copying and imitation were impossible—​or could never be anything more than copying and imitation.”9

The Common Reader and an Appeal from Criticism to Nature Finally, Johnson’s reservations about imitations increased because, although they sometimes delighted (or disappointed) the “man of learning” who could compare imitation and original, they could not appeal to the “common reader” who, unfamiliar with the original, judged poetry only by her or his “common sense . . . uncorrupted with literary prejudices” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1223, 1470–​1). This ideal common reader, who trusted his or her own responses instead of acquiescing to critics’ preferences, became more important to Johnson as he grew older (for example, in his defense of Shakespeare’s mingled dramas and his rejection of the neoclassical unities). Thus, Johnson tried to empower his readers by assuring them, “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” (vol. vii, 67). Most famously, the common reader gave him a vehicle for raising objections to the irregular rhythms and rhyme schemes, closed idiom, complicated syntax, and sublime obscurity of William Collins’s and Thomas Gray’s Pindaric odes.

9  J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study in English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4.

Verse   135 From the time he wrote his Essay on Epitaphs (1740), Johnson preferred an open idiom in elegies and epitaphs (classical epitaphs were usually written in elegiac meter, so he regularly conflated the two genres). Because epitaphs and elegies combine biography and theology (by providing moral exempla and mourning the dead), their style, Johnson argued, should be simple—​both to appeal to a broad audience and to avoid rhetorical embellishment. By the time of the Life of Waller (1779), he had decided that all religious poetry should be plain and unpretentious, since finite poetry can neither adequately praise nor describe by analogy an infinite and unknowable God: “The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 315–​16). A concave mirror cannot, by definition, magnify. Its reflection of the sidereal hemisphere—​the starry sky—​can only diminish. Moreover, infinity, as Johnson points out in the Commentary on . . . Essay on Man, is always infinitely distant from finitude; to try to describe and laud it is thus futile because hopelessly fictive (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 403). Canons of truth, he averred, are never to be violated by rhetorical decoration in sacred verse.

A Clean, Simple, Open Idiom Late in life Johnson favored a clean, simple, open idiom for virtually all poetry. This explains his praise of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-​Yard and his dislike of Gray’s and Collins’s odes (despite his friendship with Collins). Repeatedly he finds the odes affected, “laboured” (a favorite Johnsonian criticism, also applied to Warton’s poems), and hence unpleasing—​and, for Johnson, “the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1335; vol. vii, 67). Gray writes like a man who is “tall by walking on tiptoe”; his poems have “too little appearance of ease and nature” (vol. xxiii, 1470). Collins’s “diction [is] often harsh, unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected” (vol. xxiii, 1335). Like Thomas Warton, Collins “affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival,” and indulged in syntax “out of the common order” (vol. xxiii, 1335). Behind Collins’s and Gray’s practice lay their conviction (with which the Johnson of the Lives disagreed) that the language of poetry should be different—​read more elaborate and complicated—​from the language of prose. (This debate over the language of poetry and prose would be renewed by Wordsworth and Coleridge a generation later in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and in Biographia Literaria.) Many of Johnson’s contemporaries, especially among the literati, were offended by his criticism of Gray and Collins. But in the long run the consensus is with Johnson. The odes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley have been judged better poems—​more open in their diction, relaxed (Johnson would say natural) in their style and syntax (despite Miltonic inversions), and philosophically interesting than those of their eighteenth-​ century precursors. Indeed, the directness and simplicity, as well as the expressive intimacy, of Johnson’s later poetry, epitomized by “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet”

136   David F. Venturo (1783), better anticipate the Romantic poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge than anything by Collins and Gray except the Elegy. Johnson’s poems and literary criticism reveal a vigorous, engaged writer and honest, nuanced, occasionally contradictory thinker who relished the literary debates of his times and contributed, sometimes surprisingly, to fresh directions in poetry and poetics.

Further Reading Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gerrard, Christine. The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Lipking, Lawrence. “Learning to Read Johnson: The Vision of Theodore and The Vanity of Human Wishes.” ELH 43, no. 4 (1976): 517–​37. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Quintero, Ruben. Literate Culture: Pope’s Rhetorical Art. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Venturo, David F. Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Weinbrot, Howard D. The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Chapter 8

Essays Richard Squibbs

What must Johnson have made of Oliver Goldsmith’s “resverie” in his short-​lived periodical the Bee (1759), wherein the gruff coachman of “The fame machine” refuses Johnson a seat for his Dictionary but relents immediately upon realizing that this “very grave personage” is the author of the Rambler?1 To a writer who had striven for fame since arriving in London over twenty years before, such praise from a stranger was no doubt gratifying (Johnson and Goldsmith wouldn’t first meet for another eighteen months). And it might have boosted his morale as he toiled away at the Idler in the wake of terrible personal and financial setbacks, while still procrastinating on his long-​delayed edition of Shakespeare. But while collected editions of the Rambler had sold moderately well by the time Goldsmith hailed it, Johnson may have been bemused nonetheless to see his literary immortality staked on his periodical essays rather than his monumental contribution to fixing the English language. On the other hand, the relatively minor genre of the periodical essay seems to have appealed to Johnson because no one since its great originators, Addison and Steele, had managed to find enduring success in it. In the thirty-​five years between the end of the Spectator and the first number of the Rambler, roughly three dozen essay series modeled on the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian had appeared in London. Of these, only three titles were issued in collected editions more than three times; and even then, only the most recent, the Female Spectator (1744–​6), would see an edition in print beyond the 1740s.2 Meanwhile, new collected editions of Addison’s and Steele’s series continued to appear regularly every few years, with the latest brought out in 1749–​50. Johnson’s aim was therefore to succeed in writing essays that would not just momentarily captivate the public but stand “the test of a long trial” like those of his great predecessors (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 201). And in this he half-​succeeded. For while the Rambler’s original periodical 1  Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. i, 447. 2  The Free-​thinker: 1718, 1722, 1733, 1739, 1740, 1742; The Female Spectator: 1746, 1747, 1748, 1750, 1755, 1766, 1775; The Humourist: 1720, 1724, 1725, 1730, 1735, 1741.

138   Richard Squibbs readership was small, the collected essays enjoyed a thriving afterlife as “classicks” for roughly seventy years, until English literary taste had changed sufficiently to make the rigor and religiosity of Johnson’s moralizing seem outmoded and dull. Goldsmith, then, was half-​right too. Posterity indeed still remembers the Rambler, but only as the lesser writing of Dictionary Johnson. From the vantage of 1759, however, Johnson’s single-​handed restoration of the periodical essay to literary prominence was remarkable not just for the Rambler itself, but for stimulating a brief but prolific revival of the genre after more than three decades of mediocre iterations. The Rambler’s ruminative style, generalizing philosophy, and sober self-​criticism stripped the approach of Addison’s and Steele’s essays to what Johnson conceived as the genre’s bare rhetorical essence. Instead of recording the foibles of the Town in their time-​bound details, he sought to abstract from them general principles of right and wrong conduct. When three major collections of periodical essays—​ James Harrison’s British Classicks (1786), J. Parsons’s Select British Classics (1793), and Alexander Chalmers’s British Essayists (1803)—​canonized the genre at the end of the eighteenth century, all skipped straight from the Guardian to the Rambler and those series which immediately followed it. Nathan Drake, too, structured his five-​volume history of the genre (1805, 1809) around these same high-​water marks. But where Johnson looked to the Spectator as an inspiring example of how diurnal essays could live on into posterity, most essayists writing in the wake of the Rambler pointedly rejected Johnson’s religious seriousness and heavy-​handed style. So even in the one literary genre in which Johnson was demonstrably influential, his example was mostly a negative one—​fitting for such a dogged contrarian.

The Periodical Essay The Rambler today is best known for its moral and intellectual rigor and elevated diction: a totemic expression of the older Johnson made familiar by Boswell. Among students of the eighteenth century who are not Johnsonians, roughly five essays have come to stand in for the series as a whole: Rambler 4 (on the novel), 5 (on Spring), 12 (on a young woman come to London for service), 60 (on biography), and 155 (on the danger of habits). In this, the Rambler has shared the fate of the Spectator, whose 635 essays are typically represented by the eight or so that are most often anthologized. But in the Spectator’s case, we read them because of the ratified historical impact they had in constituting the modern public sphere and its characteristic print media. In the case of the Rambler, we read them because Boswell’s Johnson wrote them. Their difference from other periodical essays, in other words, is what marks them as Johnson’s and makes them worth reading. Taken as a whole, however, the Rambler offers insight not just into the literary development of Johnson’s characteristic philosophical tough-​mindedness, but into a generic conception of the periodical essay that has been mostly lost to literary history.

Essays   139 As Boswell notes, Johnson undertook the Rambler to remedy a conspicuous absence in the publishing world of mid-​century London: no essay series of comparable scope, moral intent, or literary and intellectual quality had appeared since the Spectator’s last volume of 1714. So much time had elapsed, and so many inferior imitations had come and gone, in fact, that he believed such a publication would “have the advantage of novelty” (Life, vol. i, 201). The Rambler’s wordy, at times ponderous, style was certainly novel for the genre and much remarked upon (Boswell’s defense of it, comparing the acquired taste of Johnson’s harder “liquor of more body” to Addison’s instantly pleasing “light wine,” is among his most apt similes—​even if he seems to have taken it from Johnson himself: Life, vol. i, 224).3 And against the expectations of the title, Rambler essays tend to reek of the closed air of the study rather than sparkle with the liveliness of the town as had the Tatler and Spectator. This was deliberate, as Johnson found Steele’s essays wanting for “being mere Observations on Life and Manners without a sufficiency of solid Learning acquired from Books” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 215). Instead of recording and reflecting on the minutiae of London life with such compelling style that his essays might eventually claim the notice of posterity, Johnson used the winnowing force of his intellect and rhetoric immediately to retrieve kernels of universal truth from the disposable husks of everyday situations. This made the Rambler responsive more to Johnson’s sense of what should always matter than to the comparatively petty matters of the day. Johnson’s account of the Spectator’s achievement in the Life of Addison offers crucial insight into this revisionist conception of the periodical essay. John Gay’s “Present State of Wit” (1711), the first extensive account of the new genre, provided the template, which Johnson would fill out with a deeper sense of literary history. Gay had marveled at how the Tatler dared “to tell the Town”—​twice weekly—​“that they were a parcel of Fops, Fools, and vain Cocquets” yet managed to reform readers’ behavior because it did so with such panache.4 “’Tis incredible to conceive the effect his Writings have had on the Town,” Gay goes on; “How many Thousand follies they have either quite banish’d, or given a very great check to” while having “set all our Wit and Men of Letters upon a new way of Thinking” (Poetry and Prose, vol. ii, 452). Though Town manners had started to backslide once the Tatler ceased publishing, Gay held out great hope for the newly published Spectator, whose “Spirit and Stile” and “Prodigious . . . Run of Wit and Learning” promises similarly great things (455). Johnson, too, praises the Tatler and Spectator for supplying “cooler and more inoffensive reflections” to “minds heated with political contest” by the newssheets of the day, noting that these essays “had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that time, and taught the frolick and the gay to unite merriment with decency” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 614). One can hear echoes of this account in Habermas’s still-​influential theory of how the first English periodicals helped create modern public culture in Queen Anne’s London. Yet Johnson also situates this

3  See Richard Ingrams, ed., Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The “Anecdotes” of Mrs Piozzi in the Original Form (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 22. 4  John Gay, Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. ii, 452.

140   Richard Squibbs new form of print media in a longer history of European literature in ways that implicitly explain his manner of proceeding in the Rambler. The Rambler was, in some ways, a throwback. But to what exactly? Boswell sought to explain and ennoble the Rambler’s characteristic ponderousness by giving it a distinguished national pedigree. The rigor of Johnson’s style, he claimed, harks back to “the great writers of the last century, Hooker, Bacon, Sanderson, Hakewell, and others,” like Sir William Temple and Sir Thomas Browne (Life, vol. i, 219, 221). By the time Boswell wrote this, the Rambler had become a “classic” of the English essay tradition, known to many more readers as handsomely bound volumes than it ever had been in periodical form; it had taken its rightful place, shelved alongside the tomes of early modern England’s hardest and most serious thinkers. The Rambler’s original periodicity appears, from this vantage, incidental to its universal character and worth. Johnson’s own account of the periodical essay, however, emphasizes the genre’s complex, and necessary, engagement with its own moment. He also gives it a deep transnational pedigree, citing “Casa in his book of Manners, and Castiglione in his Courtier” as key precedents for the Tatler’s and Spectator’s common mission to reform “the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 614). But Johnson notes, too, that these English serials bear the influence of the popular Caractères (1688) of Jean de La Bruyère. This collection of satiric portraits of courtiers and citizens during the reign of Louis XIV “exhibited the “Characters and Manners of the Age” so engagingly and with such “justness of observation” that new French and English editions continued to be issued and read, long after the society, whose foibles La Bruyère skewered, had ceased to be (vol. xxii, 614, 612). By so successfully bridging the gap between timely moral writing and the regard of posterity, the Caractères in Johnson’s view provides a model to which authors of popular moral essays should aspire. The distinctively English innovation was to use the nation’s notorious public appetite for news and controversy, and the teeming print media which fed it, as a means of mass social and cultural improvement.5

The Form of the Rambler This potted history might suggest that Johnson wasn’t much concerned with the periodical essay’s formal dimensions, but the format he chose for the Rambler indicates otherwise. The Caractères in The Life of Addison appears not only as a conceptual bridge between present and future, but also formally as one between the Italian conduct books and the Spectator. While Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) (1528) is a collection of dialogues and Casa’s Galateo (A Treatise on Politeness) (1558) a monologic discourse, the Caractères is a miscellaneous collection of essays, moral reflections, and 5 For a full exposition of the impact character writing had on the development of the English periodical essay, see Richard Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-​Century Periodical Essay (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 42–​80.

Essays   141 character sketches that manage to compel despite being “written without connection” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 612). La Bruyère’s book, in a way, represents what would become the end of the publishing trajectory of the English periodical essay, as formerly weekly (or biweekly, or even daily) sheets responding to matters of the moment were collected in volumes and reprinted as morally, if not thematically, consistent wholes. The numerous sections of the Caractères, however, never circulated individually. In Johnson’s view, this may have hindered the work’s effectiveness, for writing that attempts to reform its readers’ morals and manners must be adapted formally to its intended sphere of action. Johnson notes that while English readers have long “had many books to teach us our more important duties,” before the Tatler and Spectator no literary works had appositely engaged the comparatively minor “track of daily conversation” that required for its reformation “the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amusement” (vol. xxii, 613). The dignity of the form (minor though it may be) lies in its self-​sufficiency: regularly circulated folio half-​sheets act as a material bulwark of common sense against the flood of newssheets and controversial tracts “agitating the nation” (vol. xxii, 614). This was the original format of the periodical essay, to which Johnson deliberately returned with the Rambler. Between the final number of the Spectator and the first of the Rambler, essay serials had appeared much more frequently as columns amidst the miscellaneous matter in magazines and newspapers than as individually published sheets. Many of these, like Lewis Theobald’s Censor, first published in Mist’s Journal (1715–​17), were later brought out in collected editions to assert their enduring value apart from their original, evidently ephemeral, publication media. Such was the assumed cachet of the single-​sheet essay that the preface to the Humourist (1720) claimed that its initial popularity when the essays had “appear’d Abroad singly” warranted this collected volume, though there’s no indication that the Humourist had ever circulated as individual sheets (1720, [xxxi]).6 The folio half-​sheet, according to Spectator 10, helped focus the mind amidst the myriad distractions of London and its teeming “publick Prints.”7 The double-​column printing of the Spectator’s sheets, moreover, slyly mimicked the form of the standard early eighteenth-​century newssheet in order to confound readers’ expectations when, instead of finding the usual miscellaneous material therein, they’d discover a single, sustained topic for reflection. By taking just the “Quarter of an Hour” required to read one of these essays each morning, London’s citizens could then apply the “sound and wholesome Sentiments” they contained to their daily experiences around town (Spectator, vol. i, 47, 46). Johnson, as a former editor and miscellaneous writer for the Gentleman’s Magazine, recognized how essential this self-​contained format was to the focusing aims of the periodical essay and refined it further to emphasize the genre’s inherent dignity. Each 6 

The Humourist (London, 1720), xxxi. See Nathan Drake, Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, Illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, 3 vols. (London, 1809), vol. i, 48. Drake was unable to verify that The Humourist ever circulated as sheets, and no further information has since come to light. 7  The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. i, 45.

142   Richard Squibbs Rambler essay was printed in single columns across three half-​sheets to make it stand out even more from other periodicals. The series was also the first printed without advertisements, and with sequential page numbering to encourage readers to keep and bind them in order. These changes materially reflect Johnson’s posterity-​oriented conception of the periodical essay and would shortly be adopted by series like the Adventurer (1752–​4), the World (1753–​6), the Connoisseur (1754–​6), the Mirror (1779–​ 80), and the Lounger (1785–​7). To write essays for the present was, for Johnson and his immediate successors, also to write for the edification of readers in an extensive, unknowable future.

The Topicality of the Rambler While these formal departures indicate Johnson’s desire to elevate the Rambler above everyday pettiness and commercial concerns, the essays themselves were not unconcerned with matters of the moment. James Woodruff has shown how Johnson’s original readers would have easily grasped the topical relevance of a number of Rambler essays whose contemporary context is not immediately evident to us. Using London newspapers as his guide, Woodruff connects several essays on the problematic effects of sudden riches, and one on the force of chance in human affairs, to the public mania generated by the State Lottery drawing of 1751.8 Rambler 107 (March 26, 1751) refers directly to the imminent shift in Britain from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar; the taxonomy in Rambler 144 of various types of pernicious detractors appeared amidst several cases of public reputation-​trashing; the warning in Rambler 149 against prematurely condemning suspects of criminal acts followed on the heels of a widely reported instance of mob justice; and no. 148, dealing with “parental tyranny,” was published in the wake of news reports concerning multiple acts of parricide and filicide.9 Besides these, the Rambler features recurring seasonal reflections; meditations during religious holidays; and critical essays on biography, history, prose fiction, and poetry which seem prompted by recent publications. Though Johnson would boast in the Rambler’s final number that he had “never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled [his] readers to discuss the topick of the day” (Yale Works, vol. v, 316), this was true only in the most reductive sense. Research like Woodruff ’s demonstrates how Johnson regularly aligned the Rambler’s philosophical inquiries with topics of great public interest to demonstrate, by implication, how readers might come to recognize general or universal patterns of conduct (or moral truth) in what might otherwise appear passing matters of media-​driven concern.

8 See Rambler 131, in Yale Works, vol. iv, 331–​5; Ramblers 172, 181, 182, and 184, in Yale Works, vol. v, 145–​50, 187–​96, 200–​5; and Woodruff, “Johnson’s Rambler,” 27–​8. 9  See Woodruff, “Johnson’s Rambler,” 33, 49, 56–​7.

Essays   143 This Johnsonian impulse to reveal the enduring substance beneath superficial appearances informs the Rambler’s signature rhetorical style as well. The contrast with the Spectator illuminates how each series models, in its essayistic form, different conceptions of how readers should engage with the world. A typical Spectator essay will declare its proposition concerning human character and conduct, and then move through a number of particular instances that demonstrate the validity of that proposition. “The most improper things we commit in the Conduct of our Lives, we are led into by the Force of Fashion,” begins Spectator 64. “Instances may be given, in which a prevailing Custom makes us act against the Rules of Nature, Law, and common Sense,” Mr. Spectator continues, “but at present I shall confine my Consideration of the Effect it has upon Men’s Minds, by looking into our Behaviour when it is the Fashion to go into Mourning.” Following an account of the history of courtly mourning rituals, the essay concludes by pointing out how absurd it is for the general public to adopt such rituals to mourn foreign princes with whom they have no connection, not least because the mass shift to mourning garb leaves domestic clothiers “pinched with present Want” for the period’s duration. The essay’s arch tone and wry depiction of the “wholesale Dealer in Silks and Ribbons,” who dreads the death of any “foreign Potentate” because of how this fashionable “Folly” will impact his bottom line, reinforce the worldliness of its moralizing (Spectator, vol. i, 275–​7). This pattern—​followed throughout the Spectator—​ formally enacts the ideal process by which readers should mull over the general moral or philosophical points the essays raise as they encounter representative instances of them in their daily business around the Town and City. The Rambler likewise matches its rhetoric to its aims, but with a key difference. Whereas the Spectator adduces worldly particulars to bear out its nuggets of general wisdom, Rambler essays often take circuitous tours from moral generalities through particular exceptions to these general rules, before returning to modified reaffirmations of these essays’ original propositions. “The heart of Johnson’s mission as a moralist,” according to Leopold Damrosch, “is to make us stop parroting the precepts of moralists and start thinking for ourselves” (81). The movement Damrosch describes from received precepts to the reader’s thoughtful reconsideration of them highlights individual moral agency to a greater degree than the more sociable ethos expressed (and modeled) throughout the Tatler and Spectator. Mark E. Wildermuth’s consideration of the religious dimensions of Johnson’s style in the Rambler likewise points to the series’ primary focus on individual moral and intellectual development. Each essay aims, he notes, “to expand our moral consciousness by prompting us to consider different kinds of perspectives, the human and the divine, the relative and the absolute, in order more fully to comprehend the spiritual and ethical significance of our behavior” (229). The rhetorical pattern Johnson used to try to catalyze this new comprehension is remarkably consistent throughout: over half of the Rambler’s 208 essays (114, to be exact) begin by asserting a general idea or precept, which is then subjected to minute inquiry to ascertain just how far it applies to the vagaries of human experience. Of the remaining ninety-​four essays, sixty-​five are epistles from fictitious readers, with the rest comprising literary criticism (mostly of Milton’s verse and the folly of pastoralism) and Eastern

144   Richard Squibbs tales—​and even many of these essays revolve around common assumptions which Johnson proceeds to question. Whereas Addison and Steele primarily sought to make their readers better, more thoughtful citizens, Johnson wants his readers to adjust their expectations, and come to self-​understanding, via a rational, gently skeptical, Christian morality. Only thus prepared, the Rambler insists, can readers fortify themselves against the fashionable caprices and material temptations of a superficial world.

The Religiosity of the Rambler Johnson’s critical concern with the power of inherited opinion is unique in the history of the British periodical essay. The Rambler’s musings often proceed either from a universal principle identified by one of the ancients (Cicero or Horace, usually) or from a long-​held belief with which most would automatically agree. Over 20 percent of the essays, in fact, begin with some variant of the formulation “It has long been observed . . .” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 92), or “Nothing has been longer observed . . .” (vol. v, 172). This pattern, along with the wandering quality of the essays’ ruminations, speaks to Johnson’s intent to lay bare for readers how they might critically examine the validity of truisms and adapt them to more productive uses. Rambler 29, for instance, begins by asserting that “There is nothing recommended with greater frequency among the gayer poets of antiquity, than the secure possession of the present hour, and the dismission of all the cares which intrude upon our quiet” and ends with the Christian moral that “if we neglect the duties” of the present “to make provision against visionary attacks, we shall certainly counteract our own purpose” (vol. iii, 158–​62). In a movement typical of the series, a pagan carpe diem ethos is surprisingly transformed, via a process of rational sifting and refinement, into a call to live a virtuous Christian life. Following ancient sensualist practice is, of course, absurd for those living with the benefits of Christianity, Johnson avers; yet “the incitements to pleasure are, in these authors, generally mingled with such reflections upon life, as well deserve to be considered distinctly from the purposes for which they are produced.” The essay then moves through arguments concerning the paralytic effects of an “idle and thoughtless resignation to chance”; the reason why “a wise man is not amazed at sudden occurrences” (because he “never considered things not yet existing as the proper objects of his attention,” not because he has special insight into “futurity”); and how the traditional moralists’ check to “the swellings of vain hope by representations of the innumerable casualties to which life is subject” can work equally well as “an antidote to fear” of the unknown by reinforcing just how much of life exceeds our control. It ends by musing on how indulging imaginary fears prevents us from recognizing that every moment offers opportunities for the work of moral improvement, the only real route to “human happiness”—​a conception of the good, and of the means of attaining it, far afield from the essay’s opening precept. But the essential point—​that worrying about an unknowable future prevents us from living the

Essays   145 good life, however we conceive it—​abides through all the philosophical and religious transmutations to which Johnson rigorously subjects it. The Rambler’s method of testing and qualifying received moral wisdom is brought to bear on even the hoariest sentiments, such as the universality of the “wish for riches.” Rambler 131 (Yale Works, vol. iv, 331–​5) begins by affirming that “Wealth is the general center of inclination, the point to which all minds preserve an invariable tendency.” There’s good reason for this, as “No desire can be formed which riches do not assist or gratify”; and it follows that since wealth is the surest means to gratification, the temptation to acquire it via “subtilty and dishonesty” is nearly as universal as the desire for wealth itself. After several paragraphs detailing the social ramifications of this problem (general unease, endemic fraud, the unfortunate “punctilious minuteness” of contracts), the essay concludes by facing up to the stubborn fact of inequality, which exacerbates the universal desire for riches. While we might pine for a lost “golden age” and its “community of possessions,” Johnson posits, it has vanished forever along with the “spontaneity of production” which made it possible. For production has long since depended on labor, and in spite of the “multitudes” who “strive to pluck the fruit without cultivating the tree,” “property” rightfully accrues to those who work for it. Readers determined not to resort to fraud, nor to take “vows of perpetual poverty” (which Johnson dismisses as an unproductive escape into “inactivity and uselessness”), are left with one course of action: to embrace “riches” as a means “necessary to present convenience” while adhering rigorously to “justice, veracity, and piety” in the pursuit and use of them. The intellectual loop Johnson runs here, like that of Rambler 29 and so many others, takes readers from an inherited truism, through a variety of instances which account for and test it, and back to the original proposition seen anew from the solid, common-​sense grounding of basic Christian morality. It’s a form of baptism-​by-​argument, plunging readers into the fluid medium of worldly knowledge illuminated by Christian piety, from which they emerge with new perspectives on themselves, and their moral-​cultural inheritance.

The Adventurer and the Universal Chronicle The Rambler’s pervasive religiosity, however moderated by the genre’s customary worldliness, is new to the periodical essay. While subsequent series like the World, the Connoisseur, and the Lounger would revert to the less religious, topical-​satiric mode associated with the Tatler and Spectator, the next significant London half-​sheet essay periodical the Adventurer (1752–​4) carried on the religious turn—​not surprisingly, given that Johnson wrote for it. Started by John Hawkesworth, who had succeeded Johnson as parliamentary reporter for the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1744 and would go on to literary fame for his edition of Swift’s works (1765–​6) and The Three Voyages of

146   Richard Squibbs Captain Cook (1773–​84), the series was also brought out by John Payne, the Rambler’s publisher. Johnson wrote roughly a quarter of its 140 numbers, as did Joseph Warton; Hawkesworth was responsible for most of the rest, with assistance on a few papers from Bonnell Thornton (who would shortly begin the Connoisseur with George Coleman) and several others—​ all anonymously. According to Payne, the Adventurer’s “ultimate design . . . [was] to promote the practice of piety and virtue upon the principles of Christianity; yet in such a manner that they for whose benefit it is chiefly intended may not be tempted to throw it aside”: in other words, to do what the Rambler did.10 And it succeeded, for the Adventurer initially outsold the Rambler in both its original sheets and its first folio and duodecimo editions. The series followed its predecessor, too, in presenting itself—​even more explicitly—​as a collection designed with posterity in mind. A note at the end of the Adventurer’s first essay informed readers that “These Numbers will be formed into regular Volumes, to each of which will be printed a Title, a Table of Contents, and a Translation of the Mottos and Quotations”; another at the bottom of no. 70 reads “End of the First Volume”; and the last essay notes that “when [the Adventurer] was first planned, it was determined, that, whatever might be the success, it should not be continued as a paper, till it became unwieldy as a book.”11 Though now known only to the most devoted eighteenth-​century specialist (and even then only for the twenty-​nine essays Johnson had anonymously authored), editions of the Adventurer were reprinted nearly as often as those of the Rambler through the 1790s.12 The explicit religiosity of both, however, remained unique; only the Looker-​On (1792–​3), a half-​ sheet essay series which later marshaled Christian piety against the immediate threat of Jacobin infidelity, would work in a similar vein. Even as Johnson can claim to have revived the periodical essay with the Rambler, the mid-​century literary marketplace remained a difficult environment for such ventures. The World and Connoisseur were singularly successful, publishing as weekly sheets for four and nearly three years, respectively, but the rest of the essay series that followed the Adventurer were either short-​lived or first appeared as columns in magazines and reviews, and then quickly forgotten. Johnson, too, capitulated to the realities of the market and published the Idler in the Universal Chronicle, a weekly review that appeared every Saturday from April 15, 1758 to April 5, 1760. The details of Johnson’s involvement in the paper beyond writing the Idler are murky, but Payne published the first thirty numbers, after which the Chronicle underwent two changes in publishing arrangements until it finally folded with its 104th number. Each issue ran eight pages, printed in three columns, and began with an Idler essay. Highlights from the week’s news culled

10  Quoted

in The British Essayists, vol. xix, The Adventurer, ed. Alexander Chalmers (Boston, MA, 1856), 11. 11  The Adventurer 1 (1753), 6, 420; 2 (1754), 415. 12 See Philip Mahone Griffith, “  ‘A Truly Elegant Work’: The Contemporary Reputation of Hawkesworth’s Adventurer,” in Robert B. White, Jr., ed., The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Libraries, 1978), 199–​208.

Essays   147 from other papers followed, mostly centered on London, though coverage of events in Scotland, Ireland, and foreign countries featured as well, along with poems and political essays, and advertisements (which appeared regularly after Payne gave up the paper). While the Chronicle struggled to find readers, a number of Idler essays were widely reprinted in other newspapers and magazines during the paper’s run; and volumes of the series were brought out over a dozen times through the end of the century, in addition to being included in Harrison’s and Parsons’s collections of “classicks.” So the Idler was another measured success for Johnson in this genre.

The Idler Critically, the Idler has been treated as an afterthought. Walter Jackson Bate’s remark that “the confirmed Johnsonian finds them thin” (Yale Works, vol. ii, xix) has colored reception of the essays ever since, to the extent that while the Rambler’s critical bibliography runs to over fifty published entries, there are only seven article-​length studies devoted to the Idler.13 An unconfirmed Johnsonian, however, can discern in the Idler’s lighter touch and more consistent engagement with Town life Johnson’s purposeful return to the established conventions of the periodical essay. Like the Rambler, the Idler features literary criticism, Eastern tales, and general moral reflections. Since Idler essays are shorter, the critical pieces mostly focus on broad evaluative principles instead of meticulously analyzing verse structure as in the Rambler’s Milton essays. The Idler’s early numbers also deal explicitly with current events, the series having begun nearly two years into the Seven Years’ War (essays 5 through 8 concern the war, a topical focus nowhere evident in the Rambler). Bate argues that while this topical turn indicates that Johnson initially wanted to distinguish the new series from its predecessor, the Idler’s reversion in later numbers to universal subjects and literary criticism suggests that Johnson found it easier in the end to rely on the approach he had pioneered in the Rambler. Given Johnson’s habitual indolence and pressure to continue working on his Shakespeare edition, this seems plausible. But the pervasive differences between the two series imply that Johnson wanted to explore a side of the genre that he had de-​ emphasized in the Rambler. Though it lacks the Rambler’s analytical rigor, the Idler translates its predecessor’s concern with self-​scrutiny into a more humorous, workaday idiom. Between the Adventurer’s last and the Idler’s first number, the World and the Connoisseur had infused the periodical essay with a sharper sense of irony and satire. Both series present a London public marked by shallow and materialistic self-​absorption that, especially in the Connoisseur, reflects the failure of the Spectator and other periodical essays to make good on the genre’s promise to create thoughtful, reflective citizens.14 The gleeful 13 

14 

And four unpublished dissertations from 1963 to 1978. For the satiric turn of the World and Connoisseur, see Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment, 73–​80.

148   Richard Squibbs irreverence with which they skewered the pretentions of Town life, though far afield from the pious sobriety we associate with the Rambler, seems to have registered with Johnson as he embarked on his final essay series, which is indeed marked by a greater “satiric impulse” (O’Flaherty, “Johnson’s Idler,” 213). But the Idler’s gentle satires of ordinary foibles suggest that Johnson strove to mitigate the barbed severity of the World and Connoisseur by restoring to the periodical essay the more tolerant and sociable tenor of Addison’s and Steele’s work. The Idler’s worldview is thus narrower and less historically extensive than the Rambler’s. Whereas Rambler essays typically point to how long a traditional notion has been held before skeptically picking it apart, the Idler follows the Spectator by offering entertaining confirmation of bits of common knowledge. Only eight Idler essays (out of 104) take the Rambler’s approach; the rest begin by stating what is “commonly observed” (Idler 11, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 36) or what “commonly happens” (Idler 18, vol. ii, 56), or by presenting a precept (“There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth”: Idler 20, vol. ii, 62; “Prudence is of more frequent use than any other intellectual quality”: Idler 57, vol. ii, 177) before showing, in a series of examples, how these nuggets of wisdom play out in daily life. This is not the intellectual baptism performed by the Rambler. But the way that many Idler essays dismantle the moral self-​righteousness which is always a potential upshot of social satire does recall the Rambler’s skeptical method. This aim of the Idler accounts, in part, for the prominence of character sketches in the series (36 percent of Idler essays feature sketches, compared with 21 percent in the Rambler). Where his first essay series aimed to make readers more independently thoughtful and pious individuals, Johnson’s second strives to promote an ethos of generosity and mild tolerance by reminding readers that they, too, are subject to the foibles they snicker at in others. The example of La Bruyère’s Caractères therefore looms larger in the Idler than it had in the Rambler. But while the best known of the Idler’s sketches (nos. 60 and 61, devoted to the hapless critic Dick Minim) hew close to traditional character portraits, Johnson sets most of the others in letters from fictional correspondents, which adds another layer of subtlety to his use of them to promote social morality. The letters from Robin Spritely in nos. 78 and 83 exemplify this perfectly. Spritely’s portraits of Sim Scruple, Dick Wormwood, Bob Sturdy, and Phil Gentle in no. 83 slot in neatly with the English tradition of descriptively named characters: Scruple delights in raising doubts; Wormwood compulsively contradicts everyone and everything; Sturdy’s convictions are unshakable; and Gentle acquiesces in every situation. A tenor of amused indulgence prevails as Spritely anatomizes the folly of each, showing at the end how Gentle’s refusal to take a position in an inconclusive debate allows all the others privately to feel as if they’ve actually won. Beyond what is implied in these humorous portraits of personal quirks, however, there’s no culminating lesson about proper conduct. These characters simply are who they are: harmless eccentrics whose leading traits an alert reader might mark in any crowd. The fictional letter form moreover allows Johnson to avoid the rigid moralizing of the traditional essayist. Readers must decide how much authority to grant Spritely, who confesses his own failings when he notes that it has taken him a month to

Essays   149 follow up his first letter because he (like Johnson) is an inveterate procrastinator despite “how often” he has “praised the dignity of resolution” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 259). This sort of broad acceptance of everyday shortcomings, rooted in clear-​eyed self-​criticism, is the Idler’s characteristic mode. The Idler’s aim to restore the tolerant good humor of the Tatler and Spectator to the genre thus parallels the Rambler’s reassertion of the classic periodical essay’s formal integrity with its half-​sheets. And the distinct tenor of each series finally harmonizes in the Idler’s last number. The coincidental publication of this final essay on Holy Saturday makes Johnson nudge his readers to begin “the review of life” and “the renovation of holy purposes,” for “the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 259). It’s a somewhat jarring conclusion to “this series of trifles,” though only those determined to hear nothing but sententiousness in Johnson’s voice could miss the winking in the essay’s last words, which encourage readers to think of “the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past” (vol. ii, 259). His abiding concern with literary posterity—​heard more explicitly in the Rambler’s concluding ruminations on his “future life” and “the final sentence of mankind”—​was never far from Johnson’s mind, even when producing these comparative “trifles” (vol. v, 318; vol. ii, 259).

Reception Looking back from 1802, Alexander Chalmers summed up the Rambler’s critical fortunes: once “the prejudices which were alarmed by a new style and manner” in the periodical essay had subsided, readers widely acknowledged the “general merit of this work” despite some quibbles from “critics and grammarians” concerning its “labored, and perhaps pedantic sentences.” While a “new set of objectors have appeared since the author’s death,” Chalmers charges them with petty “hostility” to a work designed not “for the uneducated part of the world, nor for those who, whatever their education, read only for their amusement.”15 Chalmers’s defense of the Rambler’s lofty aims and dismissal of complaints about its difficult language reveals how much the critical tide had turned by the end of the eighteenth century. He does, however, exaggerate how shocked readers were by the series when it first appeared, for the ostensible “alarm” at the Rambler’s “style and manner” was quite late in sounding: not until 1779, when Vicesimus Knox censured the “affected appearance of pomposity”—​“disgusting to all readers”—​which makes the Rambler “greatly inferior to the easy and natural Spectator,” did critics begin to assert a strong preference for the more genial style of Addison and Steele (Chalmers, in Critical

15 

Alexander Chalmers, in James T. Boulton, ed., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 81, 85.

150   Richard Squibbs Heritage, 81).16 Before then, and still well into the 1780s, critical assessments of the series repeated verbatim David Erskine Baker’s 1764 declaration that the Rambler “proved at least equal, if not superior, to” the Tatler and Spectator.17 Even those like Joseph Towers, who found the Rambler “less calculated for general reading” than the Spectator, and James Harrison, who regretted that the essays are “encumbered by words which possess too much Latinity for a mere English reader,” concurred that it was “more interesting to literary men” and an “exquisite periodical paper.”18 Yet by the end of the 1790s a critical consensus had developed that the Rambler’s laborious language interfered with the modus operandi of the periodical essay—​to help readers more deeply appreciate the moral dimensions of everyday life. The Idler’s reputation, meanwhile, rose a bit as the Rambler’s declined, while the Adventurer—​considered as “a continuation” of the Rambler—​was typically dispatched in a single sentence.19 William Shaw’s preference of the Idler for its “spirit” and “greater variety of subjects” was still unusual in 1785; but when Arthur Murphy less than a decade later characterized the Idler as “the Odyssey after the Iliad” because its “style of ease and unlaboured elegance” offers a pleasing break from “the fatigue of thinking” the Rambler foists on readers, he demonstrated why the Idler could have wider popular appeal (Murphy, in Critical Heritage, 72).20 By the time Chalmers rose to the Rambler’s defense, contending that in the Idler Johnson “sometimes forgot the exclusive business of the moral Essayist, [and] meddled with the occasional politics of the day,” he faced a growing consensus that, as William Mudford put it, “Johnson’s reflections on life in [the Idler] are more natural than in his Rambler,” and hence “far more valuable.”21 Judged by early nineteenth-​century standards of nature, it was clear to most that the Idler displays “more candour in [its] delineations, and more veracity in [its] assertions” than its more professedly serious predecessor (Mudford, in Critical Heritage, 80). By the time William Hazlitt published his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), the revolution in English critical assessments of the Rambler was complete. Johnson’s major achievement as an essayist was, to Hazlitt, everything that a periodical essay series should not be: unnatural, unoriginal, stilted, and leaden. Compared with the “memorandums of the events and incidents of the day, . . . finished studies after nature, and characters fresh from the life” that abound in the Tatler and Spectator, the Rambler 16 

Vicesimus Knox, “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Essays, Moral and Literary, 2 vols. (London: 1779), vol. i, 164. 17  David Erskine Baker, “Mr. Samuel Johnson, M.A.,” in O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 6. For repetitions of this judgment, see Early Biographies, 10, 20, 26, 103. 18  Joseph Towers, “An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies, 196; James Harrison, “The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies, 271. 19 Arthur Murphy, “Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson,” in Critical Heritage, 72. Knox, “Periodical Essayists,” calls the Adventurer “an imitation of the Rambler” (164). 20 William Shaw, “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Early Biographies, 169. 21 Chalmers, in The British Essayists, vol. xxxiii (London, 1817), xi; William Mudford, A Critical Enquiry (1802), in Critical Heritage, 80.

Essays   151 to Hazlitt appears as an “imposing commonplace-​book of general topics” containing “hardly a reflection . . . which had not been already suggested and developed by some other author, or in the common course of conversation.”22 Johnson “does not set us thinking for the first time,” nor do the essays offer readers anything like “a new truth gained to the mind” (Collected Works, vol. viii, 100). And where Murphy had offered a portrait of Johnson in the Rambler as “a dictator in his splendid robes” who “darts his lightning, and rolls his thunder, in the cause of virtue and piety” (Critical Heritage, 71), Hazlitt represents Johnson’s style as “the mimic thunder at one of our theatres,” while “the light he throws upon a subject is like the dazzling effect of phosphorous, or an ignis fatuus of words” (Collected Works, vol. viii, 101). Curiously, Hazlitt ignores the Idler, which would seem closer in tenor and execution to his ideal of the periodical essay (though he does pause to dismiss the Adventurer as “completely trite and vapid”: Collected Works, vol. viii, 104). Perhaps it was enough to erect the Rambler as the main foil to the Spectator. To an extent, this is how the Rambler is still read. What has changed is our tendency to consider the essays as concentrated expressions of Johnson’s moral and philosophical thought rather than to situate them firmly in the popular milieu of the periodical essay. In this post-​Boswell context, the Rambler seems always to have transcended its moment in ways that make Hazlitt appear to have missed the point. But, by overlooking the extent of Johnson’s particular engagement with this once ubiquitous and highly regarded genre, we too can miss much about his achievements as an essayist.

Further Reading Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. “Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler.” ELH 40, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 70–​89. Dixon, John Converse. “Politicizing Samuel Johnson: The Moral Essays and the Question of Ideology.” College Literature 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 67–​91. Fussell, Paul. “ ‘The Anxious Employment of a Periodical Writer.’ ” In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 143–​80. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Italia, Iona. “Johnson as Moralist in the Rambler.” The Age of Johnson 14 (2003): 51–​76. Korshin, Paul J. “Johnson’s Rambler and Its Audiences.” In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, edited by Alexander J. Butrym, 92–​105. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989. O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Johnson’s Idler: The Equipment of a Satirist.” ELH 37, no. 2 (June 1970): 211–​25. O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Towards an Understanding of Johnson’s Rambler.” SEL 1500–​1900 18, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 523–​36. Powell, Manushag N. “Johnson and His ‘Readers’ in the Epistolary ‘Rambler’ Essays.” SEL 1500–​1900 44, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 571–​94.

22  William

Hazlitt, The Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, 13 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1902–​4), vol. viii, 100.

152   Richard Squibbs Reinert, Thomas. “Periodical Moralizing.” In Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd, 46–​74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Rogers, Pat. “The Rambler and the Eighteenth-​Century Periodical Essay: A Dissenting View.” In Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-​Century Periodicals from “The Review” to “The Rambler,” edited by J. A. Downie and Thomas N. Corns, 116–​29. London: F. Cass, 1993. Spector, Robert D. Samuel Johnson and the Essay. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Van Tassel, Mary M. “Johnson’s Elephant: The Reader of the Rambler.” SEL 1500–​1900 28, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 461–​9. Wildermuth, Mark E. “Johnson’s Prose Style: Blending Energy and Elegance in the Rambler.” The Age of Johnson 6 (1993): 205–​35. Woodruff, James F. “Johnson’s Idler and the Anatomy of Idleness.” English Studies in Canada 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 22–​38. Woodruff, James F. “Johnson’s Rambler and Its Contemporary Context.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 85, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 27–​64.

Chapter 9

Schol arsh i p Mark A. Pedreira

As a lexicographer known for his erudition, Samuel Johnson was famously self-​ deprecating about his profession. In the work that would earn him the appellation Dictionary Johnson, he slyly defines lexicographer in lowly terms: “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Though he jokingly identifies himself as a “harmless drudge,” Johnson’s legacy, as a bibliographer, lexicographer, and editor—​seen in the Harleian Catalogue (1743–​5), A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765; rev. 1773 and 1778)—​has been extolled (particularly his lifelong study of Shakespeare) as “deep scholarship.”1 Johnsonians have observed how Johnson’s study of Shakespeare connects his major scholarly works, particularly his Dictionary and edition of Shakespeare. The scholarship, in fact, documents that Johnson’s “most important preliminary work” on Shakespeare, while he was compiling the Dictionary, was his study of William Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare, in which Johnson “marked out over 20,000 words.”2 Johnson cites Shakespeare “some ten thousand times,”3 giving Shakespeare a special presence in the Dictionary. In this chapter, based largely on my reading of the first and fourth editions of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755 and 1773 respectively) and his edition of Shakespeare, I acknowledge my debt to Robert DeMaria, Jr. and Jack Lynch, who were the first to recognize, in any detail, that Shakespeare stands (in Lynch’s words) “at the head of the pack” in the encyclopedic learning of Johnson’s Dictionary,4 and to recent textual-​critical work—​particularly 1  Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 99. 2  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 218. 3 Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare, 99. 4  Jack Lynch, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma (New York: Walker & Company, 2009), 87. On Johnson’s encyclopedism, see Robert DeMaria, Jr., Johnson’s “Dictionary” and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 4–​7; and Jack Lynch, “Johnson’s Encyclopedia,” in Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s “Dictionary,” ed. Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129–​46.

154   Mark A. Pedreira by Simon Jarvis, Freya Johnston, and Anne McDermott5—​that newly explores how Johnson’s lexicographical skills were pivotal to his editing of Shakespeare. Within these contexts (and related scholarly contexts such as Johnson’s bibliographical studies in the Harleian Catalogue), I argue that in the scholarly endeavors of Johnson’s Dictionary announced in his preface—​whether in his study of Shakespeare’s “diction of common life” (representative of the Elizabethan “wells of English undefiled”),6 poetic metaphor, or grammatical “composition”—​ Shakespeare’s authority, frequently complemented by classical and biblical authorities, undergirds much of the scholarly work of the Dictionary, equipping Johnson to be an editor of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare stands tall in Johnson’s Dictionary, the Dictionary, upon a careful scrutiny of his textual criticism in The Plays of William Shakespeare, enables Johnson, as Simon Jarvis puts it, to be a “fit editor” of Shakespeare.7 At the publication dates of Johnson’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare, no scholar had probed Shakespeare’s language—​or the language of many other writers included in the Dictionary from Sidney to Pope—​with Johnson’s unparalleled lexicographical knowledge and textual-​critical learning: a fact that deserves deeper scrutiny.

Scholarly Research: The Harleian Catalogue Johnson’s “Account of the Harleian Library” first appeared in the October 1742 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine (reprinted in the first of five volumes in the Catalogus Bibliothecæ Harleianæ, 1743), “promoting,” in his words, not only the Harleian Catalogue—​co-​ authored with William Oldys for Thomas Osborne (who commissioned this sale catalog of the Earl of Oxford’s library)—​but also celebrating catalogs as a literary genre.8 Johnson states, “By means of catalogues only can it be known, what has been written on every part of learning, and the hazard avoided of encountering difficulties which have already been cleared, discussing expressions which have already been decided, and digging in mines of literature which former ages have exhausted” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 80). Given that Johnson’s work classifies this large library’s inventory (roughly 50,000 volumes)9 under numerous disciplinary subjects and various formats (folios, quartos, 5 Simon

Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–​ 1765 (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1995); Freya Johnston, “Samuel Johnson,” in Claude Rawson, ed., Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone: Great Shakespeareans (London: Continuum, 2010), 115–​59; Anne McDermott, “Johnson’s Editing of Shakespeare in the Dictionary,” in Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso, eds., Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 115–​38. 6  Preface to the Dictionary, in Yale Works, vol. xviii, 95, 96. 7 Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, 161. 8  Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 94. 9  See DeMaria, Life, 104.

Scholarship   155 and octavos), he hardly exaggerates when he says that the Harleian Catalogue represents “every part of learning”—​though Johnson’s own bibliographical work, given his interest and expertise, probably largely contributed to the catalog’s scholarly annotations on the classics and English Bibles. In “An Account of the Harleian Library,” Johnson’s bibliographical proposal concerns not only “promoting the sale of the books which it enumerates,” but also something more scholarly. Accordingly, Johnson proposes the catalog’s purposes: “that the books shall be distributed into their distinct classes, and every class ranged with some regard to the age of the writers; that every book shall be accurately described; that the peculiarities of editions shall be remarked, and observations from the authors of literary history occasionally interspersed” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 77–​8). Though the division of labor in the catalog may be uncertain, its scholarly intentions display the bibliographic precision and scholarly detail that typify Johnson’s writing career. Given Johnson’s lifelong study of the Bible, readers of the Harleian Catalogue might expect that he had a major hand in its heavily annotated first section, “Biblia Sacra.” In sections divided according to folio, quarto, and octavo, readers find citations not only on one of Johnson’s favorite sources in his Dictionary, the Authorized King James Bible (in the “folio” section, in no. 189, the annotator cites John Selden on the learned translators)10, but also on other significant early English translations of the Bible. Under “octavo” readers find important early English translations of the Bible in various editions in nos. 427, 431, 436, and 437, respectively, by Miles Coverdale (1538), Tyndale (“with the Latin Translation of Erasmus,” 1550), “the Version of Geneva” (1575), and “the Bishops Translation” (1579). Some of the annotations in the “Biblia Sacra” seem typical of Johnsonian reasoning and style. For instance, under “English Bibles, Quarto,” the annotator, consistent with Johnson’s manner of conjecture in his textual criticism (informed by his bibliographical knowledge of sources), conjectures in no. 291 about a bibliographical matter: in this case a title, The Whole Bible, by Coverdale, Dedicated to Edward the Sixth (1553). In the annotation, the annotator notes (with bibliographical evidence): “It is called, in the Title, the Whole Bible, probably, because the Apocryphal Books, omitted in the former Edition, are inserted in this.” In the same quarto section, readers, in fact, find the “former Edition” lacking the Apocrypha in no. 288, the Bible, by Coverdale, Dedicated to Henry the Eighth (1537). The Harleian Catalogue, particularly volumes i and iii, also describes editions and translations of ancient writers and even showcases certain classical writers. For example, in what is presented as a catalog within the Harleian Catalogue, readers find “Catalogue of Tully’s Works, published before the Year 1500” (vol. iii, no. 922). Concerning Homer’s works, Johnson, who wrote extensively in the Lives of the Poets about Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, probably would have given considerable attention to the Harleian Library’s renowned Renaissance translators of Homer’s Iliad. For instance, the annotator of an edition of Lorenzo Valla’s translation of Homer provides interesting bibliographical

10 

John Selden, Table-​Talk (London, 1689), sig. A2r.

156   Mark A. Pedreira information on a late fifteenth-​century Italian edition, printed by Henricus Coloniensus and Statius Gallicus, of Lorenzo Valla’s abridged translation of Homer’s Iliad (a translation of sixteen books), cited as follows: “Homeri Ilias Lat per Laurentium Vallam (first edition, Bresia, November 1474)” (vol. iii, no. 923).11 Regarding English translations of classics, the third volume of the Harleian Catalogue includes a section on “English Translations from the Greek and Latin Poets, Historians, and Orators.” Some of the translations are cited in Johnson’s Dictionary, particularly those described in nos. 4863, 4864, 4865, and 4878: respectively, the folio editions (some with famous notes) of Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Pope’s English Iliad (1715, “with Notes and Cuts”), Sir Roger L’Estrange’s translation of Aesop’s (and Other Eminent Mythologists) Fables, with Morals and Reflections (1704), and Works, Translated into English Verse, by Dryden (1697, “adorned with a 100 Sculptures”). Among the authorities in the Dictionary, Johnson also cited writers found in “English Translations” in quarto, particularly nos. 4959 and 4961, respectively, Thomas Creech’s edition, with notes, of Lucretius’s Of the Nature of Things (1683) and Thomas May’s edition of Virgil’s Georgicks (1628). Some of these translations, particularly Pope’s folio edition of the Iliad, were cited in Johnson’s Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets, not only for the celebrated verse but also for the renowned critical prefaces and notes celebrated by Johnson as landmarks of English criticism.

Scholarly Learning: Johnson’s Ideal Reader and Authorities in the Dictionary According to Lynda Mugglestone, part of the “identity” of a dictionary is its function as a “guide.”12 In his preface, Johnson’s brief discussion of how readers may be guided in the Dictionary involves a defense of his work’s scholarly detail and an identification of his ideal reader, or “accurate examiner”: one who observes, unlike “careless or unskilful perusers,” the “diversities of significations” in his copious quotations (some 116,000 citations, illustrating roughly 40,000 entries), which enlarge and stabilize the English language.13 Johnson states: 11  Lodi Nauta, “Lorenzo Valla,” in Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 959. 12  Lynda Mugglestone, Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 13 DeMaria, Johnson’s Dictionary, 17. David Crystal notes that the first edition (1755) has “over 113,000” quotations and “a further 3,000 in the fourth” (1773): A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology, ed. David Crystal (London: Penguin Books, 2005), xix. Lynch, following McDermott, counts 42,773 entries: Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary”: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language (New York: Walker & Company, 2004), 8.

Scholarship   157 But a work of this kind is not hastily to be charged with superfluities: those quotations, which to careless or unskilful perusers appear only to repeat the same sense, will often exhibit, to a more accurate examiner, diversities of signification, or, at least, afford different shades of the same meaning: one will shew the word applied to persons, another to things; one will express an ill, another a good, and a third a neutral sense; one will prove the expression genuine from an ancient author; another will shew it elegant from a modern: . . . the word, how often soever repeated, appears with new associates, and in different combinations, and every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language. (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 97–​8)

Though his predecessors in Renaissance lexicography (especially Robert Estienne and Thomas Cooper) produced pioneering classical dictionaries, Johnson’s modern lexicographical methods—​in which he collects, copies, and arranges his illustrative quotations shaping his entries14—​highlight new concerns such as sense-​divisions, metaphorical meanings, source and target domains of metaphors, denotative and connotative senses, and occasional usage comments, with citations ranged, generally chronologically, from the age of Elizabeth to the age of Pope (see Chapter 17, “Language”). Throughout the Dictionary “hundreds of entries,” according to Lynch, present Johnson’s encyclopedic learning, giving readers not only an unparalleled guide to the English language but also knowledge on an encyclopedic scale.15 For instance, under balance n.s., “balance, Fr. bilanx, Lat.,” Johnson gives nine senses, in both 1755 and 1773, beginning with the encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers, who explains (here in epitome) its mechanical function in “determining the difference of weight” and its “several forms.” After presenting Chambers’s definition Johnson gives eight other senses of balance, copiously illustrated, further explaining—​as Johnson, in his preface, terms the function of definition16—​the headword’s various significations: under sense 2, “A pair of scales,” citing Jonathan Swift and Sir John Davies (on the “balance of power” and “burden’d balance,” respectively); and under sense 3, “A metaphorical balance, or the mind employed in comparing one thing with another,” citing Shakespeare’s Henry V (“I have in equal balance justly weighed, | What wrong our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer: | Griefs heavier than our offenses”). Under sense 4, readers encounter another sense on the comparative act of the mind (“The act of comparing two things, as by the balance”), illustrated by Roger L’Estrange and Francis Atterbury. L’Estrange, in his edition of The Fables of Aesop, notes, “this inference upon the balance, that we suffer only the lot of nature.” In senses 5 and 6, readers find mercantile and economic meanings on “overplus of weight” and on “account balance”: sense 5 illustrated by Sir Francis Bacon and sense 6 by Johnson, essentially, “pa[ying] the balance” to make an

14 See Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​ 1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 15  Lynch, “Johnson’s Encyclopedia,” in Anniversary Essays, 129. 16  See Yale Works, vol. xviii, 88–​9.

158   Mark A. Pedreira “account even.” Under sense 7, cross-​referenced to sense 2, they find a related meaning on “scales,” “Equipoise; as balance of power”—​with an illustration of psychological equipoise cited from Pope’s Essay on Man (epitomized in the couplet): “These mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, | Make and maintain the balance of the mind.” Finally, senses 8 and 9 denote, respectively, “The beating part of the watch,” illustrated by John Locke in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, and the astrological sign—​“one of the twelve signs”—​“commonly called Libra.” Though the entries in the Dictionary display considerable variety, Johnson’s entry on balance may be taken as fairly typical of his lexicographical craft. In the “interpretative lexicography” discussed in the preface and practiced in the Dictionary, Johnson’s depiction of metaphor, though originally conceived in The Plan of a Dictionary (1747) as one type of sense, tropological, in a “consecutive series” of senses, records this trope—​frequently occurring with multiple and related meanings (or “kindred senses”)—​as closely “interwoven” in the language (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 47–​9, 91). Given metaphor’s copious and polysemous nature, Johnson does not, in many entries, necessarily classify this trope as figurative or metaphorical (as seen in his third sense of balance, classified as metaphorical). For example, in the Dictionary (1755), under to fetter v.a., Johnson gives a single sense: “To bind; to enchain; to shackle; to tie.” In the fourth edition of 1773, he adds: “It is properly used of the feet, but is applied to other restraints.” In his definition, Johnson defines to fetter by synonymy, providing citations by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bramhall, and Prior, which illustrate the transitive verb’s literal sense with respect to “feet” and its application, metaphorically, “to other restraints.” Significantly, in Johnson’s fourth citation of to fetter by John Bramhall, from A Defence of True Liberty, the reader finds the only illustration of the feet literally chained (though in its context of Bramhall’s refutation of Hobbes, the quotation presents an analogical comparison of Hobbes’s “universal necessity” with the fettering, or enchainment, of liberty): “Doth a master chide his servant because he doth not come, yet knows that the servant is chained and fettered, so as he cannot move?” The other four citations, including single citations by Sir Philip Sidney and Matthew Prior and two by Shakespeare, illustrate the word’s metaphorical “appli[cation] to other restraints.” Sidney, in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, provides the first illustration: “Neither her great worthiness nor his own suffering for her, could fetter his fickleness.” Johnson’s two subsequent citations are taken from Cymbeline and Much Ado about Nothing, in which readers find both the “conscience” and passions metaphorically fettered (in Cymbeline Posthumus Leonatus, in prison, reflects, “My conscience! Thou art fetter’d | More than my shanks and wrists”; and in Much Ado about Nothing, Leonato, distressed about Hero, exclaims, “Fetter strong madness in a silken thread; | Charm ach with air, and agony with words”). Prior, in Solomon; or, The Vanity of the World, provides an elegant couplet: “A chain which man to fetter man has made; | By artifice impos’d, by fear obey’d.” Though drawing on diverse writers to illustrate this transitive verb, Johnson gives illustrative presence to Shakespeare, whose poetic metaphor, connecting tragedy and comedy with everyday life, displays Shakespeare’s “diction of common life.”

Scholarship   159 Verb entries with metaphorical senses copiously illustrated by Shakespeare abound in Johnson’s Dictionary, frequently supplemented by classical authorities. One noteworthy example of a word illustrated by Shakespeare and classical authorities is to discharge v.a. Johnson’s first edition provides twelve senses, with sense 3—​“To throw off any thing collected or accumulated; to give vent to any thing; to let fly. It is used of any thing violent, or sudden”—​giving the verb’s metaphorical target domain, “any thing violent, or sudden.” Johnson cites Shakespeare (in Henry VIII, “Mounting his eyes, | He did discharge a horrible oath,” and in Macbeth, “Infected minds, | To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets”), as well as three other citations—​one by Dryden and two by Pope—​of translations of classical poets. For example, Johnson cites Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “Nor were those blust’ring brethren left at large, | On seas and shores their fury to discharge” and Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, “Soon may kind heav’n a sure relief provide; | Soon may your sire discharge the vengeance due, | And all your wrongs the proud oppressors rue.” Johnson’s citation of famous modern translators of classical writers, such as Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Ovid, gives a major presence to classical translation in Johnson’s Dictionary. In the Dictionary, Johnson’s ancient and modern authorities illustrate meaning, yet they also represent, as a storehouse of literary style, the beauty of the English language.

A Journey into a Word: The Linguistic Complexity of Heart in Johnson’s Dictionary Although Johnson’s reading for A Dictionary of the English Language involved, in the words of his preface, “excursions into books,”17 intellectual journeys “fortuitous and unguided,” Johnson, as a lexicographer, frequently homed in on certain scholarly matters that he studied with great attention (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 84). In his preface, he mentions how his Dictionary sometimes emphasizes scholarly concerns, particularly grammatical matters (a subject treated extensively in his Dictionary’s “Grammar of the English Tongue”), giving considerable attention to what contemporary grammarians call “composition,” especially phrasal verbs and compound words. Though it would be impractical to examine in the Dictionary Johnson’s record on phrasal verbs (for instance, the entry for the verb take, which has “133 numbered senses and 363 quotations,” includes many phrasal verbs), Johnson’s readers, nonetheless, may examine the Dictionary’s record on a noun like heart,18 which is given illustrative quotations that present it in 17 Concerning

Johnson’s “excursions” and “journey into words” see Lynda Mugglestone, Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 2015). 18  Lynch observes that though “Few words have as many meanings as set and take,” words like heart, civil, and spirit “show [Johnson’s] attention to some of the most difficult problems in lexicography” (Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary,” 10).

160   Mark A. Pedreira well-​known idioms and in phrasal verb constructions. In fact, examining heart—​a word signifying things physiological, conceptual, and emotional in many cultural contexts in early modern British literature—​provides a good test case of how Johnson’s Dictionary functions not only as a “guide” but also (in another “identity” of dictionaries noted by Mugglestone) as a “factual work of reference.”19 Given the history of heart in English, Latin–​English, and Latin lexicography, I begin by placing Johnson’s thoughts in historical context. In defining and illustrating heart, an organ culturally and metaphorically central to human thought, Johnson had his work cut out for him. If most early English lexicographers had little to say on the subject, three of his British predecessors may, nonetheless, have caught his attention—​ John Kersey in A New English Dictionary (1702), Nathan Bailey in Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), and Benjamin Martin in Lingua Britannica Reformata; or, A New English Dictionary (1749).20 Kersey is the first to list compounded forms of heart: for instance, “Faint-​hearted, or cowardly”; “False-​hearted, or deceitfull”; “Hard-​hearted, or cruel”; “Light-​hearted, or cheerful”; and “Stout-​hearted, or couragious.” Bailey defines heart, “The Seat of Life in an Animal Body, &c.” and gives two of its compounded forms, Heartless and Heart-​Struck. Martin, an innovator in English lexicography—​ though drawing, as Mugglestone shows, on Johnson’s proposals about sense-​divisions in the Plan21—​gives several “sense-​divisions” of heart: “1 the most noble part of the body 2 the middle, or centre of a place, &c. 3 the substance, or goodness” (italics mine). In the Latin lexicographical tradition, Robert Estienne, whom Johnson carefully read in Thesaurus linguæ Latinæ: Editio nova (London, 1734–​5; first edition Paris 1531),22 provides nearly 100 citations illustrating cor (heart), the vast majority by Lucretius, Plautus, Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Cicero. In the Latin–​English tradition, Robert Ainsworth—​drawing on Estienne’s disciple Thomas Cooper in Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565; 1578 reprint),23 who defines heart, cor, cordis, “The heart; the minde; courage . . .” and cites Latin idiom like Virgil’s “aspera corda” (savage hearts) in the Aeneid and Lucretius’s “anxia corda” (anxious heart) in De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things)—​presents, in Thesaurus linguæ Latinæ compendiarius; or,

19 Mugglestone, Dictionaries, 2. 20 Kersey,

A New English Dictionary (London, 1702; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974); Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum (London, 1730; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969); Martin, Lingua Britannica Reformata (London, 1749). 21  Lynda Mugglestone, “Dictionaries,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 161. 22  Robertus Stephanus [i.e., Robert Estienne], Thesaurus linguæ latinæ: Editio nova, 4 vols. (London, 1734–​5). Lynch notes, “Robert Estienne’s Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ (1543) and the Suidas Lexicon offered models for [Johnson’s] great Dictionary of the English Language (1755)”: see Lynch, “Johnson, Samuel (1709–​84),” in Robert B. Todd, ed., The Dictionary of British Classicists, 3 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), vol. ii, 519–​20. 23  Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1578; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1975). For Cooper’s indebtedness to Robert Estienne, see DeWitt T. Starnes, Robert Estienne’s Influence on Lexicography (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1963), 104.

Scholarship   161 A Compendious Dictionary of the Latin Tongue (London, 1736),24 many citations on heart, like Cooper’s, concerning passion, emotions, and courage. In these English, Latin–​English, and Latin dictionaries, Johnson could examine the many senses and illustrations of heart and its compounded forms. Yet in A Dictionary of the English Language Johnson provides new insight on this noun, giving twenty senses of heart in his 1755 edition (revised as twenty-​one senses in 1773) drawn from “popular language” and illustrated by reputable writers. In his fourth edition, he gives its etymology: “heort, Saxon; hertz, German.” Then in the first two senses in the 1773 edition he explains, first, its anatomy as a “muscle,” “which by its contraction and dilation propels the blood through the course of circulation . . .”; and, second, its meanings in “popular language.” In sense 2 (which was formerly conjoined with the physiological explanation of sense 1, absent a single clause, in 1755), Johnson writes, “It is supposed in popular language to be the seat sometimes of courage, sometimes of affection, sometimes of honesty, or baseness” (italicized words added in 1773; italics mine). Johnson derives two of his twenty-​one senses of heart—​sense 7, “Seat of love,” and sense 14, “the seat of tenderness”—​from the domains of “popular language,” as illustrated, respectively, by Pope and by Shakespeare and Nicholas Rowe. Readers find in sense 7, “Seat of love,” Pope’s Pastorals: “Ah! what avails it me the flocks to keep, | Who lost my heart while I preserv’d my sheep?”; and in sense 14, “the seat of tenderness: a hard heart therefore is cruelty,” they find, in addition to a citation from Rowe, Shakespeare’s memorable lines in Coriolanus spoken by the protagonist about his general Menenius: “I’ve seen thee stern, and thou hast oft beheld | Heart hardening spectacles”—​a citation giving a compounded form of heart, the “Heart hardening” perspective of an embattled general. Johnson’s other senses of heart refer, semantically, to various mental, emotional, and physical domains. In sense 4, “The inner part of any thing,” Johnson focuses with prescience (centuries before cognitive linguistic theory about metaphorical “embodiment”25) on the heart as “the inner part”—​inferentially, something bounded, central, and essential—​“of any thing”: image schematically a container schema, defined by George Lakoff as “a boundary distinguishing an interior from an exterior.”26 To illustrate this sense, Johnson cites idioms on the heart concerning the “inner part” of various things, entities, or places by George Abbot, Sir John Hayward, Robert Boyle, John Dryden, and Joseph Moxon, emphasizing, respectively (noting here only their idiomatic expressions), “the heart of the country” (Abbot), “the heart of the kingdom” (Hayward), “heart of trees” (Boyle), “the heart of the town” (Dryden), and “heart of oak” (Moxon). In senses 12 and 16, Johnson also derives these significations from the image schema of a contained space: the heart containing the spatial qualities, in senses 12 and 16, respectively, of 24 

Robert Ainsworth, Thesaurus linguæ Latinæ compendiarius, 2 vols. (London, 1736). See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 26 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 271. 25 

162   Mark A. Pedreira “secret thoughts” (“recesses of the mind”) and “secret meaning[s]‌” (“hidden intention”). In sense 12, defined “Secret thoughts; recesses of the mind,” Johnson cites five authorities, the King James Bible, Davies, King Charles, Locke, and Pope, in which the citations taken from the Authorized King James Version and John Locke express idioms about heart signifying both its “secret thoughts” and its mentally hidden, or recessed, nature. In the citation taken from 2 Samuel 6:6, readers find Michal’s private thoughts: “Michal saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart.” And in the citation from Locke, from Some Thoughts concerning Education, they encounter the well-​known idiom to open one’s heart: “Would you have him open his heart to you, and ask you advice, you must begin to do so with him first.” Under sense 16, “Secret meaning; hidden intention,” Shakespeare, however, stands as the sole citation (in Twelfth Night, Viola, disguised and momentarily unrevealing, promises Olivia the heart of her message: “I will on with my speech in your praise, | And then shew you the heart of my message”). In addition to these various senses of heart, Johnson gives a broad range of other significations, many displaying familiar English idiom. A brief enumeration of Johnson’s remaining senses of heart, supported, as we shall see, with copious literary authorities, presents his Dictionary as a useful reference work (all the senses, here without citations, are given in full, except senses 5, 6, 9, and 10): in senses 5 and 6, respectively (with key words noted), “character” and “courage”; in sense 8, “Affection; inclination”; in sense 9, “Memory”; in sense 10, “Good-​will; ardour or zeal” (a sense explaining the idiom, “To take to heart any thing”); in sense 11, “Passions; anxiety; concern”; in sense 13, “Disposition of mind”; in sense 15, “To find in the HEART. To be not wholly averse”; in sense 17, “Conscience; sense of good or ill”; in sense 18, “Strength; power; vigour; efficacy”; in sense 19, “Utmost degree”; in sense 20, “Life. For my heart seems sometimes to signify, if life was at stake; and sometimes for tenderness”; and, finally, in sense 21, “It is much used in composition for mind, or affection.” What is noteworthy in some of these senses of heart, especially senses 8 and 11, is the way that Johnson’s citations illustrate well-​known idiom, particularly phrasal verb constructions including the noun heart. For instance, in sense 8, “affection; inclination,” Johnson cites several quotations that include a phrasal verb, set one’s heart on.27 The first citation, however, from the Authorized Version forcefully illustrates this sense—​ “affection; inclination”—​with the preposition towards: “Joab perceived that the king’s heart was towards Absalom” (2 Sam. 14:1). Next, Johnson cites Samuel Daniel’s History of the Civil War (“Means how to feel, and learn each other’s heart, | By th’ abbot’s skill of Westminster is found”). Immediately following, Johnson gives three citations by John Milton, Roger L’Estrange, and William Temple, which present a phrasal verb, set one’s heart on. These three citations are presented, to borrow Johnson’s words in the preface, as a “genealogy of sentiments,” or “intellectual history,” “by shewing how one author

27  A.

P. Cowie and R. Mackin, eds., Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 320.

Scholarship   163 copied the thoughts and diction of another” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 98). In Johnson’s presentation of writers who use the idiom set one’s heart on to illustrate the eighth sense of heart—​“affection; inclination”—​readers find Milton’s authority, in Paradise Lost, eloquently showcased and subtly imitated (for Milton, L’Estrange, and Temple to set one’s heart on is, with variations on the Miltonic sentiment and style, to be “over-​fond,” “to set the heart too much upon any thing,” or to “scorn all the rest”): by Milton, “Nor set thy heart, | Thus over-​fond, on that which is not thine”; by L’Estrange, “ ’ Tis well to be tender; but to set the heart too much upon any thing, is what we cannot justify”; and by Temple, “A friend makes me a feast, and sets all before me; but I set my heart upon one dish alone, and if that happen to be thrown down, I scorn all the rest.” The final two illustrations by Dryden display English idiom, such as the idiomatic expression “stubborn heart” cited from Dryden’s Fables: “What did I not, her stubborn heart to gain? | But all my vows were answer’d with disdain.” It is worth noting, given Shakespeare’s representation in the Dictionary of the “diction of common life,” that sense 11—​“Passions; anxiety; concern”—​is given its sole citation by Shakespeare, illustrating heart in another idiom, “Set your heart at rest.” In a citation from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania, quarreling with Oberon, ultimately offers him moral consolation: “Set your heart at rest; | The fairy land buys not the child of me.”

Enlarging the Language: Shakespearean Illustration of Compounding in the Dictionary If Shakespeare in the Dictionary illustrates many of Johnson’s senses of heart, his presence is felt no less in the compounded forms of this noun. Regarding grammatical compounds as a species of “composition” (or word formation), he identifies compounds, like composition in general, as an essential part of the English language. In his preface, he in fact views “composition” in general, and compounding in specific, as “one of the chief characteristicks of a language,” and endeavors to rectify the “universal negligence of [his] predecessors” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 86). He delivers on his promise. On the compounding of heart, Johnson gives twenty-​four hyphenated compounds. Moreover, in five of these linguistic compounds Shakespeare is the sole illustrator (heart-​ach, heart-​break, heart-​burned, heart-​dear, heart-​ease); in two more he is the sole illustrator of a single sense (heart-​sick, and heart-​struck); and in two more he is one of several illustrators (heart-​string and heart whole). As Shakespeare’s genius is frequently presented within Johnson’s larger appreciation of Elizabethan writers, who are celebrated as the “wells of English undefiled” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 96), Spenser stands out as an illustrator of compounded forms of heart. Among the illustrators of compounded words of heart, Spenser is the sole illustrator of four

164   Mark A. Pedreira compounds (heart-​quelling, heart-​robbing, heart-​sore, and heart-​swelling). Under heart-​sore n.s., Johnson, for instance, gives a memorable citation about Archimage from the Faerie Queene: “Wherever he that godly knight may find, | His only heart-​sore and his only foe.” Milton also stands out as an illustrator of compounds of heart, though less for frequency (being the sole illustrator of one sense of heart-​struck and the sole illustrator of heart-​easing) than for passages complementing Shakespeare. In Johnson’s, for instance, on heart-​ease n.s., “quiet; tranquility,” and heart-​easing adj., “giving quiet,” with illustrations, respectively, by Shakespeare and Milton (in Shakespeare’s Henry V, “What infinite heart-​ease must kings neglect, | That private men enjoy?,” and in Milton’s L’Allegro, “But come, thou goddess fair and free, | In heav’n yclep’d Euphrosyne, | And by men heart-​easing mirth”), readers find in the lexicographer, attentive to Shakespearean antithesis and Miltonic personification, the eye of the critic. As a lexicographer attuned to philological, grammatical, and rhetorical concerns, Johnson viewed compounding, illustrated by great writers, as critical to the study of English word formation and English literary style.

Scholarly Notes: Johnson on King Lear In the conclusion to his notes on King Lear, Johnson, in his literary-​critical judgment on this tragedy, states, “The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 702). Drawing on his lexicographical and textual-​ critical knowledge in the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare (1st ed. 1765; revised 1773 and 1778),28 Johnson demonstrates in his notes to King Lear his skill as an editor of Shakespeare—​a challenge because early Shakespearean editors debate the respective authority of readings in this play’s quarto of 1608 and in the First Folio (1623), as well as the complexities of Shakespeare’s language. Like other early editors, Johnson, in the preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), focuses on the editor’s major tasks of establishing and explicating Shakespeare’s text (tasks performed ably by Johnson’s predecessors William Warburton and Lewis Theobald, whose revised editions of Shakespeare published in 1747 and 1757,29 respectively, were used at various points by Johnson, sometimes eclectically, as his base texts30). To examine Johnson’s editorial methods as aspects of his lexicographical expertise, I shall look at his notes to King Lear, focusing on the storm scenes in act 3, scenes 1, 2, and 4, as well as a parallel passage

28 

Jack Lynch, “The Dignity of an Ancient: Johnson Edits the Editors,” in Comparative Excellence, 102. The Works of Shakespear, ed. William Warburton, 8 vols. (London, 1747); The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 8 vols. (London, 1740). 30  Simon Jarvis states, “Johnson alternated his copy-​text in the course of editing Shakespeare,” using both Warburton’s 1747 edition and a “1757 reprint of Theobald’s edition” (Scholars and Gentlemen, 174). For the “eclectic combination” of texts, both Warburton’s 1747 edition and the 1757 edition of Theobald, used by Johnson as base texts during his editorial career, see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 83. See 29 

Scholarship   165 to King Lear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that reveals Johnson’s thoughts about Shakespeare’s language. In act 3, scenes 1, 2, and 4, Lear endures a storm on the heath, accompanied, at first, by the Fool, and later by Kent as well. Lear’s suffering in the storm is first revealed in act 3, scene 1, lines 15–​17, when the Gentleman asks Kent about who accompanies Lear during the storm. This short dialogue between Kent and the Gentleman is overlooked in Johnson’s notes, but Johnson had cited the exchange in his Dictionary as the sole citation of the first sense of heart-​struck (“Driven to the heart; infixed for ever in the mind”): “Who is with him? | —​—​—​—​None but the fool who labours to out-​jest | His heart-​struck injuries.” In act 3, scene 2, line 48, when disguised Kent finds Lear, he speaks lines about “Man’s nature” that admit various readings in the quarto and the folio. Johnson’s text reads, “Kent. Man’s nature cannot carry | Th’ affliction, nor the fear” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 683). Johnson observes, “So the folio, the later editions read, with the quarto, ‘force’ for ‘fear,’ less elegantly.” In fact, Theobald’s edition of 1757 reads, “Man’s nature cannot carry | Th’ affliction, nor the force.”31 Disagreeing with Theobald’s editorial judgment, Johnson adopts the folio reading. Though Johnson’s editorial decision may be partly motivated by the fact that, in Freya Johnston’s words, he generally upheld “the folio as the genuine record of Shakespeare’s final intentions,”32 Johnson prefers the folio reading here because it “elegantly” depicts (as the Arden editors later note) a distinction between psychological fear and physical force:33 the folio reading “fear” signifying psychologically the “affliction” suffered in the storm. Johnson’s next note, on 3.2.56, focuses on Lear’s response to Kent’s words about “man’s nature.” The lines examined in the 1765 edition (some of these same lines with notes omitted in the Yale Johnson) read: Caitiff, shake to pieces, That under covert and convenient seeming, Hast practis’d on man’s life! Close pent-​up guilts, Rive your concealing continents . . .34

In the first part of his annotation, Johnson rejects Warburton’s conjectural emendation “under cover of convivial seeming” (or in Warburton’s periphrasis, “under cover of a frank, open, social conversation”35) for the folio reading “under covert and convenient seeming,” noting, in deference to the common reader, Shakespeare’s “usual and proper also Arthur M. Eastman, “The Texts from Which Johnson Printed his Shakespeare,” Journal of English and German Philology 49 (April 1950), 182–​91. 31 

The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, vol. vi, sig. C4r. Johnston, in Great Shakespeareans, vol. i, 143. 33  King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 266. 34  The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (London, 1765), vol. vi, sig. G2r. 35  The Works of Shakespear, ed. Warburton, vol. vi, sig. F6r. 32 

166   Mark A. Pedreira sense” of convenient (“accommodate” to the present purpose; “suitable” to a design). Johnson explains, “Convenient seeming” is “appearance” such as may promote his purpose to destroy.36 Regarding Lear’s lines, “Close pent-​up guilts, | Rive your concealing continents,” Johnson—​and later Steevens in the Johnson–​Steevens edition of 1778—​ takes the Folio reading instead of the quarto reading, “rive your concealèd centres” (as Steevens notes, “The quartos read, concealed centers”37). The Arden editors concur, claiming that the Folio reading “makes better sense” than the quarto.38 In this particular reading, the New Oxford editors in King Lear and His Three Daughters, printed in the New Oxford Shakespeare, also concur, printing the Folio reading “continents” in brackets—​instead of “centres”—​in their quarto edition.39 In the Oxford Shakespeare edition of the quarto (1608), The History of King Lear, Stanley Wells explains the quarto line, “rive your concealèd centres,” periphrastically: “split open your hidden cores, rend asunder the coverings of the containers (F’s ‘continents’) where you cower concealed.”40 Among eighteenth-​century editors, neither Johnson nor his predecessors take the quarto reading. Only Johnson, however, gives a note (omitted in the Yale Edition) explicating the folio reading, “Rive your concealing continents . . .” He explains, “Continent stands for that which contains or incloses.”41 Johnson’s annotation is cited in Horace Howard Furness’s late nineteenth-​century New Variorum Edition,42 and his explication has prevailed, so widely accepted that it is essentially adopted without attribution in twentieth-​century editions, such as Jay L. Halio’s edition (based on the First Folio) of The Tragedy of King Lear.43 As a source for his annotation, Johnson draws on the Dictionary, which defines continent n.s. as “That which contains any thing. This sense is perhaps only in Shakespeare.” To illustrate this sense, Johnson cites the Folio reading of “concealing continents” in King Lear (found in both Theobald and Warburton)—​ though perhaps from memory, as he mistakenly writes “contending continents”—​along with giving two other citations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra (the Hamlet citation expunged from the fourth edition). Earlier Johnson had examined the unique sense of continent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, giving a parallel passage from King Lear. In his note to 2.1.92, Johnson, regarding Titania’s words about a river overflowing its banks, “That they have over-​born their continents,” comments, “Born down the banks that contained them. So in Lear, 36 

Plays, ed. Johnson, vol. vi, sig. G2r.   The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols. (London, 1778), vol. ix, sig. Gg5v. 38  King Lear, Arden Shakespeare, 266. 39  The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Critical Reference Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), vol. i, 1295. 40  The History of King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells, the Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183. 41  Plays, ed. Johnson, vol. vi, sig. G2r. 42 Shakespeare, King Lear: The New Variorum Edition, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 11th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott & Company, 1908), 176. 43  Note 56: “Rive . . . continents Slit open the containers that hide you.” The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 37

Scholarship   167 Close pent up guilts | Rive their concealing continents” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 145). In the 1765 edition, Johnson actually wrote “pent guilts,” but as the Yale editors observe, he corrected this line in the 1778 edition to Shakespeare’s actual words (with the phrasal verb “pent up”): “Close pent up guilts” (vol. vii, 145). A “pent up” heart, as one discovers in Johnson’s Dictionary entry on pent, is “shut up,” and Lear’s forceful verb rive in the line “Rive their concealing continents”—​signifying, in the Dictionary, “to split” or “to cleave” (or even “to force in disruption”)44—​has the same force toward the “pent-​up heart” as the river’s waters have when “they have over-​born their continents.” The metaphorical image foregrounded in the passage under scrutiny is containment (a container metaphor): in Johnson’s explication, “Born down the banks that contained them.” Though Johnson does not cite these lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his Dictionary as one of his illustrations of continent, these lines nonetheless add force to his argument that the sense of continent, both in his edition to Shakespeare and in his Dictionary, is “That which contains anything”: a sense uniquely and eloquently Shakespearean. In a note to 3.4.26–​ 7, Johnson displays how his bibliographical knowledge of Shakespeare—​here his inclusion and commentary on two lines “present only in the folio”—​shapes the characteristic blend of Johnson’s textual and literary-​critical commentary. The text under critical scrutiny reads, Lear. In, boy, go first. [To the Fool.] You houseless poverty—​ Nay, get thee in; I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep—​ (Yale Works, vol. viii, 685)

Johnson’s brief note suggests (to borrow Freya Johnston’s words) “the presence of authorial revision” on Shakespeare’s part,45 focusing especially on Shakespeare’s alleged moral intentions. Johnson states, “These two lines were added in the author’s revision, and are only in the folio. They are judiciously intended to represent that humility, or tenderness, or neglect of forms, which affliction forces on the mind” (vol. viii, 685). Johnson’s diction, “judiciously intended,” displays the scholarly dimension of his moral criticism, in which he uses bibliographical evidence—​“these two lines . . . added in the authour’s revision”—​to infer a moral purpose. In Johnson’s moral judgment, Shakespeare “represent[s]‌” the king’s “humility, or tenderness, or neglect of forms”—​ Lear forgetting for a moment that he is king—​because of his “affliction.” In this note, Johnson the scholarly annotator seamlessly blends with the literary critic. In Johnson’s notes to King Lear, which well represent his editorial methods, readers find the notion of Johnson, the renowned lexicographer, bibliographer, and textual critic, as a “fit editor” of Shakespeare fully realized. Johnson’s scholarly genius draws 44 

Regarding the Renaissance “cardiocentric self,” Lear’s anguished speech, in an historical viewpoint probably motivating (though unacknowledged) the Johnsonian interpretation, is the “agony of the overcharged heart.” William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 166. 45  Johnston, in Great Shakespeareans, vol. i, 143.

168   Mark A. Pedreira on his unparalleled knowledge of language and literature, a knowledge enabled by his ambitious scholarly endeavors in the Harleian Catalogue, A Dictionary of the English Language, and his edition of Shakespeare. Among the great Shakespearean editors, Johnson stands alone as a pioneering textual critic and lexicographer.

Further Reading DeMaria, Robert, Jr. “Johnson’s Dictionary.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 85–​101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–​1765. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Lynch, Jack. The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. McDermott, Anne C., ed. Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers, vol. v, The Eighteenth Century. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. Mugglestone, Lynda. Samuel Johnson & the Journey into Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Parker, G. F. Johnson’s Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Ritchie, Fiona, and Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Starnes, De Witt T. Renaissance Dictionaries: English–​ Latin and Latin–​ English. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1954. Starnes, De Witt T., and Gertrude E. Noyes, eds. The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604–​1755. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1946. Walsh, Marcus, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Chapter 10

Fiction Steven Scherwatzky

Samuel Johnson’s reputation as a critic of fiction and as a writer of fiction rests largely on two mid-​century publications: his observations on the novel in Rambler 4 (1750) and his Oriental tale The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). While Rambler 4 presents his most well-​known statement on the genre and Rasselas his most highly regarded foray into it, Johnson also wrote numerous other short works of fiction, often in periodical essay format; incorporated fictional elements in putatively nonfictional works; and, in conversation, offered scattered comments on fiction, several of which Boswell recorded. But both Johnson’s thoughts on fiction and the fiction he wrote reveal a profound ambivalence. More so than any other genre in which he worked, Johnson expressed mixed feelings toward fiction, especially what he viewed as a new kind of fiction popular in his day. The reason for his ambivalence is clear: he celebrates the new fiction for providing an accurate “mirror of manners and life,” that dispenses with the artificial “machines and expedients” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 19) of earlier fiction. But he worries that corrupt characters are too frequently presented in an attractive light, which could be harmful to impressionable readers. This ambivalence, however, is not strictly personal: it indicates a more widespread concern regarding the status and worth of fiction in eighteenth-​century England and of the novel as an emergent literary form. If Michael McKeon is correct in his claim that the eighteenth-​ century novel “registers an epistemological crisis” regarding “how to tell the truth in narrative,” then Johnson’s ambivalence exemplifies the complex response to what is now called “formal realism.”1 Rambler 4 provides Johnson’s most sustained statement on fiction and focuses specifically on the novel as the literary form with which “the present generation seems more particularly delighted” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 19). The essay appeared when the label novel had become the dominant epithet for an approach to writing fiction defined by (often

1  For a full discussion of his theory of the novel’s development, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20–​1. McKeon does not discuss Johnson’s fiction or Rambler 4 in relation to his theory.

170   Steven Scherwatzky contradictory) labels, including “romance” and “history.”2 Rambler 4, however, neglects the word “novel” entirely (nor does it mention any novelists by name). Johnson refers instead to “this kind of writing,” which he judges a new kind of fiction, as that which “may be termed not improperly the comedy of romance” (vol. iii, 19).3 He proceeds to distinguish between the subject matter of older “heroic romances” and these newer “familiar histories.” It is not that the word novel was unavailable to Johnson. He included it five years later in the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), yet chose an outdated, even dismissive, definition: “a small tale, generally of love.”4 This hardly captures the richness of the new fiction addressed in Rambler 4. But specific generic designation hardly seems Johnson’s concern.5 He was more worried about the potentially deleterious moral impact “this kind of writing” could have on what he considered its primary audience: “the young, the ignorant, and the idle” (vol. iii, 21). The older “romances formerly written” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 21) focused on incidents and sentiments so “remote” from everyday life that they posed little danger to readers who might otherwise identify too closely with the characters and situations. The newer “familiar histories,” in their attention to proximal daily routine, provide readers with “the power of example” (vol. iii, 22) that could readily be emulated, perhaps dangerously so. Hence Johnson’s ambivalence: he celebrates the capacity of the new fiction for presenting life “in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind” (vol. iii, 19) but worries about the kind of life represented. The new fiction admirably depicts situations and characters that “arise from general converse, and accurate observations of the world” (vol. iii, 20), but its attempt at verisimilitude risks blurring the distinction between vice and virtue. The problem for Johnson is that the very qualities that make this genre so attractive are also troubling. He acknowledges that “the greatest excellency of art” is “to imitate nature,” but also believes that great care should be taken regarding the types of nature “most proper for imitation” 2 

J. Paul Hunter writes of eighteenth-​century novels, “In their own time they were most often called ‘histories’, these fictional narratives of present time that chronicled the daily experiences, conflicts, and thoughts of ordinary men and women. They went by other names too—​‘romances,’ ‘adventures,’ ‘lives,’ ‘tales,’ ‘memoirs,’ ‘expeditions,’ ‘fortunes and misfortunes,’ and (ultimately) ‘novels.’ ” See “The Novel and Social/​Cultural History,” in John Richetti, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. 3   To avoid the anachronistic label “formal realism,” I will refer to the emergent novel as the “new fiction.” 4 Geoffrey Day argues that Johnson’s Dictionary definition recalls Lord Chesterfield’s distinction between “novel” and “romance”: “A Novel,” Chesterfield claims, “is a little gallant history, which must contain a great deal of love, and not to exceed one or two small volumes.” Quoted in From Fiction to the Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 9. 5  Michael McKeon states, “It is only around the middle of the eighteenth century that ‘the novel’ became the standard and dominant term” (Origins of the English Novel, 25). But the question of what formal qualities distinguish the novel from other forms of prose fiction, such as “romance,” is complex. Margaret Anne Doody, for example, challenges the idea of any distinction between “novels” and “romances”: see The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), especially 11–​16.

Fiction   171 (vol. iii, 22). Regarding Henry Fielding, for example, he told Boswell “he was a blockhead” and a “barren rascal.” Boswell: “Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?” Johnson: “Why, Sir, it is of a very low life” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 173–​4).6 Johnson worried that youthful and naive readers of novels are “easily susceptible of impressions” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 21) and lack the ability to discriminate between the kinds of conduct worthy of imitation. Depictions of “low life” are not in and of themselves objectionable; rendered properly, they could provide appropriately monitory lessons. But, for Johnson, depictions of “low life” should have their limits. Despite the inherent truth value of just representations of nature, he argues that it is “not a sufficient vindication of a character that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn” and chastises writers who, “for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally conspicuous” (vol. iii, 22). Too often the new fiction renders reprehensible characters attractive, casting a “brightness on their crimes” (vol. iii, 23). For Johnson, this is no minor concern: the stakes are “of the utmost importance to mankind” (vol. iii, 24). Writers of fiction, he believes, have a moral responsibility to present clear guidelines for readers, all the more so for the impressionable among them. To think otherwise would be a violation of the moral imperative of art. In Johnson’s estimation, virtue and vice should not be judged by the same mimetic standard. The disruption of proper distinctions is deemed a “fatal error” to which “all those will contribute, who confound the colours of right and wrong, and instead of helping to settle their boundaries, mix them with so much art, that no common mind is able to disunite them” (vol. iii, 24). This “fatal error,” however, is not inevitable. The solution can be found in the nature of fiction itself. However much the new fiction might strive to emulate the incidents and actions of real life, it is free from the constraints of narrative history. Fictional characters and their situations are not bound by the limits of what might or might not have happened in any historical record. They can speak and act in ways that sound and appear real without being measured against any record other than that of the author’s imagination. “In narratives, where historical veracity has no place,” Johnson states, “I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue not 6 

For a discussion of Johnson’s perspectives on Fielding and Richardson, see Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), and Mark Kinkead-​Weekes, “Johnson on ‘The Rise of the Novel,’ ” in Isobel Grundy, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays (London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984), 70–​85. Harrison and Kinkead-​Weekes both claim that, for several reasons, Johnson should have been more amenable to Fielding. Harrison recounts Hannah More’s anecdote of Johnson being horrified to learn she had read Tom Jones. More records Johnson as having said, “I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work” (quoted in Harrison, 11). In contrast, Johnson valued Richardson for the clarity of his moral vision in creating unambiguous characters, claiming in his Life of Rowe that “It was in the power of Richardson alone to teach us at once esteem and detestation, to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit, elegance, and courage, naturally excite; and to lose at last the hero in the villain” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 580).

172   Steven Scherwatzky angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 24). At its best, Johnson believes the new fiction can sufficiently advance truth and morality without forfeiting the realistic qualities that made it so attractive to eighteenth-​century readers. It is not that vice should not be shown; but when shown, “should always disgust.” Characters need not be wholly good or wholly bad; when authors exercise a proper sense of balance and discrimination, attuned to the demands of both art and morality, the result can blend the virtuous ideals of heroic romance with the demands of realism. Johnson’s ambivalent perspective on the new fiction in Rambler 4 is consistent with his general view of the relationship between life and literature. His praise for the new fiction’s insistence on illustrating life in its “true state” and for limiting its incidents to “natural events” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 19) anticipates his objections to Milton’s Lycidas, which he derides for its blatant artificiality: “In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new.” In its “inherent improbability,” Lycidas fails to meet the test of life: there is nothing real to measure it against (vol. xxi, 176). Shakespeare, by contrast, succeeds in Johnson’s estimation as a dramatist who “holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life” (vol. vii, 62). However, Shakespeare also “sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without moral purpose” (vol. vii, 71). Much like the authors of the new fiction who “confound the colours of right and wrong,” Shakespeare “makes no just distribution of good and evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong and at the close dismisses them without further care and leaves their examples to operate by chance” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 71). Writers of fiction, as Johnson sees it, need to avoid Shakespeare’s mistake. With all of life’s diversity at their disposal, they must exercise caution and display restraint. For Johnson, there is nothing artificial about imposing limitations of this kind on artistic expression. Men and women of virtue endure similar constraints. Fiction, he believes, should abide by the same standard.

Early Political Fiction Long before Johnson became a critic of fiction, he was a writer of fiction, or, at least, a writer who included fictional elements in works typically classified as political writing and journalism. Among Johnson’s first publications are two political pamphlets, Marmor Norfolciense (1739), a satirical prophecy that ridicules Whig foreign policy under ministry leader Robert Walpole, and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739), a mock defense of the Lord Chamberlain’s refusal to grant a public performance license to Henry Brooke’s play Gustavus Vasa; or, The Deliverer of his Country (1739). At this time Johnson also began work as a parliamentary reporter for Edmund Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, producing accounts of political debates that were closed to the public (1740–​2). While these early writings are a far cry from the kinds of fiction

Fiction   173 addressed in Rambler 4, they nonetheless employ fictional elements for political purposes and should not be dismissed as mere hackwork: they demonstrate Johnson’s progress from polemical satire in the pamphlets to more nuanced dialectical thinking in the Debates in Parliament. Marmor Norfolciense was listed for sale in the May 11, 1739, issue of the Daily Advertiser. The pamphlet was published anonymously, though Johnson had already established himself as the author of the play Irene (1735) and of the poem London (1738). The shift toward political pamphleteering might seem an odd choice for a fledgling writer seeking literary fame but, as Terry Eagleton has noted, this was a time when literature had yet to become institutionalized in the modern sense.7 The lines of demarcation between literature and politics were often blurry, and Johnson’s political pamphlets openly emulate Jonathan Swift. Indeed, Swift had published a twenty-​six-​line satirical political poem called The Windsor Prophecy (1711) that may have served as a model for Johnson’s twenty-​six-​line poem in Marmor Norfolciense. Swift’s prophecy adopts the pretense of a recently discovered apocalyptic medieval poem foretelling political disaster for England. Similarly, Marmor Norfolciense begins with a fictitious report of a farmer in Norfolk (Walpole’s birthplace) having unearthed a marble stone inscribed with dire warnings for England’s future upon its discovery. The report is followed by a poem “To Posterity” that begins, Whene’er this stone, now hid beneath the lake, The horse shall trample, or the plough shall break, Then, O my country! shalt thou groan distrest, Grief swell thine eyes, and terror chill thy brest, Thy streets with violence of woe shall sound, Loud as the billows bursting on the ground. (Yale Works, vol. x, 24–​5)

The poem recounts standard Opposition complaints about the ways in which Court policies have weakened the nation and rendered it vulnerable to foreign attack.8 But Johnson differs from Swift in what comes next. While The Windsor Prophecy is simply a mock-​prophetic poem, Johnson follows his poem with a detailed prose exegesis conducted by an inept commentator.

7 Eagleton

argues that “an intellectual division of labor” didn’t exist in early eighteenth-​century England: The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 24. Carey McIntosh states, “For Johnson, as for his contemporaries, the word fiction refers not merely to narratives and novels, but to any departure from literal truth, hence to some figures of speech and literary conventions as well as to all invented episodes”: The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). 8  Bertrand Goldgar provides a detailed account of Opposition politics at this time in Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–​1742 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). See also Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 91–​106.

174   Steven Scherwatzky Though not fiction in the standard sense of an imaginative narrative tale, the prose commentary meets Johnson’s Dictionary definition of fiction as the “act of feigning or inventing.” In this case, Johnson has invented a character, a mock pedant, who misses the point. The prophecy announces that England, at the time of the marble’s discovery, will see “Discord stretch her wings | Kings change their laws, and kingdoms change their kings” (Yale Works, vol. x, 25). Yet in the face of this warning, with its clear indictment of the deleterious impact of the Hanoverian succession, the commentator focuses his initial inquiry on whether or not the prophecy was written by a Saxon or a Briton, expressing more concern about establishing the date of composition rather than heeding the warning on the current state of the nation. He refuses to see the dangers before him. When confronted with the prophecy’s dire contents, the commentator appears perplexed and astonished: Is not all at home satisfaction and tranquility? All abroad submission and compliance? Is it the interest or inclination of any prince or state to draw a sword against us? And are we not nevertheless secured by a numerous standing army and a king who is himself an army? Have our troops any other employment than to march to a review? Have our fleets enounter’d any thing but winds and worms? To me, the present state of the nation seems so far from any resemblance to the noise and agitation of a tempestuous sea, that it may be much more properly compared to the dead stillness of the waves before a storm. (Yale Works, vol. x, 34–​5)

The fictitious commentator inadvertently reveals himself as blithely uninformed. Far from being satisfied, many English citizens were concerned with Walpole’s foreign policy. They worried that his pacifism left the English navy vulnerable. They knew that the English navy had suffered Spanish depredations, though, under Walpole’s orders, could not retaliate. Many of them resented supporting a costly standing army that the current administration had not put to the test against foreign aggression.9 Yet the commentator, in decoding the poem, is blind to the most obvious signs. And even if he was convinced of a “dead stillness,” he fails to recognize the obvious danger of a calm before a storm. Little is known of the pamphlet’s reception, other than that Alexander Pope judged it on “the whole very Humerous” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 143). But Johnson apparently considered the Swiftian approach effective, as he employed it two weeks later in another satirical pamphlet, A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739). This 9  For

a discussion of English foreign policy at this time under Walpole, see “The Policy of Peace,” in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–​1783 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49–​53. Boswell remarks, “Sir Robert Walpole was a wise and a benevolent minister, who thought that the happiness and prosperity of a commercial country like ours, would be best promoted by peace, which he accordingly maintained, with credit, during a very long period. Johnson himself afterwards honestly acknowledged the merit of Walpole, whom he called “a fixed star” (Life, vol. i, 131).

Fiction   175 time, Johnson created a fictitious “vindicator,” who identifies himself on the title page as an “Impartial Hand” while offering a knee-​jerk defense of administration policy. In Swiftian fashion, the full title also promises “a Proposal for Making the Office of the Licenser More Extensive and Effectual.” The “Hand,” of course, is hardly “impartial.” A stauncher advocate of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship powers would be hard to find, and the proposal is far from modest, as it seeks a comprehensive review of the entire body of English literature for the purpose of censoring all that fails to conform to the current Whig administration’s policies. In a catalog worthy of Swift, the vindicator complains that “our old poets” have written “passages unfit for the ears of an English audience” and proceeds to list a range of potentially offensive topics, most of which are drawn from the commonplaces of the Opposition to Walpole: This censure I do not confine to those lines in which liberty, natural equality, wicked ministers, deluded kings, mean arts of negotiation, venal senates, mercenary troops, oppressive officers, servile and exorbitant taxes, universal corruption, the luxuries of a court, the miseries of the people, the decline of trade, or the happiness of independency are directly mentioned. These are such glaring passages as cannot be suffered to pass without the most supine and criminal negligence. I hope the vigilance of the licensers will extend to all such speeches and soliloquies as tend to recommend the pleasures of virtue, the tranquility of an uncorrupted head, and the satisfactions of conscious innocence. (Yale Works, vol. x, 70)

Unsurprisingly, the vindicator recommends the creation of an “Index Expurgatorius” and the hiring of a “great number of the friends of the government” to help exercise the obligations of this “great office” (vol. x, 69). The satire is not subtle: clearly Johnson considered this kind of censorship abhorrent, objected to the practice of government sinecures, and found nothing “great” in the vindicator’s recommendations.

Debates in Parliament Johnson’s involvement with Swiftian satire for political purposes dates to the previous year, with Edmund Cave’s decision to publish unauthorized accounts of the debates in Parliament. The House of Commons passed legislation on April 13, 1738, prohibiting publication of any record of its debates. This prohibition encouraged creative thinking on the part of Cave and his Gentleman’s Magazine editorial staff, who hoped to circumvent the legislation. The resulting stratagem was to publish parliamentary debates under the guise of having taken place in the imaginary “Senate of Magna Lilliputia” rather than in England. While it is impossible to know who initially proposed this conceit, Johnson likely had a hand in composing, or at least editing, the fictional introduction

176   Steven Scherwatzky to the series, which explains that Gulliver’s grandson returned to Lilliput to vindicate his grandfather’s name.10 Shortly after his arrival, Gulliver’s grandson learns that time has restored his grandfather’s reputation, as the “accusations against the Captain by his enemies were cleared up, or forgot” (Yale Works, vol. xiii, 1497). After spending three years in Lilliput, Gulliver’s grandson returns to England “not with a cargo of gold, or silk, or diamonds, but with histories, memoirs, tracts, speeches, treaties, debates, letters and instructions” (Yale Works, vol. xiii, 1497). This claim sets the stage for the first debate, which the introduction prepares us for by including a reference to Walpole’s pacifist policies toward Spain. We learn that Lilliput (England) and Iberia (Spain) fell into territorial conflicts in the Americas, where the Iberians, “insatiable in their ambition, resolved to insist on nothing less than the absolute uninterrupted possession of that whole quarter of the world.” This decision led to a resolution to attack Lilliputian shipping, in the face of which the Lilliputians “were patient under these insults for a long time, but being at length awakened by frequent injuries, were making, at Mr. Gulliver’s departure, preparations for war” (vol. xiii, 1501). Not surprisingly, the topic would soon be addressed in the debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia. While we cannot be sure how much, if any, of this fictional introduction was written by Samuel Johnson, we do know that he initially edited, and eventually became the author of, the debates themselves. What makes the debates pertinent to Johnson and fiction is that they were largely his invention. Access to the debates was prohibited to journalists and the general public alike, forcing Johnson to rely on leaks, outlines provided by spies, occasional details or even entire speeches supplied furtively by Members of Parliament, and, of course, his own embellishments. According to Boswell, Johnson sometimes had “nothing more communicated to him than the names of the several speakers, and the part which they had taken in the debate” and reports Johnson as having admitted that the debates were “mere coinages of his imagination” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 118; iv, 408). Arthur Murphy, another of Johnson’s early biographers, records an occasion when, after receiving praise for his impartial treatment of both parties, Johnson replied, “I saved appearances tolerably well, but I took care that the Whig dogs did not get the best of it.”11 Sir John Hawkins claims Johnson admonished Smollett for relying too heavily on the debates in his History of England, “for that they were not authentic.”12 Perhaps most strikingly, Boswell states that Johnson felt uneasy about the debates on his deathbed, where he “expressed a regret for his having been the author of fictions, which had passed for realities” (Life, vol. i, 152). The “Magna Lilliputia” ruse of the introduction remains in place during the debates proper, with the House of Commons thinly disguised as Clinabs and the House of Lords

10  For a brief discussion of Johnson’s possible role, see the introduction to the Yale edition of the Debates in Yale Works, vol. xi, pp. xv–​lxvi, and the preface to appendix B, vol. xiii, 1493–​4. 11  Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 379. 12  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 81.

Fiction   177 as Hurgoes. But despite Johnson’s wry suggestion that he favored the Tories over the Whigs, his versions of the debates are remarkably nonpartisan. They provide a range of perspectives among the various speakers, each of whom argues the particulars of his case with attention to more universal concerns. The result is an often-​dramatic exercise in dialectical thinking. This experience in exploring different perspectives on an issue provides an early indication of what would become a hallmark of Johnson’s writing: a point/​counterpoint approach, similar to what we saw in Rambler 4 where he presents what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of the new fiction.13 In the Debates in Parliament, Johnson transforms partisan polemics into moral discourse. Johnson’s version of the debate on whether or not to remove Robert Walpole from office provides an example of the shift from the one-​sided inflammatory satire of Marmor Norfolciense and A Compleat Vindication to a more carefully reasoned, multifaceted approach. Walpole had been accused of a range of crimes, from personal enrichment to jeopardizing national security, and Johnson had joined the cry against him with Marmor Norfolciense. Unlike his first two political pamphlets, though, parliamentary reporting required Johnson to represent both sides of political issues. The debate focuses on whether or not public outcry, or “common fame,” provides suitable grounds for impeachment. Representatives from each house argue their cases in impassioned language, largely of Johnson’s own construction, without any conclusive indication that one side or the other has gotten “the best of it.” Robert Giddings has said “Johnson’s account of these proceedings achieves dramatic grandeur; it is among the finest things he composed.”14 Walpole rose to power in the wake of his success in restoring England’s finances following the South Sea Bubble collapse. He served as first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, and enjoyed a degree of power equivalent of a prime minister. A staunch Whig, Walpole had favored policies that, he believed, promoted commercial interest at home and peace abroad. But by the late 1730s his policies came under increased scrutiny, with the Opposition—​which included Tories like Samuel Johnson—​ proclaiming themselves Patriots in response to policies they believed favored foreign interests. The public outcry placed Walpole in an untenable position and the personal fortune he amassed left him vulnerable to accusations of malfeasance. The prospect of his removal from office gained currency and parliament soon debated the matter, placing Johnson in the position of having to recreate the political arguments as he imagined them to have been. Rather than exploit the opportunity for political advantage, Johnson chose—​ or, more accurately, the occasion demanded—​a measured approach. He needed

13 Paul Fussell claims, “Differing from himself is one of Johnson’s activities that has not always been sufficiently appreciated”: Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 173. This idea dates back to Bertrand Bronson’s Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946). 14  See Robert Giddings, “The Fall of Orgilio: Samuel Johnson as Parliamentary Reporter,” in Grundy, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, 96.

178   Steven Scherwatzky to establish an individual voice for each speaker and to offer convincing testimony from a range of perspectives. His version of the debate to remove Walpole opens with Lord Carteret (dubbed Hurgo Quadrert as per the Lilliputian conceit) presenting the case against Walpole as consistent with “the universal cry of the nation.” Carteret begins loftily: As the motion which I am about to make is of the highest importance, and of the most extensive consequences; as it cannot but meet with all the opposition which the prejudice of some, and the interest of others, can raise against it; as it must have the whole force of ministerial influence to encounter without any assistance but from justice and reason; I hope to be excused by your Lordships for spending some time in endeavouring to shew, that it wants no other support, that it is not founded upon doubtful suspicions, but upon incontestable facts; that it is not dictated by private interest, but by the sincerest regard to publick happiness; not abetted by the personal malevolence of particular men, but enforced by the voice of the people; a voice which ought always to be attended to, and generally to be obey’d. (Yale Works, vol. xi, 387–​8)

The language here is consistent with the Patriot Opposition’s accusation that Whig oligarchs favored personal enrichment over the protection of liberty. If to hear a powerful Lord speak as an ardent supporter of the people sounds unlikely, that’s because it is. The words attributed to Carteret differ dramatically from those present in other debate records. Notes preserved from the records kept by Thomas Secker, bishop of Oxford, present a very different set of opening remarks quite different from Johnson’s and entirely free from references to the need to obey the voice of the people.15 Carteret’s language in the Gentleman’s Magazine version of the debate, wholly devised by Johnson, creates an admittedly dramatic but entirely fictional start to the proceedings. But however consistent Carteret’s language is with the politics of Johnson’s earlier anti-​ministerial pamphlets, Johnson presents the defense with equal fervor. As the first to speak in favor of Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle (in his role as Nardac Secretary) provides a challenge to the basis of Carteret’s argument: When therefore popular reports are alleged as the foundation of the address, it is probable that it is not founded in reality upon known crimes or attested facts, and if the sudden blasts of fame may be esteemed equivalent to attested accusations, what degree of virtue can confer security? That the clamor is so loud and so general as it is represented, I can discover no necessity of admitting; but however the populace may have been exasperated against him, we are surely not to be influenc’d by their complaints, without enquiring into the cause of them, and informing ourselves whether they proceed from real hardships, unnecessary severities, and calamities 15 

See the editorial note in Debates in Parliament, in Yale Works, vol. xi, 388n.

Fiction   179 too heavy to be born, or from caprice, and inconstancy, idle rumours, and artful representations. (Yale Works, vol. xi, 415)

Johnson allows the Duke of Newcastle a sound response to Carteret’s opening gambit. The Hurgo Quadrert and the Nardac Secretary each present reasonable arguments that frame the topic in an engaging and informative fashion. While Carteret argues against arbitrary power, Newcastle warns of mob justice. Few details are provided; Johnson presents the matter as if it could apply generally to any political discussion, with a strong case made by each side. The debate format required Johnson to create a persona for Walpole as well, a situation ripe with opportunity to continue in the satirical mode of Marmor Norfolciense. Instead, Johnson imagines Walpole with greater sympathy than before. In Sir Retrob Walelop, Johnson creates a poignant character fully aware of the irony of his predicament.16 In addressing his peers, he notes that after having “stiled me the Prime Minister, they carry on the fiction which has once heated their imaginations, and impute to me an unpardonable abuse of that chimerical authority which only they have thought it necessary to bestow” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 578). In response to the charge of avarice, Walelop says “All that has been given to me is a little house at a small distance from this city, worth about seven hundred sprugs, which I obtained that I might enjoy the quiet of retirement, without remitting my attendance on my office” (vol. xii, 580–​1). While this remark is hardly true—​Walpole lived lavishly in a stately home—​it allows him to appear as a selfless public servant instead of a self-​aggrandizing tyrant, at least to those who fail to see any possible irony. Rather than continue in the vitriolic mode of his previous representations of Walpole, Johnson creates a more sympathetic character in the debate. Despite the built-​in ludicrousness of his Lilliputian name, there’s a vulnerable humanity to Retrob Walelop that could be read as a shift in Johnson’s perspective on the prime minister. It is possible that the fictive nature of parliamentary reporting led Johnson to greater empathy. Hawkins confirms this change of heart in noting how Johnson eventually reversed his judgment on the man: Of Sir Robert Walpole, notwithstanding that he had written against him in the early part of his life, he had a high opinion: he said of him, that he was a fine fellow, and that his very enemies deemed him so before his death: he honoured his memory for having kept his country in peace many years, as also for the goodness and placibility of his temper. (Hawkins, Life, 308)

16  Giddings remarks, “The presentation of Sir Robert Walpole’s final speech reveals Johnson’s genius as a writer of political journalism which, in his hands, becomes the stuff of high drama” (“The Fall of Orgilio,” 98).

180   Steven Scherwatzky In a role that required imagining what others might say rather than truly reporting their words, Johnson developed a more nuanced understanding of people and of politics. But the parliamentary debates can also be understood as a significant step in his career that contributed to his ambivalence toward fiction. On the one hand, he felt an obligation to capture the cadence of speech and a range of perspectives on the political topics of his day. On the other hand, Johnson felt a lasting regret for having invented speeches that weren’t true. Whatever his misgivings, the very act of imagining the thoughts and motives of others, the benefit of seeing situations from a variety of perspectives, would have a lasting impact. The change is evident in the difference between his wooden and one-​dimensional Gentleman’s Magazine biographies of Admiral Robert Blake and Sir Francis Drake (1740) and the more complex Life of Savage (1743) as well as his approach to writing periodical essays beginning with the Rambler (1750–​2).17

An Allegorical Fable Yet however much the fictional dialectics of parliamentary reporting might have taught Johnson about creating characters, establishing voices, and representing conflicting perspectives, his next foray into fiction produced a work reminiscent of more traditional prose fiction rather than the heteroglossic realism of the emergent novel.18 At the request of Robert Dodsley, Johnson wrote a short prose allegory called The Vision of Theodore for the Preceptor (1748), a collection of educational treatises (see Chapter 26, “Education”). Despite having reputedly composed the allegory in one night, Johnson is said to have considered it “the best thing he ever wrote.”19 By this time, Johnson was well aware of the new realism in fiction and was only two years away from his evaluation of 17 It could be said that Johnson’s tenure as parliamentary reporter ultimately contributed to his preference for biography rather than imaginative prose. 18 Not all Johnson scholars would agree that Johnson succeeded in creating different voices. Regarding the debates, Thomas Kaminski has said, “all speakers sound the same.” He adds, “The debates were never intended to be either detailed records of fact or particularly realistic fictions” (Early Career, 126 and 129). Hawkins, however, reports, “It must be owned, that with respect to the general principles avowed in the speeches, and the sentiments therein contained, they agree with the characters of the persons to whom they are ascribed” (Hawkins, Life, 81). For a discussion of heteroglossia and the eighteenth-​century novel, see McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 11–​14. 19 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 192. Boswell attributes the remark to Bishop Thomas Percy, who mentions it in a letter to William Shenstone in 1760. Given that Johnson and Percy met in 1756, it is likely that the comment was made prior to the publication of Rasselas (1759) but certainly after Life of Savage (1744) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). Of the possibility of Johnson considering The Vision of Theodore his best work, Walter Jackson Bate says, “The statement is so absurd that we can forgivably assume one of two things: On some occasion when Percy was praising Johnson’s allegories, which he genuinely admired, Johnson could have pulled his leg by making a remark of this sort. Or Johnson may have been referring only to Oriental tales and allegories, and stating that he thought this the best of the lot (the remark was made before he wrote Rasselas)”: Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 253.

Fiction   181 the novel in Rambler 4. But rather than adopt the approach of contemporary novelists, Johnson produced a Christian allegory closer in spirit to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).20 The Vision of Theodore bears little trace of the lessons in voice learned as parliamentary reporter, nor any evidence of the value of imitating nature through “general converse and accurate observations of the world” as espoused in Rambler 4. On the contrary, Johnson produced a narrative that privileges the remoteness from everyday life over any direct encounter with it. The Vision of Theodore is an allegorical fable. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines fable as “A feigned story intended to enforce some moral precept” and allegory as “A figurative discourse, in which something other is intended, than is contained in the words literally taken.” Rather than turning toward the realism of the new fiction, Johnson looked back to classical and medieval literary traditions for inspiration, notably the dream vision.21 The narrative begins with a hortatory instruction from an unidentified narrator to “read and be wise” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 195). We learn that Theodore, after forty-​eight years of solitude, grew curious and decided to climb the Peak of Teneriffe. Initially Theodore is ambivalent about his decision to explore, worried that “my heart was deceiving me, that my impatience of confinement rose from some earthly passion, and that my ardour to survey the works of nature, was only a hidden longing to mingle once again in the scenes of life” (vol. xvi, 196). Yet, despite these misgivings, Theodore proceeds on his path, determined to continue his journey to the top of the mountain. Shortly after beginning his ascent, however, Theodore admits he grew tired and fell asleep. He then saw before him a “being of more than human dignity” who promises instruction as Theodore observes “the Mountain of Existence” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 197–​8). This guide, identified as Theodore’s Protector, helps him see the various stages of moral development as steps in the journey up the mountain. At the lowest level is Innocence, followed by Education, Reason, and Religion. Each step of the way Appetite urges on the wayfarer. However, Habits, both good and bad, begin to form as the journey continues. These Habits appear as a “troop of pygmies” (vol. xvi, 200) with the power to shrink or grow in size as they facilitate or impede moral progress. Theodore is told that those who allow themselves to grow distracted from the path of Reason and succumb to bad habits will likely end up in Caverns of Despair, the Bowers of Intemperance, or of the Maze of Indolence. Those who pursue the path of virtue and follow Reason as it leads to Religion, will ultimately find themselves in the Temple of Happiness. When summarized in this way, the moral lesson of The Vision of Theodore seems unremarkable and certainly unrealistic. But the story is not as straightforward as it sounds. As Lawrence Lipking has noted, Johnson’s narrative reveals an “ambivalent attitude

20  Kaminski

claims “Johnson was exempt from the modern prejudice for realism. One only has to consider Rasselas, The Vision of Theodore, and the many fables and allegories in The Rambler to understand that realism was not Johnson’s mode, even when creating his most artful fictions” (Early Career, 129). 21  For a discussion of sources, see the editors’ introduction, Yale Works, vol. xvi, 179–​90.

182   Steven Scherwatzky toward vision itself.”22 Theodore often has trouble seeing, unless his Protector points out what he’s missing, and the Temple of Happiness remains elusive. The fable ends with the sad fate of those who wandered from the path of Reason and found themselves weighted down by the chains they had forged. Those lost in the Maze of Indolence suffer a particularly cruel fate, as “the chains of Habit are riveted for ever, and Melancholy having tortured her prisoner for a time, consigns him at last to the cruelty of Despair.” Theodore is left with the prospect of “this miserable scene” and the exhortation of his Protector to “be wise, and let not Habit prevail against thee” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 212). The narrative concludes as morning breaks and Theodore finds himself where he had fallen asleep. The Vision of Theodore ends ambiguously. Has the dream vision had an impact? Will Theodore follow the paths of Education, Reason, and Religion? Or will he succumb to bad Habits and find himself in despair? Given how passive Theodore is throughout the narrative, both before and during the dream vision, there’s little reason to believe that he will now direct himself along the path of virtue. But to ask questions of this nature is perhaps to apply the standards of the new fiction to a more traditional prose narrative. If we let the allegory do its work, then the moral precept has been served. The point is that the Temple of Happiness can be found only through the proper exercise of reason and with steadfast commitment to religion. Johnson would likely think that any reader who viewed Theodore as a real person had missed the point of the fable. Theodore—​ whose name means “God’s gift”—​has been shown the path to salvation, and the path is accessible to anyone willing to exert the effort. Theodore, however, is not meant to be a richly rendered individual like Robinson Crusoe, Pamela Andrews, or any other hero or heroine of the new fiction, nor are the choices he faces in any way unique. It is not his fate that should be of interest, but our own. That said, Johnson knew all too well that “maxims of prudence, or principles of virtue, may be treasure in the memory without influencing the conduct” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 97). While there is no basis for us to judge the effectiveness of this moral allegory on impressionable young readers, The Vision of Theodore is of interest as Johnson’s first application of the “choice of life” theme to fiction.23 Written a decade before Rasselas, The Vision of Theodore anticipates many of its concerns. However, before writing his most extensive (though still short by the standards of most eighteenth-​century novels) work of fiction, Johnson turned toward fiction in many of his periodical essays. Carey McIntosh reports that “about 143 of the 325 essays by Johnson in The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler resort to fiction of some kind.”24 By that count, the total number of pages devoted to fiction in these essays outweighs that of The Vision of Theodore and Rasselas

22  Lawrence Lipking, “Learning to Read Johnson: The Vision of Theodore and The Vanity of Human Wishes,” ELH 43, no. 4 (Winter, 1976), 527. 23  The Yale editors conclude “It is impossible to measure the real efficacy of The Preceptor, and of ‘The Vision’ in particular, as an instrument of education.” For a discussion of its reception, see Yale Works, vol. xvi, 190–​3. 24  See McIntosh, Choice of Life, ix.

Fiction   183 combined. To overlook the periodical essays would be to miss the largest repository of fiction Johnson produced.

Fictional Essays In retrospect, it is not surprising that Johnson seemed most receptive to writing fiction in periodical essay form. Though Johnson engaged in several projects of prodigious length—​such as the Debates in Parliament (1740–​2), the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and the Lives of the Poets (1779–​81)—​these works can all be broken into much smaller units; each debate, each dictionary entry, each poetical life, was composed as a discrete, independent entity that formed part of the larger project. The short essay format allowed Johnson to write brief fictional tales without having to sustain a narrative over time. Some of these periodical fictions take place in remote locales and rely on allegory, much like The Vision of Theodore. A prime example from this category is Rambler 67, a dream vision of the “Garden of Hope,” where the unnamed dreamer reaches out for delights that elude his grasp. Others are set in London and strive for literal realism, such as Rambler 12, where Zosima journeys to the city seeking employment. Yet, despite the diversity of approaches Johnson employs, his fictional essays are bound together, like so much of his work, by his concern with “the choice of life,” the restlessness of the imagination, and the vanity of human wishes.25 Some of Johnson’s best fictional essays borrow conventions from the Oriental tale, which enjoyed popularity throughout the first half of the century.26 While it is impossible to say exactly why the Oriental tale appealed to Johnson, his willingness to adapt its conventions to the periodical essay helped him avoid the pitfalls he had identified with the new fiction. In its reliance on distant, exotic locales, high-​born personages, exciting adventures, and a pointed moral, along with its roots in earlier forms of prose fiction less focused on realistic character development, the Oriental tale allowed Johnson to present generalized character types without resorting to allegory. With respect to characterization, the Oriental tale can be said to occupy a niche somewhere in between the rigid one-​dimensionality of allegory and the rich fluidity of realism.27 In Johnson’s hands, 25   For a full discussion of the thematic concerns of Johnson’s fictional essays, see McIntosh, Choice of Life, 36–​54. 26  Markman Ellis states “the ‘oriental’ tale in general identified the Orient as the near exotic territories of the middle East and South Asia—​territory broadly known to European culture since the classical period—​although the genre could be extended to China and Japan where necessary. The word ‘Oriental’ covers a wide swath of geography, including parts of Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia, including the Middle East and Far East.” Markman Ellis, “Novel, Empire and the Oriental Tale,” in J. A. Downie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 492. For a general introduction to the genre, see R. L. Mack, ed., Oriental Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vii–​xliv. 27 Of the relationship between Oriental tales and the new fiction, Ellis argues, “In many ways, oriental tales sit uncomfortably within the tradition of formal realism now closely identified with the

184   Steven Scherwatzky these characters inhabit a liminal space between the universal and the particular. He manages to create characters far different from anyone his readers might conceivably encounter but with whom they can nonetheless empathize. The periodical essays that best embody Johnson’s approach to Orientalism in fictional essays appear in Ramblers 120, 190, and 204–​5. Perhaps because of the Oriental setting and characters, which English readers could hardly confuse with their own experience, these three tales are devoid of any ambivalence toward fiction: Johnson writes with gusto and, in brief compass, presents vivid narratives with moral authority.28 The first is the tale of Almamoulin, son of the rich merchant Nouradin of Samarkand, who, despite great wealth, enjoyed a reputation for integrity. However, Nouradin grew ill, called for his son, warned him of the sad fate of man, and died. Upon inheriting his father’s estate, Almamoulin “believed that happiness was now in his power” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 277). But restlessness quickly overcame him, discontent set in, and he sought the advice of a wise man, who informed him that he had been “deluded by idle hopes and fallacious appearances.” The only solution, the sage advises, is to use riches wisely by helping the poor and the sick, as charity and care “will afford the only happiness ordained for our present state, the confidence of divine favor, and the hope of future rewards” (vol. iv, 280). Rambler 190 offers a similar tale, this time of Abouzaid, son of the mighty warrior Merad, who had earned great riches and respect as a favorite of the emperor. But, as “human greatness is short and transitory” (vol. v, 229), Mered grows ill, calls for his son, admonishes him to be moderate and charitable, and dies. Abouzaid initially vows to follow his father’s precepts but finds himself mistreated by those he resolved to help. Ultimately, he resolves “to solicit only the approbation of that being whom alone we are sure to please by endeavouring to please him” (vol. v, 231). Ramblers 120 and 190 might seem relentlessly grim, but each ends on a note of Christian consolation. The same cannot be said for Ramblers 204 and 205, which tell the story of Seged, lord of Ethiopia and “monarch of forty nations” (Yale Works, vol. v, 296). Having brought peace and prosperity to his realms, Seged decides to retire to an island for ten days of respite from obligation and concern. But each day brings unexpected disquiet, from perturbations generated by others to his own unsettling thoughts. On the morning of the eighth day, Seged learns that his daughter, the Princess Balkis, has grown ill, and on the tenth day she dies. Even a single day, let alone ten, of complete happiness is beyond the grasp of this mightiest of monarchs. The tale concludes with the Rambler’s eighteenth-​century novel. While they eschew many features of DeFoean fictional modernity, their idiosyncratic features make extended and sophisticated attempts to reach out to external worlds beyond the metropolis” (Ellis, “Novel, Empire, and the Oriental Tale,” 493). 28 

Manushag Powell argues that, when adopting fictional personae in the Rambler, “Johnson works through a number of contradictory impulses by tinkering with his own voice, seeking to sympathize with and simultaneously to distance himself from his live readership, and operating against his very own ambivalence toward the creation of fiction.” Though she does not discuss Johnson’s Oriental Ramblers, her thesis applies to the voices he creates for them, especially that of Seged in Ramblers 204–​5. See “Johnson and His ‘Readers’ in the Epistolary Rambler Essays,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 44, no. 3 (Summer 2004), 571–​94.

Fiction   185 stark observation, “Such were the days which Seged of Ethiopia had appropriated to a short respiration from the fatigues of war and the cares of government. This narrative he has bequeathed to future generations, that no man hereafter may presume to say, ‘This day shall be a day of happiness’ ” (vol. v, 305).

Rasselas The story of Seged, in its focus on the various choices he makes in a vain attempt to secure happiness during his ten-​day retreat, anticipates what would be Johnson’s most famous—​and sustained—​work of prose fiction, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). Originally titled The Choice of Life, the initial impetus for the tale was one of necessity: Johnson’s mother had died in January 1759, and he found himself left with expenses that needed to be paid. Turning once again to the Oriental tale for inspiration, Johnson successfully pitched the project to his printer, William Strahan, striking a desperate note as he urged him to “Get me the money if you can” (Johnson to William Strahan, January 20, 1759, in Letters, vol. i, 178–​9). The composition process moved quickly over the course of a week.29 The roots, however, can be traced back earlier than the Rambler Oriental tales, as far back as one of Johnson’s earliest literary projects: a translation from the French of Joachim Legrand’s chronicle of seventeenth-​century Jesuit missionary Jeronimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Traces of Lobo’s influence, from the Ethiopian setting to the historical personage Rassela Christos, are apparent throughout Rasselas. But to place too much emphasis on the influence of this historical chronicle on Johnson’s fictional story is to run the risk of attributing a significance to Lobo’s account of his journey that is opposite to what Johnson valued in it. What Johnson valued most in A Voyage to Abyssinia is what he believed to be its trustworthiness as a historical chronicle. In his preface, Johnson applauds Lobo for having resisted the temptation to distort historical fact. “Contrary to the general vein of his countrymen,” Johnson remarks, Lobo “has amused his reader with no romantick absurdities or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand, that they should believe him, who cannot contradict him” (Yale Works, vol. xv, 3). Lobo, he claims, has simply “described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from life, and to have consulted his senses, not his imagination” (vol. xv, 3).30

29  Robert DeMaria remarks that, despite the swift composition of Rasselas, “there are many aspects of the work that Johnson had thought about for a long time”: The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 205. 30 Christine Rees claims that, “In his preface to his translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, [Johnson] goes out of his way to recommend the work precisely because it is not a utopian fiction or imaginary voyage”: Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (London: Longman, 1996), 245.

186   Steven Scherwatzky Rasselas, a young prince, is raised in the protective realm of the Happy Valley, where all his wants and needs are satisfied. But this vale of plenty fails to suppress his restless imagination and soon Rasselas desires nothing more than escape. To this end, he enlists the assistance of his philosophical mentor Imlac and, along with his sister Nekayah and her servant Pekuah, the four companions dig their way out. Rasselas hopes his journey will help identify a choice of life that could provide lasting happiness. But each person he meets tells a similar story of woe: the hermit, unhappy, plans to return to society; the optimistic philosopher grieves the death of his daughter; the shepherds rail against their oppressive landlords rather than express pleasure in pastoral retreat; the rich man fears the loss of his wealth and threats to his family; and the scholar’s words grow less comprehensible the more he speaks. Neither the choices of public life nor private life provide a bulwark against pain and suffering. Having failed in his quest to identify an unalterably rewarding plan or profession, Rasselas and his companions return to Abyssinia, marking a “conclusion, in which nothing is concluded” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 175). Despite its forty-​nine chapters, Rasselas is much shorter than most contemporaneous novels and resists their practices. There is not much of a plot; in fact, once Rasselas leaves the Happy Valley, the episodic nature of the journey and the various stops along the way could be randomly rearranged without doing violence to the narrative.31 Though the tale mentions specific places such as Abyssinia and Cairo, the kind of particularity of place evident in most contemporary novels is absent; and the characters have famously been accused of all sounding the same, and not much different from Johnson.32 The narrator speaks in the hortatory tones of the pulpit and the characters, though not in any way allegorical, seem little more than static vehicles for declamatory observations. The focus throughout is on the general and the universal rather than the specific and particular; Imlac’s advice to Rasselas on the basis for great poetry applies to Johnson’s overall approach to his lengthiest work of fiction: “The business of the poet is to examine not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades of verdure in the forest” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 43). By focusing on generalities (including those of geography), dispensing with psychological complexity, and avoiding the requirements of linear plot, Johnson seems determined to provide a counterpoint to the new fiction.33 Perhaps he felt that he could

31  The question of whether or not Rasselas has a coherent structure has been the subject of much discussion. For an argument that it does, see Frederick M. Keener, The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 217–​40 and 334 n. 32  Clive Probyn describes Rasselas as “incidentally novelistic,” claiming that Johnson’s “characters are no more than pegs on which to hang an argument which is already displayed in the opening sentences, an anticipatory recapitulation which removes all suspense at a single stroke.” English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, 1987,) 173. 33 For an insightful discussion of Johnson’s appropriation of orientalist motifs in relation to “spatiotemporal unities,” see Karin Kukkonen, A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 103–​17.

Fiction   187 better convey his moral purpose without getting mired in the specifics of location like Defoe, the richness of introspection like Richardson, and the requirements of plot like Fielding. But neither did he embrace Oriental tale conventions uncritically.34 Rasselas can be read as much as a satire on the genre as an example of it. The exotic locales aren’t any more satisfying than any English town or village, the high-​born characters aren’t any happier than anyone else, the exciting adventure (presumably the kidnapping of Pekuah) is quickly resolved without much suspense, and the moral point avoids a pointed moral. In the end, Rasselas plans a return to Abyssinia (though not necessarily the Happy Valley) without having settled on a choice of life that will vanquish his restlessness or satiate his hunger of imagination. The final chapter outlines his plans and those of his companions. Pekuah hopes to be a prioress, Nekayah to establish a college for women, Rasselas to govern a small kingdom, and Imlac to avoid specific plans altogether. But “Of these wishes they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 176). Despite their high hopes at the outset, the only lesson learned is that their wishes will remain forever unsatisfied.

Outgrowing Fiction? The fact that Rasselas ends abruptly without clear resolution compounds any sense we might have of Johnson’s skepticism toward the kind of closure typical of most prose fiction, especially the popular novels of the mid-​eighteenth century. Of the ending of Rasselas Robert DeMaria has said, “It is difficult to imagine a conclusion that is more determined to leave the reader in ignorance than this. If the ending says anything at all, it says that fiction is not the answer” (DeMaria, Life, 212). Johnson would concur. Not long after the publication of Rasselas, Johnson, in Idler 84, abjures fiction altogether. “In romances,” he remarks, “when the wild field of possibility lies open to invention, the incidents may easily be made more numerous, the vicissitudes more sudden, and the events more wonderful; but from the time of life when fancy begins to be over-​ruled by reason and corrected by experience, the most artful tale raises little curiosity when it is known to be false” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 261). The idea that fiction is something one outgrows had been previously expressed in Rambler 151, where Johnson attributes its attractions to youthful inexperience: “While the judgment is yet uninformed and unable to compare the draughts of fiction with their

34 Johnson’s

relationship to the Oriental tale and the larger question of Anglo-​ European appropriations of “oriental” motifs has been the subject of much recent study. For discussions of the topic, see Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–​1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), especially 202–​13; Clement Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 169–​200; and Wendy Laura Belcher, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 189–​211.

188   Steven Scherwatzky originals, we are delighted with improbable adventures, impracticable virtues, and inimitable characters” (Yale Works, vol. v, 39). As we mature, fiction becomes less compelling and we forgo “the imitations of truth, which are never perfect” and “transfer our affections to truth itself ” (vol. v, 40). Johnson also makes this point in a chapter he may have contributed to Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752).35 Here, Arabella speaks with a clergyman who helps convince her the time has come to dispense with romances, despite their powerful attractions. In his denigration of novels, and romance fiction in particular, the clergyman sounds much like Johnson when he insists “The only Excellence of Falsehood . . . is its Resemblance to Truth; as therefore any Narrative is more liable to be confuted by its Inconsistency with known Facts, it is at a greater Distance from the Perfection of Fiction” (378). But also like Johnson, he well understands the allure of fiction, in this case that of heroic romances: “Who can forbear,” he says, “to throw away the story that gives to one man the strength of thousands; that puts life or death in a smile or a frown; that recounts labors and sufferings to which the powers of humanity are utterly unequal; that disfigures the whole appearance of the world, and represents every thing in a form different from that which experience has shewn?” (378–​9). But forbear we must, Johnson might say, if we hope to become mature adults. Several years after the publication of Rasselas, Johnson would make a similar point when equating the development of English literary history to intellectual growth, suggesting that the time for “giants, dragons, and enchantments” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 82) has passed. However, it seems even the mature Johnson had trouble forgoing romance. According to Boswell, Bishop Thomas Percy claimed that Johnson never quite kicked his youthful reading habits. Boswell records Percy as reporting: When a boy he was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life; so that (adds his Lordship) spending part of a summer at my parsonage-​house in the country, he chose for his regular reading the old Spanish romance of Felixmarte of Hircania, in folio, which he read quite through. Yet I have heard him attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession. (Life, vol. i, 49)

Once again, we see Johnson both attracted to and worried about the impact of fiction, even though in this case he is thinking more about traditional romances rather than the new fiction. Though Carey McIntosh suggests that Johnson “concedes to narrative fiction more potency than perhaps many of his readers would,”36 Percy helps us to see how irresistible Johnson found that power, for both good and bad.

35  For a discussion of Johnson’s possible contribution, see Margaret Anne Doody’s introduction to Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxx–​xxxii and 414–​15. 36  See McIntosh, Choice of Life, 18.

Fiction   189 After Rasselas Johnson would return to fiction infrequently. He contributed “The Fountains,” a short allegorical fairy tale, to Anna Williams’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. “The Fountains” involves a fairy offering a young woman wishes, with what Bernard Einbond calls the unique twist that they are “reversible.”37 The return to wishes and the choices they entail recalls Rasselas, but Johnson seems far less committed to this brief story. “The Fountains” is free of the ambivalence and satiric intent pervasive in Johnson’s approach to fiction. But that could be a reflection of the palpably artificial nature of the tale. DeMaria calls it “so transparently fictional that it did not arouse in [Johnson] the conflict between writing and a suspicion of fiction that underlies the ironies of Rasselas.”38 At this point Johnson’s interest in writing fiction had waned. Fictional elements appear occasionally in his political writings of the 1770s, most notably the satirical “Progress of a Petition” episode in The False Alarm (1770), but by and large he was done with fiction. Johnson would spend his final years writing the Lives of the Poets (1779–​81), a project that, given the popularity of fiction and the relentless ascendancy of the novel, seems elegiac in the face of changing literary tastes. Did Johnson think fiction had much of a future? We know that he dismissed its most innovative features and denounced Tristram Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 449). He also seemed skeptical of complex plots, which in part explains his resistance to Fielding. Boswell records Johnson as having said, “There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s than in all Tom Jones.” When Lord Thomas Erskine averred that Richardson “is very tedious,” Johnson exclaimed, “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment” (vol. ii, 174–​5). For Johnson, novels weren’t necessary for capturing the truth of human experience or for expressing our deepest emotions. It seems one letter of Richardson could suffice, and perhaps genres other than fiction could do just as well, if not better. However, he also claimed there were only three books “written by a mere man” that readers “wished longer”: Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe.39 Surely he found something of lasting value in these lengthy works of prose fiction. But are they novels? Are they realistic? Do they tell us something true about human experience? The answers to these questions, then and now, would depend on who was asked. And it is precisely because there are no simple answers to such complex questions that the topic of Johnson and fiction remains of perennial interest.

37  See Bernard Einbond, Samuel Johnson’s Allegory (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 80. For background and context for “The Fountains,” see Gwin J. Kolb, “Mrs. (Thrale) Piozzi and Samuel Johnson’s ‘The Fountains: A Fairy Tale,’ ” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13, no. 1 (Autumn, 1979), 66–​81, and Lisa Berglund, “Allegory in The Rambler,” Papers on Language and Literature 37, no. 2 (Spring, 2001), 147–​78. 38  See DeMaria, Life, 218. Boswell calls “The Fountains” a “beautiful tale” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 26). 39  Quoted in W. R. Owens, “Religious Writings and the Early Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-​Century Novel, 116. Christine Rees states, “It has often been remarked, the wonderful absurdities of Don Quixote also flavor Johnson’s fiction, whenever Rasselas engages his companions in “the dangerous prevalence of imagination” (Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-​Century Fiction, 262).

190   Steven Scherwatzky

Further Reading Belcher, Wendy Laura. Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Henson, Eithne. “The Fictions of Romantick Chivalry”: Samuel Johnson and Romance. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. Kinkead-​Weekes, Mark. “Johnson on the ‘Rise of the Novel.’ ” In Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, edited by Isobel Grundy, 70–​85. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984. McIntosh, Carey. The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973.

Chapter 11

Critic i sm Jack Lynch

“Remember,” Jean Sibelius sneered, “a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic!”1 It’s a fine one-​liner—​but is it true? A statue of Samuel Johnson stands near St. Clement Dane’s, made by Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald; another by Richard Cockle Lucas shows Johnson in academic regalia, seated on what looks like a throne, engaged in profound meditation, in Lichfield’s Market Square. Harder to spot are the small sculpture on the exterior of the choir of Lichfield Cathedral and the carved mural in Old Square, Birmingham. A bust of Johnson presides over his grave in Westminster Abbey. An inexplicably buff Johnson, decked out in a toga, has been confronting visitors to St. Paul’s north quire aisle since 1796. And though Johnson himself is missing, a more-​than-​life-​size monument to the most famous of his cats—​not his favorite, but still “a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 197)—​awaits the return of his master, who stepped out to buy him oysters, in Gough Square. If not monuments to a critic—​and a critic’s pussycat—​what exactly are these statues? The most prominent of the lot, the one on the Strand, lists Johnson’s various claims on our attention (essayist, philologist, biographer, wit, poet, moralist, dramatist, political writer, talker), but at the top of the list is critic. Sibelius was wrong. At least one critic has earned a few statues. Johnson worked in the widest imaginable range of critical modes. He was an active reviewer for the magazines.2 His experience compiling the Dictionary made him one of the most attentive close readers of all time. He was a pioneering textual critic in his edition of Shakespeare (1765), taking practices that had been limited to classical texts

1  The quip has become proverbial and attributed to many wits, but it seems to have originated in a conversation between Jean Sibelius and Bengt de Törne, who records it in Sibelius: A Close Up (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 27. 2  See Brian Hanley, Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer: A Duty to Examine the Labors of the Learned (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001).

192   Jack Lynch and applying them for the first time to vernacular English works.3 His Life of Savage was recognized as a breakthrough in literary biography when it appeared in 1744, and became the model for his career-​topping effort to read poetry in the light of biography, and vice versa, in his Lives of the Poets. Throughout his career he argued forcefully for the importance of literary history. He even planned a grand work, a “History of Criticism as it relates to judging of Authours from Aristotle to the present age. An account of the rise and improvements of that art, of the different Opinions of Authours ancient and Modern.” As Paul Tankard observes, we have reason to lament that he never brought this to fruition: Johnson proposes something which had not hitherto been attempted: not his own literary theory or exposition of or attempt at constructing that of some other writer (such as many critics have attempted to do for Johnson), nor an epitome of a range of critical writings aiming to set up a canon. Studies had been made of critical writing as a field of controversy, on the assumption that the critical canons need to be fixed. But it had not been attempted to do so scientifically and comparatively, as a study of what is changing and constant in the history of human intellectual and aesthetic pleasures.4

So Johnson was active in almost every variety of criticism available to an eighteenth-​ century writer. But while there is much criticism by Johnson, is there such a thing as “Johnsonian” criticism? He figures in most histories and anthologies of criticism: his name appears nearly 300 times, for instance, in the eighteenth-​century volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (1997). But it is not always clear what he stands for. Johnson lacks a critical manifesto and, having produced few pithy formulations along the lines of “the poet nothing affirmeth” or stirring slogans about “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he plays an uncertain role in these histories.

No Human Being Can Ever Be a Poet One passage above all appears in the histories and anthologies as representative of Johnsonian criticism: “The business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the

3  I discuss some of his innovations in “Johnson, Politian, and Editorial Method,” Notes & Queries 45, no. 1 (March 1998), 70–​2. 4  See Paul Tankard, “ ‘ That Great Literary Projector’: Samuel Johnson’s Designs, or Projected Works,” The Age of Johnson 13 (2002), 114–​5.

Criticism   193 streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest . . . But the knowledge of nature is only half the task of a poet; he must be acquainted likewise with all the modes of life . . . He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same . . .” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 43–​4)

Here, we are told, is the Johnsonian theory of poetry. Imlac is Johnson’s mouthpiece, teaching the impressionable Rasselas his hard-​earned wisdom. “There can be no reasonable doubt,” George Saintsbury declared at the turn of the twentieth century, “that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character . . . [The poet] does not number the streaks of the tulip.” J. E. Spingarn wrote in 1911 that Johnson “pronounced dogmatically that the poet should not ‘number the streaks of the tulip.’ ” René Wellek, too, quoted the familiar bromide, saying “Johnson arrives at his condemnation of the particular, the local and transient, a thesis which he formulated possibly more sharply than any other critic of high repute.” More recently Raman Selden quotes Imlac’s speech in The Theory of Criticism, from Plato to the Present: A Reader.5 But we must be attentive to contexts. As many have pointed out, this passage in Rasselas is interrupted as it approaches its climax: “Enough! Thou hast convinced me, that no human being can ever be a poet.” Comic bathos ironically undermines Imlac’s “enthusiastic fit” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 46), leaving us to wonder how much of what we have read about streaked tulips, species, and individuals, and all the modes of life should be taken seriously. The converse—​an inclination to dismiss as ironic what is actually meant sincerely—​can also be a danger. Idler 60 tells us “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expence,” and “every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic” (vol. ii, 184–​5). And so, when we read in no. 61 that Dick Minim “declares loudly for the noble simplicity of our ancestors, in opposition to the petty refinements, and ornamental luxuriance,” we smirk at the thoughtlessly parroted clichés (vol. ii, 190). Dick Minim is a caricature of a failed critic. And yet . . . while we laugh at Minim, we might grow anxious if we were pressed to point out exactly where he is wrong, or at least where he differs from Johnson. A few of Minim’s critical pronouncements, of course, are clearly not Johnson’s. He is enthusiastic about “the academies of the continent,” for instance, but Johnson’s preface to the Dictionary abhors academies (Yale Works, vol. ii, 190; vol. xviii, 108). And though 5 

George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, 3 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900–​5), vol. ii, 484–​5; J. E. Spingarn, The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 18; René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–​1950, vol. i, The Later Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 85–​6; Raman Selden, The Theory of Criticism, from Plato to the Present: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1988). For commentary see Edward Tomarken, Johnson, “Rasselas,” and the Choice of Criticism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 62–​3.

194   Jack Lynch Minim is proud of discovering “two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense” in Hudibras, where “ ‘bubble’ and ‘trouble’ caus[e]‌a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of ‘blowing bubbles’ ” (vol. ii, 189), Johnson would later write dismissively that “This notion of representative metre, and the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense, have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties” (vol. xxiii, 1202). Some of Minim’s other critical opinions, though, sound so reasonable that they are difficult to distinguish from things Johnson wrote in good earnest. Minim believed Denham and Waller were “the first reformers of English numbers” (vol. ii, 186)—​Johnson’s lives of Denham and Waller make the same point. Minim “blamed the stanza of Spenser” (vol. ii, 186), and Johnson found Spenser’s stanza “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length” (vol. iv, 285). Tom Mason may be alone in honest introspection, writing, “Although I do not think I was a peculiarly stupid undergraduate, my literary education bore a frightening resemblance to that followed by Dick Minim.”6 Though Minim is a target of fun for his self-​importance, we cannot assume that Johnson always believes the opposite. Johnson’s critical pronouncements appear in works of fiction, in comic essays, in biographical asides, and in casual conversation. If we are to make sense of him as a critic, we must pay attention to the contexts in which his critical opinions are delivered. Boswell knew he was not always sincere in conversation: “Care . . . must be taken to distinguish between Johnson when he ‘talked for victory,’ and Johnson when he had no desire but to inform and illustrate” (Life, vol. iv, 111). The situation is even more complex when we try to gather his true opinions on criticism. Too often we are dealing with what Wayne Booth labels “unstable irony,”7 which makes it difficult to discern the sincere truth concealed by the irony. It will not be easy to extract a collection of Johnsonian critical maxims or to build a Johnsonian critical manifesto from his obiter dicta.

Faults and Beauties We can, however, make observations about Johnson’s critical practice. Literary criticism was, for him, about evaluation above all. Here he is far from our own age’s conception of the purpose of criticism: we teach our students that criticism should be analytical rather than evaluative, not a matter of thumbs-​up or -​down. Johnson’s two Dictionary definitions of the noun critick, though, focus entirely on evaluation: the critic is either “A man skilled in the art of judging of literature; a man able to distinguish the faults and beauties of writing” or, more narrowly, “A censurer; a man apt to find fault.” 6  Tom Mason, “On (Not) Writing Literary and Critical History: Dryden’s Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern,” in Philip Smallwood, ed., Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 55. 7  See Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 240–​5.

Criticism   195 Some say Johnson rarely found fault. John Wain, for instance, argues that “Johnson condemns, where he has to; but his nature is generous and affirmative, more given to sharing a love than imparting a hate. When one comes away from a few weeks’ steady reading of Johnson’s criticism, it is the passages of warm, glowing praise that remain most vividly.”8 Perhaps the “warm, glowing praise” sticks with Wain, but others’ experience has been different. Thomas Leonard-​Roy, for instance, argues that “hatred is fundamental for understanding Johnson’s thoughts on conversation and criticism.” Francis Blackburne was enraged by “Dr. Johnson’s see-​saw meditations, the shifty wiles of a man between two fires, who neither dares fight nor run away,” branding Johnson “the grand exemplar of literary prostitvtion.”9 A modern Miltonist, Roy Flannagan, admits the Life of Milton left him with a “strong urge to punch . . . Dr. Johnson” for his bilious opinion of the poet.10 Johnson insists true criticism is more than praising beauties. Addison says “one of the characteristicks of a true critic” is dwelling on “beauties rather than faults,” but Johnson corrects him: “the duty of criticism is neither to depreciate, nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover.” There is no obligation to be cruel, of course, but authors should not expect gentle treatment, “for he that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the publick judgment. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.” And once an author is dead and has no feelings to hurt, “the critick is, undoubtedly, at full liberty to exercise the strictest severity” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 133–​4). Pointing out artistic failures may be an unpleasant duty, but it is a duty nonetheless.

Careless of Diction Certain kinds of writerly failure were especially important to him. Sloppy diction is an unforgivable sin. The Metaphysical poets “endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 25), and this carelessness keeps them from true literary excellence. Poorly controlled figurative language—​including what his friend Joseph Warton may have been the first to call “mixed metaphors”—​almost always prompts Johnson’s derision.11 In Shakespeare’s

8 

John Wain, ed., Johnson as Critic (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 55. Francis Blackburne, Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (London, 1780), vi, 148. 10  Roy Flannagan, “Bate’s Samuel Johnson and Johnson’s Life of Milton: Puckish or Perverse? A Review Article,” Milton Quarterly 12 (1978), 147–​8. 11  OED finds its earliest example of mixed metaphor in one of Joseph Warton’s notes in Christopher Pitt’s translation of Virgil: “Mr. Spence observes, that there is something of the mixed metaphor (or rather mixed allegory) in this passage.” 9 

196   Jack Lynch King John, he finds “Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France, | For ere thou canst report, I will be there,” and comments, “The simile does not suit well: the lightning indeed appears before the thunder is heard, but the lightning is destructive, and the thunder innocent” (vol. vii, 406). Where Addison writes “Fir’d with that name—​| I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain, | That longs to launch into a nobler strain,” Johnson scolds him extravagantly: To “bridle” a “goddess” is no very delicate idea; but why must she be “bridled?” because she “longs to launch”; an act which was never hindered by a “bridle”: and whither will she “launch?” into a “nobler strain.” She is in the first line a “horse,” in the second a “boat”; and the care of the poet is to keep his “horse” or his “boat” from “singing.” (vol. xxii, 651)

Dryden comes in for a similar drubbing for his description of a ship in Annus Mirabilis: “What a wonderful pother is here, to make all these poetical beautifications of a ship! that is, a ‘phenix’ in the first stanza, and but a ‘wasp’ in the last” (vol. xxi, 386). Low diction where the occasion calls for high is another recurring bugbear. As he notes in Rambler 168, “every man, however profound or abstracted, perceives himself irresistibly alienated by low terms” (Yale Works, vol. v, 126). He has a particular distaste for this passage from Macbeth: Come, thick night! And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes. Nor heav’n peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, hold, hold!

The lines, Johnson admits, have much to recommend them: he sees “all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” But the low diction destroys the effect, and “perhaps scarce any man now peruses it without some disturbance of his attention from the counteraction of the words to the ideas . . . the efficacy of this invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now seldom heard but in the stable” (vol. v, 127). Whatever pathos it had comes crashing down with the word knife: Yet this sentiment is weakened by the name of an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments; we do not immediately conceive that any crime of importance is to be committed with a knife; or who does not, at last, from the long habit of connecting a knife with sordid offices, feel aversion rather than terror? (vol. v, 128)

Criticism   197 But is it really so inappropriate? The Rambler shows a sophisticated understanding of what makes some diction low. “No word,” Johnson explains, “is naturally or intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words, as of other things arbitrarily and capriciously established, depends wholly upon accident and custom.” Words get all their associations from “the occasions to which they are applied” (vol. v, 126). That modern readers are less struck by the inappropriateness of knife supports Johnson’s argument about the origins of these feelings: they come from the occasions to which they are applied, and those occasions change over time.

The Age in Which He Lived The changes in the register of the word knife between 1606 and 1765, and again between 1765 and today, remind us that Johnson was a historicist at heart. Those who focus on his emphasis on generality and universality often overlook this aspect of his criticism. Even Lawrence Lipking, one of Johnson’s most astute commentators, maintains he “loathed” historicism.12 And yet Johnson tells us that “Every man’s performance, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 81), and it is hard to imagine a more succinct statement of the historicist program. On this matter he was consistent from the beginning of his career to the end. His first published work of criticism, the Observations on Macbeth (1745), declares, “In order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merit of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age, and the opinions of his contemporaries” (vol. vii, 3). One of his last, the Life of Dryden (1779), makes the same case: “To judge rightly of an author we must transport ourselves to his time” (vol. xxi, 436). Those who cannot do so should not be taken seriously: “Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own,” he warns, “should always doubt their conclusions” (vol. xxi, 159). Johnson was not alone in this. “In reading the works of a poet who lived in a remote age,” Thomas Warton insists, “it is necessary that we should look back upon the customs and manners which prevailed in that age,” and Warton’s History of English Poetry is largely an account of “the manners, monuments, customs, practices, and opinions of antiquity,” because poems can be understood only against the background of the age. Comments like this led one critic in 1915 to credit Warton with “introduc[ing] the modern historical method of criticism.”13 But though he was not alone, Johnson was an

12 

Lipking, “What Was It Like to Be Johnson?,” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987), 57 n. 21. Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1762), vol. ii, 87; The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1774–​81), vol. i, p. ii; Clarissa Rinaker, “Thomas Warton and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” PMLA 30 (1915), 87. 13 

198   Jack Lynch important figure in the development of historicism. In a letter, he celebrates Warton’s historicist criticism and explains why it mattered so much: You have shown to all who shall hereafter attempt the study of our ancient authours the way to success, by directing them to the perusal of the books which these authours had read . . . The Reason why the authours which are yet read of the sixteenth Century are so little understood is that they are read alone, and no help is borrowed from those who lived with them or before them.14

Two years later, in his proposal for his edition of Shakespeare, he demands credit for conducting the same kind of reading program: “All the former criticks . . . have not sufficiently attended to the elucidation of passages obscured by accident or time. The editor will endeavour to read the books which the authour read, to trace his knowledge to its source, and compare his copies with their originals” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 56). Johnson derides antiquarian pedantry, but he knows criticism rests on a foundation laid by antiquaries. He knows, too, that one’s situation in history affects the critic as much as the artist, and a proper judgment depends on the ability to see beyond one’s own age. “Criticks,” he says in Rambler 93, “like all the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 132). This is his justification for applying different standards to contemporary works and classics. Shakespeare, he writes, had by 1765 attained “the dignity of an ancient,” and could therefore “claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration” (vol. vii, 61).

This Conflict of Opinions One of Johnson’s conversational trademarks is “No, Sir,” a phrase that appears more than 160 times in Boswell’s Life. Johnson loved to quarrel. On the rare occasions when Boswell feels obliged to disagree with his hero, his tone is tentative, even apologetic: “He had always been very zealous against slavery in every form, in which I with all deference thought that he discovered ‘a zeal without knowledge’ ”; “Here my friend for once discovered a want of knowledge or forgetfulness”; “Here it may be questioned whether Johnson was entirely in the right” (Life, vol. iii, 200, 336, 406). Not so when Johnson disagrees with the people around him: he thrives on contradiction. He loved taverns because they provided a forum for lively arguments: “I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight.”15 His critical method was much the same. Johnson’s was a reactive intelligence, sharpest 14 

Johnson to Warton, July 16, 1754, in Letters, vol. i, 81. John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 56. 15 Sir

Criticism   199 when he was correcting someone. Jacopo Sannazaro’s Piscatory Eclogues were “censured by succeeding criticks, because the sea is an object of terror”—​but surely “the poet has a right to select his images, and is no more obliged to shew the sea in a storm, than the land under an inundation” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 198). Conventional wisdom held that Milton was a prodigious teacher—​but “Those who tell or receive these stories, should consider that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the best horseman must be limited by the power of his horse” (vol. xxi, 116). Thomas Sprat had praised Martin Clifford as a critic—​“But let honest credulity beware of receiving characters from contemporary writers” (vol. xxi, 383). Pope had a bad reputation among “editors, collaters, commentators, and verbal criticks” for his handling of Shakespeare’s text—​“but let him not be defrauded of his due praise” (vol. xxiii, 1102). He disagreed even with people he liked. His former assistant on the Dictionary, Robert Shiels, went on to ghostwrite the Lives of the Poets attributed to Theophilus Cibber in 1753, a work that proved invaluable in his own work usually known by the same title. But while Johnson praises his old amanuensis as “a man of very acute understanding,” that doesn’t spare him from correction in the Life of Hammond: “I have since found that Mr. Shiels . . . has been misled by false accounts” (vol. xxii, 839). Criticism was for Johnson always an exchange, never an uninterrupted harangue, and many of his most important critical pronouncements were delivered as responses to rivals. His proposal for an edition of Shakespeare justifies its existence in terms of “the deficiencies of the late attempts” of the other editors (Yale Works, vol. vii, 58, 51). When the edition finally appeared it delivered on his promise to correct the earlier editors. Alexander Pope emends a line in King Lear from “Ten masts at each make not the altitude” to “Ten masts attacht”; Johnson rejects the reading: “Mr. Pope’s conjecture may stand if the word which he uses were known in our authour’s time, but I think it is of later introduction” (vol. viii, 695–​6). Pope’s nemesis Lewis Theobald, a much better textual critic, emends King John from “Unthread the rude eye of rebellion” to “untread the rude way”; Johnson disagrees: “The metaphor is certainly harsh, but I do not think the passage corrupted” (vol. vii, 427). William Warburton, his favorite target, thinks a passage in Measure for Measure was interpolated out of theatrical necessity; Johnson responds, “I cannot agree that these lines are placed here by the players” (vol. vii, 202). In the preface, he picks fights with even more critics: alongside his familiar take-​down of the so-​called Aristotelian unities (vol. vii, 79–​80) are quarrels with Voltaire, Thomas Rymer, John Dennis, John Upton, Zachary Grey, and others. Over and over again he frames his criticism as a response to, and correction of, someone else’s. So important is critical disagreement that he put it at the heart of his Shakespeare edition, which deserves to be called the first Shakespeare variorum.16 For the first time, an edition of Shakespeare included not just one editor’s notes but those of all his 16  I make the case for considering Johnson’s edition of 1765 as a variorum in “The Dignity of an Ancient: Johnson Edits the Editors,” in Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso, eds., Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 97–​114.

200   Jack Lynch predecessors as well, sometimes to agree with them, sometimes to disagree with them, and sometimes to leave a question open. And whereas a conventional edition gives priority to what is settled, a variorum devotes the most attention to those passages that have generated the most disagreement. In Johnson’s hands, the variorum form invites future readers to supersede his own judgments: “The edition now proposed will at least have this advantage over others. It will exhibit all the observable varieties of all the copies that can be found, that, if the reader is not satisfied with the editor’s determination, he may have the means of chusing better for himself ” (vol. vii, 55).

I Rejoice to Concur It might seem, then, that Johnson was happiest when he was quarreling with the world. But while disagreement energized him, he was happier still when the world got it right. “I rejoice to concur with the common reader,” he writes of Thomas Gray’s Elegy; “for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1470–​1). Johnson believed in critical principles, but real-​world examples often forced him to reconsider those principles, even to lay them aside. Blank verse, his criticism told him, is barely verse at all—​and yet “I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 204). Apparently sound critical arguments might condemn a work, but “To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside” (vol. xxiii, 1214). The only arbiter that matters is the public: “there always lies an appeal from domestick criticism to a higher judicature, and the publick, which is never corrupted, nor often deceived, is to pass the last sentence upon literary claims” (vol. iii, 128). Just as no critic can overrule the public’s enthusiasm for a book, no amount of arguing from critical principles can turn a bad verdict into a positive one. “To convince any man against his will is hard,” Johnson says in Rambler 93, “but to please him against his will is . . . above the reach of human abilities” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 131). Akenside earns one of Johnson’s most devastating put-​downs: “To examine such compositions singly, cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker parts: but when they are once found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared; for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read?” (vol. xxiii, 1451). “Tediousness,” after all, “is the most fatal of all faults” (vol. xxii, 727). On such occasions, criticism can only endorse the opinion of the crowd. Real crowds, of course, are always limited—​swayed by fads, subject to bias, misled by carpers. Johnson therefore thought about what might ratify popular judgment, and found his answer in the criticism of Shakespeare, who by 1765 had begun “to assume the dignity of an ancient”:

Criticism   201 He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topick of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. (Yale Works, vol. vii, 61)

That century test has a history that stretches back centuries; Horace’s version, est vetus atque probus, centum qui perficit annos, seems to have been conventional wisdom when he wrote it in 14 bce. But Johnson articulates a reason behind the rule of thumb: the passage of time allows those things that interfere with a candid reading to dissipate. If a work is capable of pleasing, by the time a century has passed it will have done so. If a work is unable to hold an audience’s attention, after a century we will know that. The truth will out. This is not to say Johnson always got it right. His critical blunders—​and some of them were doozies—​have provoked smirks from his own day to the present. “Nothing odd will do long,” he said. “ ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last” (Life, vol. ii, 449): this was wrong enough to earn it a place on the cover of at least one edition of Tristram Shandy. Boswell “wondered to hear him say of ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest’ ” (vol. ii, 319). Lycidas is lacking in nature, lacking in truth, lacking in art, “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 176). Of Cordelia’s death he records, “the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity” (vol. viii, 704). But, after nearly a century and a half of embracing the happy-​ending Lear, the public changed its mind, and left Johnson standing almost alone among critics to defend the most notorious vandalism of Shakespeare’s sacred text. These judgments have to count as failures even by Johnson’s own light.

He Thinks Only on Men Johnson provides examples of failed criticism. What, though, does good criticism look like? Johnson was convinced a good critic is attuned to the things literature does to its audiences. Many have paid attention to Johnson’s Aristotelian allegiances. John Wain, for instance, writes that “Johnson’s work in criticism comes down in a straight line from the general Renaissance tradition, which in turn means that it is largely Aristotelian.”17

17  John Wain, ed., Johnson as Critic (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 9. Percy Hazen Houston makes a similar case in Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth-​Century Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 42, as does Jean H. Hagstrum in Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), 24, 33, 168–​75.

202   Jack Lynch This has usually been understood to mean a mimetic conception of criticism: witness his much-​quoted praise of “just representations of general nature” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 61).18 Mimesis, though, in fact plays only a small role in Johnson’s criticism. Much more important is that he understood literature in what M. H. Abrams calls a “pragmatic” sense.19 Literature does things. Literature certainly did things to him, and Johnson felt literature in a way that is rare among major critics. His first encounter with Hamlet’s ghost terrified him: “he read Shakspeare at a period so early, that the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was alone” (Life, vol. i, 70). That sensation never went away: “He that reads Dryden, finds himself lull’d with serenity, and disposed to solitude and contemplation. He that peruses Shakespeare, looks round alarmed, and starts to find himself alone” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 19–​20). He found Cordelia’s death so shocking “that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor” (vol. viii, 704). Philip Smallwood is right to focus on the “human openness to the plays which is easily lost in the business of scholarship . . . Personal testimony of this kind is totally alien to the practice of a standard modern edition of Shakespeare, where expressions of feeling are conventionally banned.”20 To understand literature, then, is to understand how actual readers respond to it. We can discern elements of proto-​reader-​response criticism throughout Johnson’s criticism. He often places himself in someone else’s position and tries to see the world as they see it, both readers and characters. In trying to make sense of Macbeth’s “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day,” for instance, he takes his readers step by step through what he imagines taking place in Macbeth’s consciousness: I suppose every reader is disgusted at the tautology in this passage, “Time and the hour,” and will therefore willingly believe that Shakespeare wrote it thus, Come what come may, Time! on!—​the hour runs thro’ the roughest day. Macbeth is deliberating upon the events which are to befal him, but finding no satisfaction from his own thoughts, he grows impatient of reflection, and resolves to wait the close without harrassing himself with conjectures. Come what come may. But to shorten the pain of suspense, he calls upon time in the usual stile of ardent desire, to quicken his motion, Time! on!—​ 18  See also John D. Boyd, S.J., The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), chap. 7; Scott D. Evans, Samuel Johnson’s “General Nature”: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-​Century Discourse (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 134; and Edward Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), chap. 5. 19  See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 14–​21. 20  Philip Smallwood, “Shakespeare: Johnson’s Poet of Nature,” in Clingham, Cambridge Companion, 144.

Criticism   203 He then comforts himself with the reflection that all his perplexity must have an end, the hour runs through the roughest day. (Yale Works, vol. viii, 760)

There is a similarly patient explication of mental processes in his discussion of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”: “Of this celebrated soliloquy, which bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires, and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes, is connected rather in the speaker’s mind, than on his tongue, I shall endeavour to discover the train, and to shew how one sentiment produces another” (vol. viii, 981). Though there is no evidence Johnson read David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), he was certainly interested in a similar kind of associationism. This kind of character criticism is more sophisticated than what many others were doing at the time. Brian Vickers suggests the real heyday of Shakespearean character criticism begins in 1774, with critics including Maurice Morgann, Thomas Whately, and William Richardson.21 But as early as the 1740s Johnson treats Shakespeare’s major characters as human beings with complex inner lives. This is where eighteenth-​century readers were becoming increasingly convinced that Shakespeare outshone all other writers. Shakespeare’s “chief skill was in human actions, passions, and habits; he was therefore delighted with such tales as afforded numerous incidents, and exhibited many characters, in many changes of situation. These characters are so copiously diversified, and some of them so justly pursued, that his works may be considered as a map of life, a faithful miniature of human transactions, and he that has read Shakespeare with attention, will perhaps find little new in the crouded world” (vol. vii, 49). (This fantasy that the infinitely creative Shakespeare might people an entire imagined world has an echo in the Dictionary: “If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker . . . and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed”: vol. xviii, 96–​7.) Johnson writes “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species,” but this emphatically does not mean Shakespeare trades in stock characters—​stock characters are the business of “criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles,” as when “Dennis and Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard.” Shakespeare does not trade in such clichés: “His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men” (vol. vii, 62, 65). 21  Brian Vickers, “The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–​1800,” Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981), 11–​31; see also John Bligh, “Shakespearian Character Study to 1800,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984), 141–​ 53. The best discussions of eighteenth-​century character criticism more generally are Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and David A. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–​1825 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

204   Jack Lynch This sympathetic attempt to understand characters as “men” rather than as types allows him to understand some apparent critical faults as intentional. His first published work of criticism, Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth, notes that the passage “their daggers | Unmannerly breech’d with gore” is “undoubtedly” faulty—​but perhaps that’s the point? “It is not improbable,” he muses, “that Shakespeare put these forced and unnatural metaphors into the mouth of Macbeth as a mark of artifice and dissimulation, to show the difference between the studied language of hypocrisy, and the natural outcries of sudden passion” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 23). The “to be or not to be” soliloquy contains a much-​disparaged mixed metaphor: how can one take arms against a sea? Pope thought the problem could be emended away, not a sea but a siege of troubles, and Warburton likewise proposed assail of troubles. But just this once Johnson is willing to tolerate a mixed metaphor: “I know not why there should be so much solicitude about this metaphor. Shakespeare breaks his metaphors often, and in this desultory speech there was less need of preserving them” (vol. viii, 981). The metaphor is mixed for a reason. Compelling characters allowed him not just to overlook linguistic faults; they also sometimes came close to blinding him to moral faults, as in this eruption of enthusiasm over Plump Jack: Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt . . . Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. (Yale Works, vol. vii, 523)

Johnson takes the moral function of literature seriously, and is uncomfortable at the delight we take in such a corrupt and despicable character. But we cannot deny that he is delightful. It is one more instance of his critical principles bending when confronted with real-​world experience. This prospect of being led morally astray by powerful characters was especially dangerous in “The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 19). Much modern critical blood has been spilled over whether the novel “rose” with Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, or whether we should seek its true origin in La Princesse de Clèves, or in Don Quixote, or in Lazarillo de Tormes, or in Daphnis and Chloe, or somewhere else entirely. But however novel the novel, serious criticism of prose fiction was genuinely new, and Johnson may be the first truly great critic to turn his attention to it.22 22  See Michael McKeon, “Prose Fiction: Great Britain,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iv, The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 238–​63.

Criticism   205 And what pleased him most in contemporary fiction was depth and complexity of characterization. In discussing the merits of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, he maintains “that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-​plate.” Boswell interprets this as a “distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners” (Life, vol. ii, 49).23 A great writer—​a Shakespeare, a Richardson—​understands the workings of the mind as a watchmaker understands hairsprings and balance wheels. Johnson was, however, particularly struck by the moral dangers the new form posed. Works that “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind” were becoming “the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions” (vol. iii, 19, 21).

Improving Opinion into Knowledge What, finally, makes a good critic in Johnson’s mind? What was he trying to do? Can we choose to practice “Johnsonian” criticism the way we can practice Aristotelian, Marxist, or Derridean criticism? Is there, in short, a Johnsonian “theory” of literature? From the 1970s through the 1990s, the argument over Johnson and theory inevitably reflected what the participants thought of the profession’s larger “theory wars.” Those of Johnson’s admirers who were energized by différance and the Foucauldian épistémè tended to see in Johnson something like a coherent theory of literature; those who still thrilled to I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism and R. P. Blackmur’s “formal discourse of an amateur” treated Johnson as a resolute empiricist who refused to systematize. For Johnson’s enemies those positions were reversed: the theorists who disliked Johnson saw in him only a naive positivism, while his theory-​averse antagonists saw him as an uncritical adherent to neoclassical dogma. Johnson believes criticism is, or should be, more than subjective preferences and passing fancies, but it cannot be pursued a priori. We can know most important critical truths only through empirical investigation. His preface to Shakespeare includes an important meditation on the epistemic status of critical knowledge: “As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind.” Some judgments are absolute—​“Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square”—​but others are necessarily

23 

On Johnson’s opinions of Fielding and Richardson, see Allen Michie, Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 68–​72.

206   Jack Lynch comparative: “whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 60).24 Rambler 92 explains that “the task of criticism” is “to establish principles, to improve opinion into knowledge.” At its best, “Criticism reduces those regions of literature under the dominion of science, which have hitherto known only the anarchy of ignorance, the caprices of fancy, and the tyranny of prescription” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 122). But criticism is rarely at its best: despite centuries of effort, it “has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.” Individual judgments should inform principles, not vice versa: across the ages “practice has introduced rules, rather than rules have directed practice.” All rules should make us skeptical, since they are often no more than “the arbitrary edicts of legislators, authorised only by themselves” (vol. v, 76). This may be one reason why labels like “neoclassical” or “Augustan,” which once did much to explain Johnson’s critical inclinations, have fallen out of fashion among modern critics. Johnson was certainly influenced by French neoclassical critics like Boileau,25 but he was also prepared to ignore or contradict any of the principles so dear to neoclassicism when circumstances demanded it. The Johnson of legend is notorious for his dogmatism, for ending conversations with an authoritative “There’s an end on’t!” And yet, once we get past the bluster, he is often surprisingly unassuming. On encountering a difficult passage in Much Ado about Nothing, he writes simply, “This and the three next speeches I do not well understand” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 361). A phrase in 1 Henry IV stumps him: “The ‘melancholy of Moor-​ditch’ I do not understand, unless it may allude to the croaking of frogs” (vol. vii, 456). Readers of King Lear have spent centuries ingeniously glossing Kent’s notorious insult, “Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter!” Johnson frankly confesses, “I do not well understand how a man is reproached by being called ‘zed,’ nor how ‘Z’ is an ‘unnecessary letter.’ ” Has there been some textual corruption, maybe “whoreson C” for cuckold? “C is a letter unnecessary in our alphabet, one of its two sounds being represented by S, and one by K.” It is at least as plausible as the other readings, but Johnson immediately adduces evidence that weakens his own argument: “But all the copies concur in the common reading” (vol. viii, 674–​5). He makes a pair of confessions few critics have the courage to make: that he does not get a joke and that he has not done the required reading. In annotating “The young prince hath mis-​led me. I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog,” he writes, “I do not understand this joke. Dogs lead the blind, but why does a dog lead the fat?” (vol. vii, 494). And of Thomson’s Liberty, he admits, “when it first appeared, I tried to read [it],

24 For

other eighteenth-​century considerations on the same question, see Douglas Lane Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 41. 25  Some of the foundational work on Johnson’s critical debts appears in Percy Hazen Houston, Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth-​Century Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), esp. chap. 3, 4, and 5; a more thorough account of Johnson’s neoclassical allegiances appears in Robert D. Stock, Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory: The Intellectual Context of the Preface to Shakespeare (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1974).

Criticism   207 and soon desisted. I have never tried again, and therefore will not hazard either praise or censure” (vol. xxiii, 1294). He is especially diffident in offering conjectural emendations: “I am about to propose an interpretation which many will think harsh, and which I do not offer for certain” (vol. vii, 436). Another Falstaffism prompts similar confusion. “If Percy be alive, I’ll pierce him” bothered a number of early commentators. Warburton suggested emending “I’ll” to “he’ll,” referring to Prince Hal. Johnson, always uncomfortable with conjecture, offers his own reading: I rather take the conceit to be this. To “pierce a vessel” is to “tap” it. Falstaff takes up his bottle which the Prince had tossed at his head, and being about to animate himself with a draught, cries, “if Percy be alive I’ll pierce him,” and so draws the cork.

But then, at the end of the long note, he demurs: “I do not propose this with much confidence” (vol. vii, 488). As James Misenheimer notes, “Johnson is not an easy critic. He is never easy upon himself, and he is seldom easy upon others.”26 We are left with the paradox that the arch-​dogmatist, that Great Cham of Literature, may be the most diffident of all the great critics. The goal is to improve opinion into knowledge, but Johnson knows real critical knowledge is hard-​won. To be a Johnsonian critic is to be uncommonly open to all the ways a critic can fail. It means constantly asking whether one’s biases interfere with seeing the thing itself. It means scrutinizing every word in literature with the intensity of a lexicographer. It means recognizing that the larger public is a better judge than any one critic, since criticism demands a kind of self-​effacement that does not come easily. It means admitting ignorance. It means always trying to rise above one’s own limited historical point of view. To be a Johnsonian critic is exhausting, so exhausting that we may want to shout, “Enough!—​no human being can ever be a critic.” But perhaps in that struggle against insurmountable odds there is something akin to heroism, something almost worthy of a celebratory statue.

Further Reading Clingham, G. J. “ ‘Himself that Great Sublime’: Johnson’s Critical Thinking.” Etudes anglaises 41, no. 2 (April–​June 1988): 165–​78. Clingham, Greg. “Life and Literature in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 161–​91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1976. Hagstrum, Jean H. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1952. 26 James

B. Misenheimer, Jr., “Johnson and Critical Expectation,” in Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson, ed. Prem Nath (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987), 14.

208   Jack Lynch Nisbet, H. H., and Claude Rawson, eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iv, The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Parker, G. F. Johnson’s Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Rees, Christine. Johnson’s Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Smallwood, Philip. Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Tomarken, Edward. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Wain, John, ed. Johnson as Critic. London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

Chapter 12

Sermons Howard D. Weinbrot*

The layman Samuel Johnson wrote some forty sermons, twenty-​eight of which survive. The significant majority of these were probably purchased by Johnson’s old schoolmate, litigious friend, and prebendary of Westminster, John Taylor of Ashbourne. Sir John Hawkins reports that “a clergyman of some eminence” whom Johnson long knew, “being to preach on a particular occasion, he applied, as others under a like necessity had frequently done, to Johnson for help. ‘I will write a sermon for thee’ said Johnson, ‘but thou must pay me for it.’ ”1 The clergyman or perhaps his amanuensis normally copied out the sermon, after which the manuscript was destroyed. The purchaser’s two-​guinea fee bought nominal ownership. Given Hawkins’s remark about a “particular occasion,” whoever chose the text, Johnson supplied what the clergyman’s occasion needed. Taylor surely would prefer to have Johnson temper a potentially controversial 30th of January sermon, memorializing Charles I as martyr, rather than write one himself. The two collected volumes appeared as Sermons on Different Subjects, Left for Publication by John Taylor, LL.D. . . . Published by the Rev. Samuel Hayes (London, 1788–​9). Taylor’s apparent attempt to pass the sermons off as his own fooled no one. They were recognized as Johnson’s, were warmly received, and have been largely ignored ever since.2 They are masterpieces of their kind. *  I am indebted to Robert DeMaria, Jr., Melvyn New, and Archdeacon Jane Steen for helpful reading of earlier versions of this chapter. 1  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 53. See also 236 and 273. For the method of clergymen copying and then destroying Johnson’s manuscript, see Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 507; also vol. iii, 141–​6, 181–​2 and n. 3, vol. v, 67–​8, 483–​4. 2  For fuller discussion of the sermons’ reception and aspects of their contexts, see Jean H. Hagstrum, “The Sermons of Samuel Johnson,” Modern Philology 40 (1943), 261–​6; Paul K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 180–​ 214; James Gray, Samuel Johnson’s Sermons: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Yale Works, vol. xiv, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (1978), xxix–​xxv and 331–​8; Jane Elizabeth Steen, “Samuel Johnson and Aspects of Anglicanism,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 1992, especially 48–​74; Howard D. Weinbrot, “Samuel Johnson’s Practical Sermon in Context: Spousal Whiggery and the Book of Common Prayer,” Modern Philology 114, no. 2 (2016),

210   Howard D. Weinbrot

Johnson Defines Sermons: The Voices of His Practical Sermons Johnson defines sermon in his Dictionary as “A discourse of instruction pronounced by a divine for the edification of the people.” Instruction is “Precepts conveying knowledge,” and is illustrated from Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding (1706, posthumous): “We are beholden to judicious writers of all ages, for those discoveries and discourses they have left behind them for our instruction.”3 Edification is “The act of building up man in the faith; improvement, holiness.” Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) demonstrates enlarged faith: Jesus “told us that we must account for every idle word, not meaning that every word which is not designed to edification, or is less prudent, shall be reckoned for a sin.”4 The sermon’s spiritual wisdom builds faith and advances holiness. As Johnson says elsewhere, a sermon is “the labour of converting wickedness, and instructing ignorance.”5 An instructive, edifying sermon labors to improve and convert, but requires a willing heart. The omnipresent eighteenth-​century sermon included varied and often overlapping species—​like expository sermons that illumine a biblical text, topical or historical sermons that concern a modern event like the 5th of November or 30th of January, related overtly political sermons in which the text becomes a political and religious statement, assize sermons that stress the connections between justice and religion—​ and so on.6 Samuel Johnson’s practical sermons on such topics relate divine guidance to desired human actions, often exemplified in the sermon’s text. Divinity offers wisdom to individuals in the daily world, the better to help them prepare for the next world. Hence “the happiness of the present state is best secured by virtue, and the happiness of futurity can be obtained by no other method.”7 Johnson stressed such interchange between the

310–​36; Weinbrot, “Samuel Johnson’s Charity Sermon during War: St. Paul’s Cathedral, 2 March 1745,” Review of English Studies n.s. 70, no. 297 (2019), 890–​910. 3  Conduct of the Understanding, in The Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London, 1706). Locke urges the collegial and educational relationship between readers and the valuable knowledge earlier authors leave them: “enter into their Reasonings, examine their Proofs, and then judge of the Truth or Falsehood, Probability or Improbability of what they advance” (76–​7). 4  Dictionary, s.v. sermon, instruction, edification. See Taylor, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living, 19th ed. (London, 1703), 4; section 1, chap. 1: “The First General Instrument of Holy Living: Care of our Time.” 5  Sermon 27, for Henry Hervey Aston, presented May 2, 1745, in Yale Works, vol. xiv, 298. If the date is old style, the new-​style date would be May 13. 6  The index to The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon lists nineteen types of sermons (604). See also its reprinting of Niels Hemmingsen, “The Kinds of Sermons,” from The Preacher, or Methode of Preaching, trans. J.H. (London, 1574), 520–​1. 7  This is from Sermon 26, in Yale Works, vol. xiv, 285, attributed to Johnson at xxxv–​xxxix and 273 n. 1. I see no reason not to accept the attribution.

Sermons   211 human and the divine, the preacher and his hearer or reader, both in his religious and familiar moral works. Three germane statements help us to understand Johnson as sermon writer. Richard Hooker in 1593: “In moral actions divine lawe helpeth exceedingly the law of reason to guide mans life.” James Boswell in 1791: the “Rambler furnishes such an assemblage of discourses on practical religion and moral duty . . . that no mind can be thought very deficient that has . . . assimilated to itself all that may be found there.” William Carew Hazlitt in 1884: Johnson “was a moralist of the most active and thorough-​going stamp . . . There is no finer essay on practical religion than the literary history of Rasselas.”8 These remarks meld morality, religion, and instruction. The final two authorities cite Johnson’s moral works as emblems of practical religion. One of Johnson’s definitions of morality hints at the religious basis of moral action: “2. The form of an action which makes it the subject of reward, or punishment.” He offers fourteen illustrative quotations for the varied uses of reward and its derived forms as adjective, noun, and verb. Three illustrations are from the Bible; five are from theological texts or literary texts with theological statements, as in “The supreme being rewards the just, and punishes the unjust. Broome’s Notes on the Odyssey.” Johnson’s definition reiterates his discussion of morality in the preface to Dodsley’s Preceptor (1748). Morality alone lacks “coercive power”; it must league with “the prospect of rewards, and fear by the expectation of punishment.” Given this union, “morality . . . must derive her authority from religion” by means of “the sanctions of Christianity” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 188). Reason and morality thus guide religious action and do not diminish Revelation’s power. Joseph Trapp confronted that issue and often joined the practical and moral as religious principles. “Morality, or practical Religion, is truly and properly divided into Duties toward God, our Neighbour, and Ourselves,” he says. The term morality has wrongly been abused. True morality in fact includes “the Grace of God’s Holy Spirit . . . super added.” Trapp elsewhere concludes that “The End of Preaching, and Hearing, is Practise.”9 The dutiful religion and morality so described are “practical,” as in

8 

The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. S. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–​98), vol. i, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Georges Edelen (1977), 139, after which Hooker adds that “in supernatural it [divine law] alone guideth.” The Dictionary uses Hooker’s “in moral actions” to illustrate the adjective moral. Thanks to Archdeacon Jane Steen for alerting me to this. See Boswell, Life, vol. i, 214; and William Carew Hazlitt, “Dr. Johnson,” in Offspring of Thought in Solitude (London, 1884), 56. 9  Joseph Trapp, Sermons on Moral and Practical Subjects by the Late Rev. Joseph Trapp, D.D., 2 vols. (Reading, 1752), vol. i, 84–​5. For other melding of practical and moral, see vol. i, 80; vol. ii, 236, 255, and 328. The editor, Trapp’s son, does not indicate the sermon’s original dates. For Trapp on the “end of preaching,” see Of Preaching, Hearing, and Practising the Word of God (London, 1730), 18 and 20. Trapp’s High Church beliefs did not interfere with his “high practical” sermon mode in this case. Elsewhere, however, Trapp insists that emphasizing the practical, preceptive, aspects of Christianity must not lead us to neglect the essential beliefs and mysteries of Christian thought, like faith, redemption, sacrifice, justification, and the like. He nonetheless also insists that preachers are wiser to explain “the plain practical Points of Religion, than to be engaged in the Tempests of Controversy.” See A Preservative against Unsettled Notions, and Want of Principles in Religion (London, 1715), ii–​iii and 312 respectively.

212   Howard D. Weinbrot Johnson’s “Relating to action; not merely speculative,” with illustrative quotations from Robert South’s and from John Tillotson’s sermons. South says that “The image of God was . . . resplendent in man’s practical understanding.” Johnson’s practical sermons encourage practical religion guided by God. Johnson’s generation was less keen on preachers’ learning than on clear discourse, especially so for those engaged in the relatively new version of the “practical” part of the sermon genre. In 1690, for example, the Platonist John Norris (1657–​1711) of Bemerton published Practical Discourses upon the Beatitudes of . . . Jesus Christ. These are subjects “as Great and Noble as any . . . in all Practical Divinity.” Noble discourses require prose that should “rise up to their Dignity.”10 Peter Nourse (1663–​1723) was just six years younger than Norris but still part of the newer Tillotsonian concept of the practical sermon, as in Nourse’s Practical Discourses on Several Subjects . . . Put into a New Method and Modern Stile, and Fitted to Common Use (1705). The homilies’ antiquated scholastic language, he writes, no longer moves modern parishioners. The language and “the Manner of Expression, and all the Way and Method of Preaching is very different now.” Today’s preacher must “accommodate sound Notions to the Vulgar” in order to move their affections. Johnson agreed. He told Boswell that Methodist sermons were successful because they expressed “themselves in a plain and familiar manner, which is the only way to do good to the common people.”11 His tenth sermon (Galatians 6:7, God is not mocked) scolds heathens for lacking both a credible concept of the afterlife and a religion “diffused among the busy or the vulgar” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 108). Indeed, we later hear, “vulgar minds . . . must form the greatest part of every sect” (vol. xiv, 288). After all, “the gospel itself was first received by the poor” (vol. xiv, 176). Johnson tells a young country clergyman that a good sermon must have “something of natural or casual felicity.” Johnson was keen on the Church Fathers and on the Church of England’s own fathers and earlier sermon writers; but admiring Hooker does not denote writing like Hooker.12 Nonetheless, Johnson’s sermon style is not uniformly “plain and familiar.” Sermon 13, for example, begins with a fifteen-​line sentence (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 137). At another place we hear that the Christian religion “has been depraved by . . . succedaneous practices of reconciliation” (vol. xiv, 141), and that “the purest human virtue has much

10   John Norris, “To the Reader,” in Practical Discourses upon the Beatitudes: Volume the First, 5th ed. (London, 1707), sigs. A3r–​v, in italics. The epistle dedicatory to John Langton, Esq. is dated April 21, 1690. 11  Peter Nourse, preface to Practical Discourses, on Several Subjects: Being Some Select Homilies of the Church of England, Put into a New Method and Modern Stile, and Fitted to Common Use (London, 1705; 4th ed., 1731), sig. A2r–​v. Johnson added that the best clergymen should write “from a principle of duty, when it is suited to their congregations” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 458–​9). See also Johnson’s accidental encounter with a Methodist worshiper on April 7, 1765 in Yale Works, vol. i, 94. 12  Hawkins emphasizes Johnson’s vast reading in the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Anglican fathers, and religious texts generally. See Hawkins, Life, 326–​7. For further comparable remarks, see especially Suarez, “Johnson’s Christian Thought.” Boswell adds that Johnson’s letter “contains valuable advice to Divines in general” (Life, vol. iii, 436). The serious letter to Charles Lawrence dated August 30, 1780 is in vol. iii, 436–​8; see also Letters, vol. iii, 310–​13.

Sermons   213 faeculence” (vol. xiv, 146). In 1745, Johnson wrote a charity sermon for Henry Hervey Aston to deliver in St. Paul’s Cathedral. It includes rhetorical devices that establish the earl’s son as among the educated Great and the Good. He thus is worthy of the respect and contributions of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other elites in attendance. These examples, though, are exceptions that prove the rule. Johnson’s sermons are easily comprehended, often moving, and often recall the Rambler’s secular concerns and style.13 As Johnson told that young clergyman, “all means must be tried by which souls may be saved” (Life, vol. iii, 438). The thirteenth sermon exemplifies Johnson’s regularly simple lines. The religious hypocrite soon is discovered, “and when he is once known, the world will not wait for counsel to avoid him, for the good detest, and the bad despise him” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 138). “To give the heart to God, and to give the whole heart, is very difficult” (vol. xiv, 143). One of man’s great duties “as a social being, is, to let his light shine before men” but not “to boast of his own excellence” (vol. xiv, 147). In Sermon 14, we read that “men fail to gain what they so much desire, because they seek it where it is not to be found” (vol. xiv, 150). Experience teaches that peace and contentment are “ill supplied by hurry and confusion, by pomp and variety” (vol. xiv, 152). Bearing false witness is wrong, dangerous, and subjects one to revenge and defamation: “The way to avoid effects is to avoid the causes” (vol. xiv, 190). Johnson’s practical sermons are typically sensitive to the family’s role within social structures. “Closer ties of union are necessary to promote the separate interests of individuals”—​hence the need for marriage (vol. xiv, 4). Charity is vital so that “the orphan may be supplied with a father, and the widow with a defender” (vol. xiv, 207). Johnson’s figurative language is tactful, tactical, and enhances his mid-​level style’s statements of moral or spiritual truths. We read that wickedness “naturally skulks in coverts and in darkness, but grows furious by despair.” A man “ventures upon wickedness, as upon waters with which he is unacquainted” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 216) and is endangered. We prefer happiness but “seek it where it is not to be found.” We seem to long for a bright bubble that is “neither solid nor lasting, but owes its beauty only to its distance, and is no sooner touched than it disappears” (vol. xiv, 150). The image well characterizes human desires for happiness, misplaced efforts to achieve those desires,

13   Overlap between the Rambler and the sermons has been well studied by Alkon in Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Two overlapping remarks suggest that the practical sermon’s moral psychology also recalls the Rambler’s moral psychology. Johnson’s Rambler 2 (1750) tells us that “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 14). John Mason lacks Johnson’s concision but shares his concept: “serious Christians” read and hear sermons “not so much to be inform’d of what they did not know, as to be reminded of, and impress’d with the Importance of what they are apt to forget”: John Mason, Christian Morals; or, Discourses on the Several Human, Divine, Christian, and Social Virtues, 2 vols. (London, 1761), vol. i, p. xviii. A good sermon reminds us to recall forgotten wisdom and turn it to moral action based on religious principals. Sermon subjects and sermon style indeed often overlap with the Rambler, but the sermons are longer, therefore have more depth, and are more serious; they overtly and uniformly concern the soul, our quest to deserve reward in the next world, and our relationship not only to other humans, but also to God and Jesus.

214   Howard D. Weinbrot their prompt disappearance, and our disappointment when we have achieved nothing. The antidote to brief flimsy joy must be lasting solid joy supplied by religion. The practical sermon’s “new method” is thus normally in accessible language, and avoids learned discourse, incandescent theological disputes, complex biblical interpretation, and elucidation of Christian mysteries. Johnson concerns himself with our relationship to God, the consequences of our failure in that relationship, and the ways we can turn failure to success (see Chapter 36, “God”). Such sermons, again normally, concern the quotidian, and the secular performance of Christian values. In 1723, John Evans wrote practical sermons “for the use of families,” especially for Sunday nights and to guide children and servants. He avoids “unedifying contentions” and “doubtful disputations, or . . . angry contests among brethren.”14 Johnson, in turn, hopes to create a present spiritual world that leads to permanent bliss as the sermon labors to convert and instruct, as in one case regarding husbands and wives. Johnson advises that to preserve marital love husband and wife must practice “continual acts of tenderness” and “forgive errours, and overlook defects” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 14). They also mentor their young: “every man” rightly teaches his son a “useful art, which, by making him necessary to others, may oblige others to repay him what is necessary to himself ” (vol. xiv, 194–​5). Such practical relationships are part of God’s design for sociable human beings’ happiness. The plan includes rulers, whom God appoints “for the good of Mankind.” God asks that “every man living do all possible good to every other, as far as in him lieth.”15 Johnson’s sermons embody that ethic. His eleventh sermon, on 1 Peter 3:8, asks us to be of one mind, be compassionate, “love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous” (vol. xiv, 117). “It must be supposed,” Johnson says, that the Apostle “means not speculative, but practical union . . . similitude of virtues” (vol. xiv, 118). These are exemplified at home in “the system of domestick virtue, which the Apostle recommends” (vol. xiv, 126). The domestic sermon’s encouraging tone is only one of Johnson’s voices among his several sermons. He is the earl’s son who mingles elegant simplicity with rhetorical devices, as in the sermon for Aston. He is the avuncular pastor advising the couple before him how best to manage a marriage (see Chapter 24, “Sociability”). He sagely advises the ruling classes how to avoid political disruption that leads to fatal rebellion. The two most moving voices in the sermons, however, are no. 28, on behalf of the condemned clergyman Dr. William Dodd, and no. 25, Johnson’s “own” pastoral voice regarding the death of his wife Tetty, Elizabeth Jervis Porter (see Chapter 30, “Death”). Different circumstances demand different strategies. 14  John Evans, Practical Discourses concerning the Christian Temper: Being Thirty Eight Sermons upon the Principal Heads of Practical Religion . . . Designed for the Use of Families, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1737), vol. i, sigs. A2v–​A3r. The Yale editors state that “Johnson’s sermons contain some of his purest and most intense expressions of otherworldly religious conviction” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, p. xxx). I suggest that Johnson’s practical application of the otherworldly to the present world is a better reason for their success. 15  Patrick Delany, Sermon 14, “The Duty of Rulers to their Subjects,” in Twenty Sermons upon Social Duties and Their Opposite Vices (London, 1750), 281. The social sermon is a version of the practical sermon.

Sermons   215 Johnson’s sermon for Dodd prior to his execution is largely colloquial. He speaks within Newgate Chapel, to the fellow condemned prisoners whom he prepares for death and divine judgment. Dodd preaches as a colleague and not as the Reverend Doctor Dodd, LL.D.: “You are not to consider me now as a man authorised to form the manners, or direct the conscience, and speaking with the authority of a pastor to his flock.—​I am here guilty, like yourselves, of a capital offence; and sentenced, like yourselves, to publick and shameful death” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 303). Dodd avoids the chapel’s pulpit and asks his condemned congregation “to unite with me, on bended knees, and with humbled hearts, in fervent prayer” for God’s mercy (vol. xiv, 311).16 That grim venue and solemn occasion evoke familiar speech to those awaiting death. The venue is lightened, so far as possible, by Dodd’s remorse regarding his acknowledged guilt and his spiritual and patriotic assistance to those unfortunates before him. They need to repent their crimes and admit the justice of their sentence. They thus can “bequeath to our country that confidence in public justice, without which there can be neither peace nor safety” (vol. xiv, 310). Dodd’s sermon in prison was about his own and other inmates’ preparation for death and hopes for grace. Tetty died on March 17, 1752. Johnson’s sermon for her is supposed to be presented at her funeral, at which he and other participants grieve. The sermon also is about Johnson’s love, gratitude, loss, and hope for a future together in a better world—​as if the faith in sermons he has written for others is now tested in the sermon he has written for himself. That faith indeed promptly is supported by the words in his text from John 11:25–​6 and the sermon’s first paragraph. We see resurrection, life, live, liveth, never die, consolations, chear, ease, comfort, security, and enjoyment. These are contingent upon belief in Jesus rather than in “the fallacious and uncertain glimmer of philosophy.” The secular glimmers in darkness. The Christian provides “supernatural light of heavenly doctrine” as the mourner’s partner through gloom and “the valley of the shadow of death” (vol. xiv, 261–​2). Reason also fails as secular comfort. It discovered that the soul was distinct from the material body and therefore not capable of corruption. Reason depends upon arcane philosophical dicta to which most of us are indifferent. The Christian believes “upon more certain proofs, and higher authority”—​“the gospel of Christ” (vol. xiv, 264, 265). Johnson contrasts the darkness of the narrow grave with Christian belief that helps to “expatiate without obstruction” and to support the grieving

16  Words added by Dodd, who also added this note to Johnson’s sermon: “I now stand before you—​ no more in the pulpit of instruction, but on this humble seat with yourselves” (vol. xiv, 303). Caroline Jowett chronicles the unpleasant aspects of Newgate chapel, in which the condemned often listened and prayed with a coffin amidst them and other prisoners’ noise nearby. See Jowett, The History of Newgate Prison (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Penn & Sword Books, 2017). Johnson’s sermon, as if Dodd’s sermon, was praised and reprinted in full by “A Citizen of London,” An Account of the Life and Writing of the Rev. Dr. Dodd (London, 1777), 40–​52. Extracts were printed in The Malefactor’s Register; or, The Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, 5 vols. (London, 1779), vol. v, 226–​7. The Yale editors list several other reprintings in Yale Works, vol. xiv, 301 n. 1. Isaac Reed’s Account of the Life and Writing of William Dodd, LL.D. (London, 1777) praises the sermon. He adds that some say it was by “the same admired writer” who wrote Dodd’s address to the court and his petitions for the king’s mercy (84 and n).

216   Howard D. Weinbrot mind (vol. xiv, 265). The Gospel so improves the human condition and reduces “the sting of death” that we can contemplate mortality as a path to immortality (vol. xiv, 266). Johnson knows that to lose a loved one is to lose part of oneself and to gain “a gloomy vacuity” of mind. In a moving statement of loss, the dead “can be seen no more . . . we must go to them; but they cannot return to us” (vol. xiv, 267). The simplicity of those words masks unspeakable grief. In the edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1765), Johnson said that he was “many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” He nonetheless remembered what he could not endure to re-​read. Lear returns to the stage and a world that Kent called “cheerless, dark, and deadly,” to which Lear says “Ay, so I think.” He could think little else with his wicked daughters dead and the virtuous Cordelia breathless beside him. “Why should a dog, a horse, or a rat live, | And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more. | Never, never, never, never, never.”17 Lear’s world lacked the Christianity that, for Johnson, lightened the darkness of loss. Religion alone compensates for the loss of quotidian joy and reciprocity and assures us that “the soul is returned to God” (vol. xiv, 268), who supports such divine exchange and “return”—​always assuming penitence, contrition, and faith. Johnson moves from the general to the particular, from humanity’s to his own loss. Taylor thought the sermon too generous to Tetty and densely overlooked Johnson’s explanation of why he so praised her character. Tetty is being judged by God: “it would ill become beings like us, weak and sinful as herself, to remember those faults which, we trust, Eternal Purity has pardoned” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 269). We must remember the best of Tetty so that we may imitate the best of Tetty (vol. xiv, 270). That is not enough. Johnson moves back to the general as he had moved toward the particular. Tetty’s death teaches us to recognize the vanity of human wishes, the need to prepare for death made tolerable by religion, and to use her death and hoped-​for pardon as a model for our own hoped-​for salvation. Johnson’s final paragraph acknowledges that breadth of concern—​ for “our care, when we retire from this solemnity,” when as a result “we immediately turn from our wickedness,” so that when “our bodies” dissolve, “our souls may be saved” (vol. xiv, 271). Tetty’s virtues and God’s mercy have been absorbed into the dark moment; these allowed the funeral’s guests to contemplate “all the glorious host of heaven” whom we may join “for ever and ever” (vol. xiv, 271). The sermon for Dodd transformed condemned prisoners to national benefactors. The sermon for Tetty transformed earthly darkness to angelic light. Johnson clearly favored practical wisdom, the practical sermon, and consequent practical religion based on divine instruction to faulty humans seeking improvement. He adapted the text and occasion to his own views of religious, moral and, when necessary, political discourse. Since he spoke for an ordained clergyman, his politics and theology remained within the broad boundaries of mid-​century Anglican belief, which

17 

King Lear, 5.3.351, 370–​2, in The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 370–​2; see Johnson, Yale Works, vol. viii, 704.

Sermons   217 he himself advocated.18 In so advocating, he relegated his private thoughts and fears regarding his personal religion to his prayers and diaries, and spoke only as a public voice of the established church.

The Theology of Johnson’s Practical Sermons Johnson’s theology is evidence-​based, as in the first sentence of Sermon 10: “One of the mighty blessings, bestowed upon us by the Christian revelation, is, that we have now a certain knowledge of a future state, and of the rewards and punishments that await us after death” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 107). Revelation, the knowledge, or perhaps understanding, it transmits, and the requirements for salvation are blessedly known. Johnson uses Dodd in Newgate to state basic Anglican principles: “Salvation is promised to us Christians, on the terms of faith, obedience, and repentance.” Faith is absolute confidence in the truth of God’s words as expressed in Scripture, confidence that Jesus died to “take away the sins of the world,” and that each of us shares in those “boundless benefits” (vol. xiv, 303–​4). Obedience requires “submission to the will of God, and calm acquiescence in his wisdom and his justice.” As sinners we are to accept God’s punishments without complaint, and understand that our obedience “may yet reconcile ourselves to God.” We will find Him if we sincerely seek Him through prayer and good conduct (vol. xiv, 305–​ 6). Obedience implies repentance, or “a sorrow for sin as produces a change of manners, and an amendment of life,” such as no longer committing sins and changing the heart that induced the sin. God then will consider “repentance . . . complete” and “that life as amended.” Those are root principles of Johnson’s Christian answers to “what I must do to be saved” (vol. xiv, 303); but of course his sermons’ theology includes much more regarding the relationships of the divine to the secular, and of humanity to an omnipotent and loving God. God “spake the word, and the world was made.” He “commanded, and it was created.” He also infinitely pities fallible man, whom He loves and wants to succeed. God thus incites us with “soft impulses, to perseverance in virtue” and recalls us from vice “by instruction and punishment” (vol. xiv, 17). These traits evoke cognate aspects of man's relationship to God. One trait is what Johnson calls “filial” or “holy fear,” our concern that we must please God the Father and the judge. This fear assures that we examine the 18 

For useful discussion of received Anglican practice, see B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-​Century England: Theological Debate from Burke to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–​1832: Unity and Accord (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); and Robert G. Ingram, “The Church of England, 1714–​1783,” in Jeremy Gregory, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. ii, Establishment and Empire, 1662–​1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 49–​67. The list, of course, is selective. The Oxford volume includes bibliographies and several other valuable chapters, certainly including William Gibson, “Sermons,” 270–​88.

218   Howard D. Weinbrot motives and consequences of our actions and that we “progress in holiness” (vol. xiv, 30–​1). True fear of God moves us to avoid evil and its causes, the better to please God the benevolent judge (vol. xiv, 35). Another aspect of fear regards God as a punitive judge. The consequence of repeated failures in virtue and triumphs in vice lead to an eternity of pain—​which the good and wise God urges us to avoid. So dreadful a consequence remains possible for those who reject repentance and God’s mercy. “The longer sin has been indulged, the more irksome will be the retrospect of life” and more uncertain will be God’s grace, without which we cannot cleanse our corruption. Grace “offered and refused” may not be offered again. To reject grace and expect a joyous eternity “is to some degree, a mockery of God.” That cannot happen: “God is not mocked” (vol. xiv, 114). Both mercy and grace are conditional—​in each case upon whether the genuinely repentant individual seeks mercy. “We shall be treated according to our obedience or transgressions”; the wicked thus shall not “escape their punishment” (vol. xiv, 115). That is not God’s desired outcome for us. He knows that we are likely to fail in many efforts to be virtuous, and so He stresses mercy—​so long as, in one of Johnson’s key words regarding human conduct, we endeavor to succeed. God does not expect perfection. He expects us to be human and thus understands our psychology and motivation. We could not improve if a rigidly severe and merciless God demanded uniform virtue: “in vain would the best men endeavour to recommend themselves to his favour; in vain would the most circumspect watch the motion of his own heart, and the most diligent apply himself to the exercise of virtue.” Consequent “ineffectual solicitude” and “unavailing labours” would tire us morally and psychologically. Without hope of acceptance, we would not try to be accepted and “God would not . . . be served” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 18). This concept of service to God as fallible humans’ growth reflects Johnson’s conception of man’s relationship to God. In the ninth sermon, he makes plain that one’s sense of imperfect personal virtue does not prohibit taking communion. A “compleat exemption from sin” and uniform observance of all religious precepts is not possible in “this frail state.” God seeks “unfeigned repentance, sincere intentions, and earnest endeavours, though [one is] entangled with many frailties.” God encourages us to repent so that we may join “the assemblies of saints, and the choirs of angels” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 98). Johnson acknowledges the reality of our sin, but insists that we “endeavor” to correct it. In so doing, he reflects God’s larger acceptance of the reality of our sin so long as we attempt to correct it. This mingled generosity of vision and of tone populates most of Johnson’s sermons. The God who would be served is a friend. He supplies our needs and lessens our weaknesses, as in the mandate for marriage in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father, and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 3). Johnson’s sermon begins with a lament regarding solitude’s dangers, gloom, stillness, discontent, perplexity, distraction, grief, and melancholy. Their contrast is a society “necessary to the happiness of human nature” that requires man and woman in an “intercourse of sentiments, and an exchange of observations.” These disburden the heart and communicate its concerns (vol. xiv, 3). The divine cause for such human response is

Sermons   219 proof of God’s “regard . . . for the happiness of mankind.” He knows that “closer ties of union are necessary to promote the separate interests of individuals” (vol. xiv, 4). This process is enhanced through the physical, spiritual, emotional, and financial ties that marriage makes possible. In many cases, that help comes from connection to Jesus. One paragraph in Johnson’s sermon on communion offers terms like “the cooperation of God,” “renewal of our baptismal vow,” and “renovation of that covenant.” These reconcile us to God and lead us away from “confidence in our strength” and toward “the assistance of that Comforter, who came down from Heaven” to lead us to renewal, reconciliation, and restoration of our participation in “the merits of our Saviour” (vol. xiv, 102–​3). Renewal and reconciliation are available to all who choose to seek it by means of faith and action. Divine wisdom, then, provides free will, the better for us to earn divine approbation. God does not make it impossible for us to murder or oppress; that would “destroy virtue; for virtue is the consequence of choice.” Our actions “would not be the result of free-​will, determined by moral motives” but by necessity, like the “predestined motions of a machine” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 56). God of the sermons thus rejects Article 17 of the Thirty-​Nine Articles, the Calvinist predestination in which only a select group are saved.19 Johnson’s twenty-​second sermon, here like Johnson in private prayer, argues that “it is not the will of God, that any should perish, but that all should repent, and be saved” (vol. xiv, 232). God is “the universal Father of mankind” (vol. xiv, 146). He loves all his children and teaches them how best to behave for an ultimate reward. That teaching comes through Johnson’s sermon as a source of edification and salvation, however much spoken by another messenger.

The Preacher’s Role and God’s Role in Moral Psychology Sermons as public performance reflect Johnson’s rhetorical arts and styles. They also communicate their durable truths in part by his ability to establish relationships between speaker and congregant. Almost all of Johnson’s sermons were delivered by a cleric in ecclesiastical garb. The preacher used an angled and often ornate stairway to enter his handsomely carved elevated pulpit to deliver God’s word from on high. He thus literally looked down upon 19 

See Gilbert Burnet, An Exposition of the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England (London, 1699), 145. Burnet’s exposition encouraged tolerance for conflicting interpretations of the Articles. His long discussion, 145–​70, does not draw any overt conclusions regarding whether the Church is bound by Article 17. Burnet avoids overtly stating his own views, which are covert in these final words: “the Church has not been peremptory, but . . . a Latitude has been left to different opinions” (170). Here, as elsewhere, Johnson was on the Latutidinarian’s side. Johnson addresses God on Easter Day, April 15, 1759, and says that He “wouldst that all men should be saved” (Yale Works, vol. i, 70).

220   Howard D. Weinbrot his parishioners. The pulpit often was covered by a carved canopy, called a tester or sounding board, that further extended an image of protected and projected authority for the preacher’s voice and bearing. The image suggested yet further power when the church had either a two-​decker or three-​decker series of pulpits.20 Johnson hopes to reduce the distance between preacher and congregant by means of communal pronouns. We, us, and our appear sixty times in the original Taylor collection, and several times more in the sermons that did not appear in those two volumes. The preacher includes himself in the human search to overcome persistent error in order to achieve permanent bliss. The thirteenth sermon urges us to labor long and pray fervently to achieve that end. We wrongly seek an easy path to heaven and we “keep our hopes alive by faint endeavours.” In such cases, “we may be zealously religious at little expence.—​By expressing on all occasions our detestation of heresy and popery.” We then wrongly “erect ourselves into champions for truth without much hazard or trouble” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 143). We, as speaker and auditor, share fallible human traits that want correction. Johnson’s sermons thus regularly play upon the joined concepts of human error and the correction of human error. We are a restless, unreliable, self-​deceptive, and often immoral race that generally fails to find the tranquility, reliability, self-​knowledge, and morality we seek. We demand “private interest” and rewards in our “struggle of emulation” but find strife, not peace. Turmoil could be corrected “if it were regulated by reason and religion” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 239–​40). Ecclesiastes says that all is vanity, a troubling verdict that we reflect as we strive for success and rarely are satisfied even when successful; but we must never stop striving or we will despair. Instead, we should modify our desire for worldly success, “which is necessary to the regulation of our passions, and the security of our innocence” (vol. xiv, 134). We must strive and exercise the passions that we also must control. “Endeavour” to improve, and “regulation” to control our emotions and energy are fertile concepts in Johnson’s sermons. We always must try to do better. We always must try to regulate the drives that limit our ability to do better. This plea for deft regulation in daily life is cognate with Johnson’s plea for moderation in confessional and political passions. He laments the “rancour and hatred, the rage and persecution with which religious disputes have filled the world” and the pulpit (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 11) and, in an earlier commentator’s remark, threatened to “set whole Kingdoms on a Flame.” The 30th of January sermons reflected that rage. Luke 20 

Hogarth’s “Sleeping Congregation” (1736) shows a massive double-​decker with the minister above a prayer-​reader, near whom a sleeping woman’s cup pours a liquid on her gown. The upper pulpit seems at least twenty feet above the snoring auditors. A “three-​decker” would have had a clerk’s desk beneath the reader’s desk. See also G. W. O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 68–​84. There are helpful illustrations of pulpit architecture in J. Charles Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns and Organs in English Churches (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), especially 82–​146, and Terry Friedman’s monumental Eighteenth-​Century Church in Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center, 2011). Pulpits in village parish churches were lower than those in the major urban churches and cathedrals, as were pulpits in the Palladian style churches that Queen Anne authorized. Of course, some pulpits in some churches were likely to be in disrepair.

Sermons   221 Milbourne’s Utter Extirpation of Tyrants and Their Families (1708) adapts part of Isaiah 14 and its call for slaughter of sinners and their children. Nothing like that appears in Johnson’s Sermons 23 and 24 on the topic.21 They are temperate, thoughtful, and educational regarding the monarch’s and the people’s proper roles: liberty must be “regulated by virtue” (vol. xiv, 254). Antiquity once was excessively revered and now is ignored, but “there is a mean betwixt idolatry and insult” (vol. xiv, 82). St. Peter knew that all men cannot think alike, whether regarding the personal or the political. Our differences should not negate peace among the disagreeing, turn disagreement into animosity, and “canker the private thoughts, or raise personal hatred or insidious enmity” (vol. xiv, 118). Error and corruption are widespread, so “Let us not look upon the depravity of others with triumph, nor censure it with bitterness” (vol. xiv, 143). Violated temperance appears in “struggles for dominion, which have filled the world with war, bloodshed and desolation, and have torn in pieces almost all the states and kingdoms of the earth” (vol. xiv, 252). Johnson as surrogate preacher, therefore, almost invariably is the irenic representative of an irenic church, as in his seventh sermon, on Jeremiah 6:16. The Lord there tells Israelites to stay in the old paths where they will find happiness, “but they said we will not walk therein” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 75). Johnson tries to bring recalcitrant Britons back to God’s path by means of self-​regulation, moderation, and hard thought that leads to acceptance of the established church as the old and proper English Protestant way. Anglican Johnson clearly believes in the superiority of the Church of England, but not as a violent force that negates peace, causes enmity, or bloodies nations. Instead, he adds New Testament wisdom to Old Testament judgment, as in 1 Peter 3:15: “the Apostle . . . directs us to give the reason of our faith to any that shall demand it.” The preacher addresses the present generation of skeptics; he needs to replace their new private with old accepted public values and replace unhappiness with happiness. He makes plain that schism and heresy are not merely the individual’s, but the nation’s and the national church’s concerns. “Diversity of opinions” that lead to “new doctrines,” sects, and schisms should be “diligently obviated” (vol. xiv, 77–​8). Johnson and his church refuse to obviate, “to prevent” (Dictionary), schism by means of the Augustinian Luke 14:23, “Compel them to come in.” Official and often physical power could force Dissenters to conform, and if necessary punish the body to save the soul, as occurred in Continental Catholic Europe. Witness the Spanish Inquisition, the French dragooning of Huguenots that cost thousands of lives, and Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that removed Protestant civil rights and often estates. Johnson bypasses the argument on force in favor of a three-​part effort to convince us to follow old paths. 21 

An Attempt towards a Coalition of English Protestants . . . To Which Is Added, Reasons for Restraining the Licentiousness of the Pulpit and Press (London, 1715), 16; sometimes attributed to Daniel Defoe. For fuller discussions both of the mutations within practice of the 30th of January sermon and understanding of Luke 14:23 during the Restoration and eighteenth century, see Weinbrot, Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 105–​43, 144–​80.

222   Howard D. Weinbrot The minister lays out the dangers of hasty judgment regarding religion, which requires “long and diligent examination,” or regulation (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 79). Sincerity is not enough to “avert the wrath of God” at our straying from the old path. Excessive confidence in “a high opinion of our own sagacity” imposes the private wish upon the established public institution. Johnson offers a series of related words to limit that impertinence: enquire, watch over, search, labour, industry, and caution. Without all these “let us not presume to put any trust in our sincerity” (vol. xiv, 80). Wishing one’s opinion to be true does not make it true; it denotes consulting one’s “own imagination” (vol. xiv, 81–​2). Is it, though, reasonable to search the past for proper old paths? As with the earlier part of the argument, Johnson proceeds by means of civil exchange without rancor or the state’s strong arm. Correction is a function of reason as well as of religion, and each proceeds to cleanse the heart in order to save the soul. The Church Fathers were closest to primitive church laws, the lines of authority, “matters of faith, and points of doctrine” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 82). Indeed, later in his life Johnson says that “Contempt of Fathers and of authority” is one cause of skepticism (vol. i, 414). The generation after the Fathers must also have heard their sermons, acted on their resolution of theological difficulties, transmitted them “for some time, from father and son,” and paved the paths to salvation. All this requires the congregants’ participation. Consult Scripture and then the Church Fathers. We thereby shall “make ourselves acquainted with the will of God . . . discover the good way, and find that rest for our souls which will amply recompence our studies and enquiries” (vol. xiv, 83). We note the absence of institutional pressure and the presence of individual engagement that yields discovery and rest. In 1747, Johnson instructed Garrick’s Drury Lane audience to “prompt no more the follies you decry, | As tyrants doom their tools of guilt to die.” Spectators should demand moral stage performances: “’Tis yours this night to bid the reign commence” of proper nature and sense.22 Now, in church and with free will, ’tis yours to bid the reign of strengthened hope and faith commence. We consult, acquaint ourselves, discover, and find—​as the reward for our hard work. Private individuals decide to support and not subvert the public institution and earn “rest for our souls.” That is not possible for the fluctuating, intellectually and spiritually rootless seeker of “every new doctrine” who cannot find the “peace of God.” Johnson’s sermon draws congregants into their own spiritual education, shows them the way to achieve it, and shows the failed alternative. It concludes with a summary that returns to the sermon’s text, but modified as based upon what has come before: let the seeker “then ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and he shall find rest for his soul” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 84). We ask, find, and acquire rest, we hope, because the clergyman before us respects our pain and weakness and has shown us the way to find the 22  “Prologue Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-​Lane, 1747,” lines 55–​8, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 89–​90. See also, among other places, Johnson’s prologue to Comus (1750), a benefit to raise funds for John Milton’s humble posterity. Johnson encourages the generous fair, the wise, and the brave: “’Tis yours to crown desert—​beyond the grave” (line 38, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 241).

Sermons   223 spiritually good and restful. He knows that he succeeds only if we engage ourselves with his wisdom drawn from Scripture, history, and life. Johnson’s speaker embodies the virtues of walking in the old path, which is open to high or low church. Johnson’s Church of England, then, is based on the preacher as a vocal emblem of church authority. His congregants accept religious education, from which Johnson hopes that they find rest. Failure to accept the joint venture of preacher and auditor denotes failure in oneself and failure to pass earned wisdom to others. Johnson so demonstrates in his eighth sermon, on Romans 12:16, “Be not wise in your own conceits.” He understands that we both need empiricism and need to mistrust it as a final answer. The secular argument based on observation yields to the spiritual argument based on internal data that Johnson’s familiar “but” clause introduces: “but to judge only by the eye, is not the way to discover truth.” We may not be able to tell whether a man we observe is happy or sad. Nor can we adequately determine the “impartiality of distribution” when we prepare for the next world. Johnson returns to the concept of observation, but as based upon our awareness of the connection between action in this world and recompense in the next: “The great business . . . of every man is to look diligently round him, that he may note the approaches of the enemy; and to bar the avenues of temptation.” We never are wholly secure and always must exercise moral self-​protection. If we are not alert to the world’s dangers, the “fatal slumber of treacherous tranquility” will indeed destroy us (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 85–​6). The proud man of learning too easily puffs himself up with academic achievements. To avoid such pride he must learn “the duties of religion, and the word of God.” He then will have transformed secular to spiritual observation “by shewing that ‘one thing only is necessary’ and that ‘God is all in all.’ ” Secular observation becomes spiritual observation. The sermon concludes with Johnson’s portrayal of the active, successful, learned, spiritual searcher. Such an observer shows the right things to do, so that as spiritual empiricists we see for ourselves. We not only read or hear the sermon. We participate in it, and accept what Johnson called “strong and lasting principles” (vol. xiv, 95). Johnson’s practical religion requires our moral participation, but it relies on the permanence, power, and infinite love within Christian authority; false zealotry does not join us to God. Johnson already had added the Apostle Peter to his Old Testament text. In the thirteenth sermon, he replaces his own voice with Jesus’s voice as the corrective force: “The power of godliness is contained in the love of God and of our neighbour; in that sum of religion, in which, as we are told by the Saviour of the world, the law and the prophets are comprized.” Love of God promotes trust in God. We can help “to impose his glory on our minds by songs of praise . . . to strengthen our faith; and exalt our hope . . . and to implore his protection of our imbecility, and his assistance of our frailty, by humble supplication” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 145). Johnson assumes his role as guide to the guideless. The speaker himself is both guided by Jesus and part of the “we” in need of divine wisdom that he communicates to us as long as we join him in enlarging our own edification. We must strengthen, exalt, implore, and open our heart to faith, hope, and trust in God that later connotes trust in our selves. The practical sermon is quotidian—​ go to church, pray there or at home, do good deeds, love one another, love God. The

224   Howard D. Weinbrot sermon also is spiritual and based upon those prayers when we understand religion as a “sum,” or “many particulars aggregated to a whole” (Dictionary).

Finis Johnson’s extant sermons extend at least from May 1745 to June 1777 and often concern aspects of daily life.23 These include the political, the psychological and moral, the charitable, and even the choice of a good marriage partner. The practical sermon considers daily life as a path to the choice of eternity, and whether we earn heaven or hell. Death is even more quotidian and central to life than is marriage. Tetty’s death evokes Johnson’s most personal sermon during which his voice characteristically blends with the voice of his religion. He seeks “to open prospects beyond the grave, in which the thought may expatiate without obstruction, and to supply a refuge and support to the mind, amidst all the miseries of decaying nature” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 265). Johnson contrasts the narrow grave, decay, and misery, with Christianity’s spacious prospects and personal refuge. God provides such consolation as is possible for the loss of a spouse “yet dearer than a friend.” Hence, “So much is our condition improved by the gospel” (vol. xiv, 266). Johnson’s mainstream sermon theology thus urges the omnipotent God’s love for humanity and the ways in which He wants us to deserve his approval for virtue or to regain it after feared disapproval for vice. Faith, obedience, and repentance are the well-​paved roads to salvation. Mercy, though, is contingent upon endeavors to change and to regulate the unruly within us. The preacher teaches improvement. The congregant must act on the lesson. Johnson’s sermons also are major works of moral art. They include appropriate gravitas, mingled Latinate and colloquial expression, deep concern for struggling humanity, and lessons in how best to achieve or at least how best not to block benevolent instruction. We equally hear Johnson as dramatist, as arranger of voices suitable for different circumstances. The preacher’s voice assumes varied roles, including his own voice as 23  See Yale Works, vol. xiv, 315 for a possible earlier sermon on pride, but we cannot know whether that is Sermon 6 in the Yale edition, or if that sermon has disappeared or was never written. Henry Hervey Aston’s personal request for the sermon probably was based on friendship and on his knowledge of Johnson’s literary and religious values. An earlier ecclesiastical mendicant might not have had that knowledge or thought it prudent to subcontract to a layman still best known for his journalism in opposition to the Walpole administration. All this remains speculative, though we do know the date of the sermon for Hervey Aston. On September 17, 1777 as well, Johnson’s diary records “Partem concionis,” and on September 21 “Concio pro Tayloro” (Yale Works, vol. i, 276, 277)—​presumably the earlier sermon now finished for Taylor, but whose existence remains uncertain. That uncertainty is true as well for Johnson’s other relevant entries. On October 13 he wrote “2 sermons. 2 more sermons 4 in all” (vol. i, 279). On April 20, 1778 he wrote that “I have made sermons perhaps as readily as formerly” (vol. i, 292). We do not know whether any of these are in the two-​volume set of sermons Taylor left for Hayes, or whether in the April entry he was speaking of earlier sermon events, current writing efforts, or perhaps were personal efforts to test the strength of his mind.

Sermons   225 mourner, the scriptural voices of Jesus, an Apostle, an Old Testament patriarch, and the wisdom of Solomon—​all these appear in Johnson’s body of sermons and all exemplify “The act of building up man in the faith; improvement, holiness.” These prose sermons also embody two essential messages in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749).24 Johnson as guide assures troubled humanity keen to find the antidote to their collapsed wishes. Hope and Fear indeed have a proper outlet: “Enquirer, cease, petitions yet remain, | Which heav’n may hear, nor deem religion vain” in an attempt to seek happiness (lines 349–​50). The poem ends with a couplet that reflects much of the practical sermons’ wisdom and their attempts to improve human actions and lives through divine teachings. Once we transfer wishes from the world to God, . . . celestial wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she does not find. (lines 367–​8)

Further Reading Alkon, Paul K. Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Chapin, Chester F. The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Francis, Keith, and William Gibson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–​ 1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gray, James. Johnson’s Sermons: A Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Hagstrum, Jean H. “The Sermons of Samuel Johnson.” Modern Philology 40 (1943): 261–​6. New, Melvyn. “Anglicanism.” In Samuel Johnson in Context, edited by Jack Lynch, 101–​8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. New, Melvyn, and Gerard Reedy, eds. Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2012. Quinlan, Maurice J. Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Rivers, Isabel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–​1780. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–​2000. Scherwatzky, Steven. “Samuel Johnson’s Augustinianism Revisited.” The Age of Johnson 17 (2006): 1–​16. Suarez, Michael F., S.J. “Johnson’s Christian Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 192–​208. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Weinbrot, Howard D. “Samuel Johnson’s Practical Sermon on Marriage in Context: Spousal Whiggery and the Book of Common Prayer.” Modern Philology 114, no. 2 (2016): 310–​36.

24 

Quotations are from Yale Works, vol. vi.

Chapter 13

P ole mi c Christopher Vilmar

If we collaborated on a short list of writers in English widely considered to be consummate polemicists, it might include (for example) Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Orwell, James Baldwin, bell hooks, and Christopher Hitchens. Samuel Johnson, however, would be an unlikely choice among such rarefied practitioners of the art. Much recent criticism of Johnson, in fact, notes the empathy he displayed even toward those of whom he did not approve. One predominant mode in his writing might be described as a kind of dialogical fairness with ideas and opinions not his own, displaying a synoptic sympathy toward the human condition. And yet, in spite of these recent views, this chapter argues that Johnson was not just an occasional polemicist, but a writer whose frequent recourse to polemic requires us to balance our admiration of his empathy by acknowledging his countertendency toward pitiless attack. A combination of empathy with polemic, therefore, forms what is often thought of as Johnson’s characteristic manner of expression.

Polemic and Conversation In Classical Greek, πολεμικός (polemikos) meant “skilled in war, warlike.” Written polemic is often a kind of rhetorical gambit that treats opposing ideas with both logical disagreement and aggressive disapproval. It was clearly a habit of mind and expression quite typical in the work of Johnson, who was famously characterized in conversation as “talking for victory” (Life, vol. ii, 115). Another time, while discussing the cool reception of his pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny (1775) with Boswell, Johnson claimed, “I think I have not been attacked enough for it. Attack is the re-​action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds” (Life, vol. 2, 335). After a short consideration of Johnson’s talk that shows the extent to which his friends considered polemic central to his habits of conversation, the remainder of this chapter examines the place of polemic in his literary output: not just in his political writing, including the parliamentary debates of the early

Polemic   227 1740s and the late political pamphlets of the 1770s, but in his essays, reviews, and criticism. The range of these examples suggests the pervasiveness of polemic throughout Johnson’s spoken and written language. Boswell quoted Goldsmith: “there is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it” (Life, vol. ii, 115). In conversation, Johnson was a terrifying opponent, in words as well as body language. Later in Boswell’s Life, Sir Joshua Reynolds provides a similar description: “Johnson, ever ready for contest, instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and answered . . . Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. ‘Yes, (said I,) he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in an instant’ ” (Life, vol. ii, 368). Even as the practice of dueling was met with increasing disapproval over the course of the eighteenth century, stigmatized as a superfluous, barbaric remnant of outmoded standards of conduct, Johnson’s close friends continued to describe him as a conversational duelist. The metaphors used by Goldsmith and Reynolds agree that Johnson’s verbal hostility was accompanied by similarly abrupt and violent shifts of posture. Talking for victory was intensely physical and agonistic or, in the Greek sense of the term, polemical. Boswell likewise thought so, describing a discussion with “eminent Scotch literati” where Johnson had “tossed and gored several persons” (Life, vol. ii, 63, 66). These descriptions of Johnson’s speech came from later in his life, but by his own admission he had been “warlike” and belligerent from his youth. On the publication of Evelina (1778), Johnson encouraged Frances Burney to talk aggressively in spite of her youth: Down with her, Burney!—​down with her!—​spare her not! attack her, fight her, and down with her at once! You are a rising wit, and she is at the top; and when I was beginning the world, and was nothing and nobody, the joy of my life was to fire at all the established wits; and then everybody loved to halloo me on.1

In this recommendation, Johnson demonstrates an obvious pride in his readiness and skill at contradicting others, an opinion Boswell later confirms: “He appeared to have a pleasure in contradiction, especially when any opinion whatever was delivered with an air of confidence; so that there was hardly any topick, if not one of the great Truths of Religion or Morality, that he might not have been incited to argue either for or against it” (Life, vol. iii, 24). Johnson was prepared, upon very slender provocation, to forget politeness in order to enjoy a good argument. Dueling proves to have been an apt source of metaphors for Johnson’s pursuit of such conquests, in which Johnson delighted in the commission of rhetorical and even physical aggression. As a young hack writer newly arrived in London, and as an aging intellectual eager to maintain his leading position in English letters, Johnson was feared for the polemical nature of his conversation. 1 

Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed., Dr. Johnson and Fanny Burney: Being the Johnsonian Passages from the Works of Mme. D’Arblay (London: Andrew Melrose, 1911), 68.

228   Christopher Vilmar

Parliamentary Reporting: Polemic and Print Culture Given Johnson’s youthful predilection for attacking established positions and wits, it is not surprising to find that many of his earliest works were prose polemics. During the period when he was working on the Debates in Parliament, many of his minor works, such as the lives of Admiral Blake and Sir Francis Drake, were considered political attacks in this vein.2 The prose satires Marmor Norfolciense and A Compleat Vindication of the Lincensers of the Stage, both published in 1739, were imitations of Swift, if somewhat earnest ones lacking either the dizzying irony or satirical focus which elevated Swift’s prose above that of ordinary Opposition polemic.3 Johnson had begun borrowing from Swift nearly a year earlier, in June 1738, when he either wrote or edited the introduction to the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, which was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. This short tale introduces the Swiftian frame of the Debates, which borrowed details from the first book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to disguise the magazine’s reporting of the legislative session of Parliament. Such disguises became necessary in April 1738, when the Commons resolved to ban any communication of parliamentary sessions and to prosecute offenders for what it deemed a breach of its privilege. A month later, in May 1738, the London Magazine, which also printed accounts of these debates, began to mask its reporting as the “Proceedings of a Political Club.” At the beginning of its rival series of debates a month later, the Gentleman’s Magazine was heavily reliant on plagiarizing its debates from the London Magazine.4 Initially, in fact, Johnson was mainly an editor of debates written by William Guthrie, and his primary responsibility was rewriting text lifted from the London Magazine in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism.5 By 1740, though, Johnson had taken sole responsibility for composing the debates for Cave, a task he relinquished only in 1744.6 It was in these texts that Johnson finally arrived at an original form for his political writing, which makes the polemical form of the Debates as 2  For brief analyses of these texts as polemic, see Steven Scherwatzky, “The Vanity of Political Wishes,” in “Johnson’s Tory Politics,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1990, 74–​91. 3   Donald Greene, for example, holds this (commonplace) view of Johnson’s poor performance as an imitator of Swift: see The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 96–​108. 4  This brief summary of the historical circumstances leading to the publication of the Debates is synthesized largely from longer and more detailed accounts in Benjamin Beard Hoover, Samuel Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting: Debates in the Senate of Lilliput (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1953), esp. 1–​32; Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957), 51–​62; Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123–​43; and Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 52–​66. 5  See Kaminski, Early Career, 117. 6  See Kaminski’s introduction to Yale Works, vol. xi, pp. xv–​lviii.

Polemic   229 essential as London (1738) or the Life of Savage (1744) to this period of his maturation as a writer (see Chapter 20, “Politics”). The Johnsonian text of the Debates fills three volumes of the Yale Edition. It is not only the longest and most sustained political writing of his entire career, but also the largest single work he produced before the Rambler essays. Early readers of this text seem to have disregarded the Lilliputian frame of the Debates, treating it as a superficial ruse meant to establish plausible deniability for Cave as the publisher. As Thomas Kaminski notes, “The benefit of Cave’s subterfuge was its transparency” (Yale Works, vol. xi, p. xxi). Much of the later criticism of the Debates has followed this practice, seeking to restore and improve that transparency by checking Johnson’s text for its accuracy and documentary fidelity.7 As a recorder of political arguments Johnson necessarily recorded a great deal of polemic. But Cave demanded accuracy in his parliamentary reporting, and Johnson therefore could not simply indulge in the usual methods and tactics of the polemicist. Unlike Swift, for example, he could not bury opposing positions in the endless irony or invective of his prose as best suited the promotion of his own views. Johnson was obliged to hew closely to the substance of each debate and to reconstruct a convincing semblance of what each speaker had said. Yet, by the time Johnson took over the composition of the debates, the time for thinly veiled plagiarism had passed, and Johnson made significant changes in the practice of this reporting in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The debates Cave published soon became recognized as both more accurate and more original than their counterparts in the London Magazine. They benefited from greater unity and seriousness, as their later reception as “fact” suggests.8 While individual speeches were polemical in ways that were typical of political debate, the entire number of a given debate was transformed by Johnson into a distinctive semi-​ fictionalized and satirical polemic. To discover the complexity of this form in one of Johnson’s debates, therefore, it must be considered as a whole rather than as a series of individual polemical speeches. Yet sometimes the polemical aspect of Johnson’s debates was contingent on its physical appearance in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine. In its original form, usually over several months of serialization, the finished aspect which these texts assume in a critical edition like the Yale Works can be somewhat misleading. During the debate to remove Walpole, for example, where the Commons is on record as “humbly requesting His Majesty ‘to remove Sir Retrob Walelop from his presence and councils for ever,’ ” the order of the installments in the magazine appears to privilege the pro-​Walpole arguments, lending them an aggressive, perhaps even undeniable force and thus influencing their reception (Yale Works, vol. xii, 509).

7  Johnson is, according to most critics, generally accurate and faithful in his reconstruction: see Hoover, Parliamentary Reporting (esp. 55–​130); Greene, Politics, 112–​40; Kaminski, Early Career, 123–​43; Kaminski, “Three Contexts for Reading Johnson’s Parliamentary Debates,” in Howard Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014), 195–​216; and introduction to Yale Works, vol. xi. 8  For a brief account of that reception, see Kaminski, in Yale Works, vol. xi, pp. xxxii–​xxxvii.

230   Christopher Vilmar Both Houses of Parliament met on February 13, 1741 to debate the removal of Walpole. The event was momentous enough to suspend the chronological order of the debates in the magazine, so that the Lords debate interrupted the usual series to appear in July and August 1741.9 The corresponding Commons debate, however, did not appear until eighteen months later, between February and April 1743—​not only after the eventual fall of Walpole, but also well into the next ministry when Pulteney and Carteret had begun to prove that all their professions of patriotism and seeming aversion to corruption did not mean that they were themselves above squalid political maneuvering.10 This later context for the publication of the Commons debate may therefore suggest that Johnson was also commenting on these successors when he seemed to defend Walpole. In 1741, Walpole had adroitly maneuvered events so that he could defend himself in the final speech before the Commons vote. Johnson not only adhered to this order of speeches in the Commons debate, but in each of the five issues devoted to the Lords and Commons debate on the motion, he also gives the peroration of that issue to Walpole or to one of his supporters.11 By giving the defense of Walpole the final say in each installment, Johnson urges the soundness of this position. This defense hinges on the vacuity and hyperbole of the Opposition’s speeches (an argument which makes other appearances in the Debates, as will be demonstrated below). By representing these speeches as more sensational than substantial, Johnson subtly but unmistakably criticizes the Opposition for a misrepresentation of events. Other debates that Johnson wrote reveal how his skillful arrangement of the speeches that he developed from notes taken in the chambers of Parliament creates a complex polemical effect. Eighteenth-​century periodical writing has been shown to have an aesthetic and epistemological complexity stemming from its nearly ubiquitous practice of using anonymous or pseudonymous publication of public news. The concept of news itself was one source of this epistemological uncertainty; as J. Paul Hunter points out, as early as the seventeenth century “news” was an “attempt to anchor . . . accounts” of things and events that actually existed or had transpired “in reality.”12 But these reports were made not by Addison or Steele, but by Mr. Spectator. Still, for the parliamentary reporter after April 1738, what was an artistic choice for an earlier writer had become not merely a choice but a necessary prophylactic against legal prosecution. And as

9  The Lords debate preempted several earlier reports, while the Commons was not published for more than a year. See Yale Works, vol. xiii, 1505–​9. 10 For a brief, readable history of these events, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–​1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 53–​7 and 185–​94. 11  Robert Giddings argues that the dramatic structure of this debate highlights Johnson’s sympathy to Walpole, but he does not examine the serial nature of the original printing, which makes the effect still more pronounced. See “The Fall of Orgilio: Samuel Johnson as Parliamentary Reporter,” in Isobel Grundy, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays (London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984), 86–​106. 12  J. Paul Hunter discusses the epistemology of periodical writing in Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 216.

Polemic   231 Manushag Powell has pointed out, further epistemological instability was introduced by the radical disjunction between author and pseudonym/​anonym, between reality and its relation, which led to such “unsettling possibilities” of print that the concept of persona is no longer adequate to the description of periodical writers and their function as authors. Powell prefers the term eidolon to describe this intensified performance of authorship in periodical literature in the eighteenth century.13 Johnson employed an authorial eidolon in the Debates, which are ostensibly written by a nephew of Lemuel Gulliver. This eidolon is likewise ostensibly astonished by the similarities between Lilluputian and English politics, which forms the pretense for their publication. As a direct result of the introduction of the Lilliputian scheme and this pseudonymous author, therefore, Johnson can deviate from the drudgery of merely transcribing the debates and begin instead to shape them with deliberate attention to their rhetorical form and its larger implications. The Lilliputian frame, far from being a transparent ruse, opens up artistic possibilities that would be impossible in a simple transcription of the speeches. This form constitutes the most significant polemical structure in the Debates. Johnson’s concatenation of speeches produces a new kind of polemic with possibilities far greater than the typical arsenal of the genre (such as vituperation, exaggeration, indirection, and deflection). Individual speeches in a given debate are polemical in this more traditional sense, in that they craft partial and partisan arguments. In fact, Johnson writes in a relatively uniform style throughout, which lends each of these polemical speeches a certain grandeur. This frustrates the desire to discover Johnson’s “real” opinion by finding the best-​written or most convincing speeches. Many of his other texts have been read in this way, and certain passages, such as the speeches of Imlac in Rasselas or the letters of Asper or Misella in the Rambler, have been considered as fictional mouthpieces for Johnsonian truths.14 The Debates, however, should probably not be read in this fashion. Instead, with Powell’s eidolon in mind, the Debates become a richly polyphonic text where many eloquently stated opinions clash. Indeed, Johnson strives for eloquence even in the speeches of minor Parliamentarians. A moderate, reasonable idea may appear even in the most partisan polemical speeches. The final development of polemic in the Debates, therefore, is not the result of making Walpole or the Opposition make deliberate grammatical or logical mistakes, or lending rhetorical color to one position as a way of suggesting its soundness. Rather, Johnson creatively arranges individual polemical speeches into a larger form. In this juxtaposition of speeches into a more capacious and significant clash of Opposition ideas and positions, Johnson creates a type of complex or polyvalent polemic.

13 See Manushag Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-​ Century Periodicals (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 2 and also for discussion of the eidolon 13–​48. 14  For Asper, see Rambler 200, in Yale Works, vol. v, 277–​80; for Misella, see Ramblers 170–​7 1, in Yale Works, vol. v, 140–​5.

232   Christopher Vilmar

The Evidence of a Debate: Polemic and Rhetorical Form This complex form can be observed in Johnson’s debate in the House of Hurgoes (Lords) “On the Emperor’s Speech to the New Senate.”15 This debate took place on December 4, 1741, and was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine the following summer, over three issues in July, August, and September. As a means of examining polemic in Johnson’s debates, this debate is useful because it is not one of the great political events of the time. Much of the debate concerns procedural questions, but it also has some significant jousting between the Opposition and defenders of the Walpole Ministry. It is likewise noteworthy because of the evidence which allows for careful study of its historical accuracy and method of composition. As noted in the Yale Edition, this debate can be corroborated with two other accounts, those of Sir Dudley Ryder and Bishop Secker. These accounts confirm the basic accuracy of Johnson’s version while also revealing some of the changes that he made to his source material. Further, O M Brack discovered several corrected proof sheets at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which provide evidence of the exact editorial changes that Johnson made to a key speech near the end of the debate between his original composition and its final printed form. These changes were not merely corrections but substantive with regard to the argument.16 This debate, therefore, makes it possible to observe in some detail how Johnson works through documentary and formal difficulties in order to arrive at the complexly polemical form of the final published version. The debate begins with Hurgo Matlon (the Earl of Malton) proposing a response to the Emperor’s (King George II) speech before the house.17 The proposed response follows conventions that had governed parliamentary replies to English kings for centuries: the excellence and goodness of the monarch is praised and the loyalty of the subjects is reaffirmed. Another speaker, Hurgo Levol (Baron Lovel), endorses the response by arguing that “there appears . . . not to be at this time any particular reason for changing the form of our address” to the Emperor (Yale Works, vol. xii, 730). On this occasion, as on several others in the printed Debates, the printed form of these political questions asks metaformal questions regarding the appropriate genre of these representations. Despite the aesthetic interest of these questions, Johnson seems to satirize them as a

15 Yale Works, vol. xii, 722–​801. 16 

See O M Brack, Jr., “Samuel Johnson Revises a Debate,” The Eighteenth-​Century Intelligencer n.s. 21, no. 3 (September 2007), 1–​3. 17  In this discussion of the Debates, each speaker or place will be introduced by their Lilliputian name with their real name given in parentheses; thereafter, because this is an examination of the literary aspects of the Debates, they will be referred to using the Lilliputian names given in the text rather than their English equivalents. Exceptions will be made when a specific reference to actual historical events would create confusion when combined with a Lilliputian name.

Polemic   233 degeneration from a more appropriate focus on politics, principles, and the public good, moving away from a decision into mere squabbling over procedure and form. In the response of Hurgo Castroflet (Lord Chesterfield), which was the first instance of his sustained attacks on the Ministry, Johnson devotes much column space as well as rhetorical force to its representation. A brief summary near the beginning of this speech expressed the difficulties that face Parliament: “The danger of our present situation is generally allowed; but the consequences to be deduced from it are so contrary to each other, as give little hopes of that unanimity which times of danger particularly require” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 730). The balance of these clauses, with their acknowledgment of the human element in politics, seems identifiably Johnsonian, but this is the calm before the denunciatory Opposition storm that follows. Here Castroflet paints the nation’s actions under Walelop as calamitous: “we shall find nothing but defeats, miscarriages, and impotence” (vol. xii, 732). The totalizing vehemence of this claim—​“nothing but”—​ is carried on at length, which takes this speech far from the seemingly Johnsonian aether in the introduction regarding the need to account for human error. As demonstrated by the earlier Swiftian polemics as well as the later political pamphlets, Johnson did not shy away from polemical smears of a general nature, but the remainder of this debate is also concluded in a manner which reminds us that qualified conclusions likewise have an important place in Johnsonian politics. Hurgo Sholmlug (the Earl of Cholmondely) replies to this outburst in measured tones. He attempts to return the debate to the original question, which is the form of the address rather than the conduct of the Ministry. Johnson invests this speech with similarly Latinate cadences, but he also returns to a more carefully qualified rhetoric of the discussion in its calmer moments. Sholmlug has not forgotten the interjection of an attack on the Ministry, but he notes that he wants “to suspend the true question for a few moments, to justify that conduct which has been so wantonly and so contemptuously derided” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 746). In the following rebuttal of Castroflet’s condemnation of ministerial conduct, Sholmlug attributes political mistakes to the genuine difficulty of obtaining accurate information in order to make good decisions, and returns to the original question armed with the insights obtained from this rebuttal. His rhetoric appears to be that of a politician in control of himself and sure of his position, and his assessment of the near impossibility of rational leadership seems more humane than the totalizing condemnation of Castroflet. His concluding exhortation seems Johnsonian: Let us therefore remember . . . the danger of our present state and the necessity of steadiness, vigour, and wisdom for our own preservation and that of Degulia [Europe]; let us consider that publick wisdom is the result of united counsels, and steadiness and vigour of united influence; let us remember that our example may be of equal use with our influence . . . and let us therefore endeavour to promote the general interest of the world by an unanimous address to His Majesty in the terms proposed by the noble lord. (vol. xii, 750–​1)

234   Christopher Vilmar This call for resolve and unity, and its praise of the power of example, seems like a concerted attempt to balance these two positions against one another and discover what common good remains between them. And while individually neither of these speeches seems especially distinguished from other political writing at the time, the contrast created by their juxtaposition is noteworthy. The Opposition rhetoric of Castroflet’s diatribe against Walelop is obviously polemical, in the usual sense of the word, full of fiery and dismissive denunciation of the Ministry. It would have an undeniable appeal to readers who shared its Opposition sentiments. The rebuttal of Sholmlug, however, is no less carefully structured. It minimizes the opposing claims before returning to the original question, and therefore is no less polemical despite its milder tone. And much of its strength lies in the rousing, stately parallelism of the peroration quoted above. The question, then, is what Johnson may have intended from the effect of reading these two speeches in immediate, direct contrast to one another. In a statement that has often been quoted by scholars of the Debates, Johnson claimed that he was careful in “making sure that the Whig dogs do not have the best of it.”18 But these Hurgoes, Castroflet and Sholmlug, are both Whigs. A conflict within a party illustrates that political enmity is not always one of high principles but might simply be a clash of venal interests. Both politicians are animated but neither seems to have a monopoly on zeal or virtue. Where Castroflet engages readers with rhetorical flourish, Sholmlug impresses with calm deliberation. Insofar as Johnson has crafted these two responses and lent them both a degree of rhetorical zest, it seems that polemic serves to heighten the tension between the two men. And this tension between two reasonably convincing positions allows the common reader to explore the intricate clash between Ministerial and Opposition Whig politics. The two speeches that follow Sholmlug further distract from the “true question” by returning to alleged Ministry failures. Then Hurgo Adonbing (the Earl of Abingdon) plaintively reminds the house of the original topic of the debate: “I have always observed that debates are prolonged, and enquiries perplexed, by the neglect of method” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 758). He calls for the original proposal to be read again, but this attempt is made in vain once Hurgo Quadrert (Baron Carteret) delivers another lengthy Opposition harangue against the proposed address. Quadrert calls it “only a flattering repetition of the speech . . . drawn up to betray us into an encomium on the Ministry” (vol. xii, 758). The formulaic nature of the proposed response to the Emperor follows tradition and is in no way an “encomium,” but these allegations of Quadrert draw a response from the Nardac Secretary (the Duke of Newcastle). Newcastle had served Walpole loyally, but later in the century he was accused (notably by Horace Walpole) of having attempted to undermine the very ministry he had served in with such distinction. Johnson has him defend the Ministry, and he notes the pleasure which the “eloquence” of Quadrert always gives while accusing him of misrepresenting the current political climate (vol. xii, 768). 18 

G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 379.

Polemic   235 In the next section of the Nardac Secretary’s speech, he charges the Opposition with mistakenly dwelling on imaginary threats rather than political realities: Where imagination can exert its power, we easily dwell upon the most pleasing views, and flatter ourselves with those consequences, which, tho’ perhaps least to be expected, are most desired; wherever different events may arise, which is the state of all human transactions, we naturally promote our hopes and repress our fears, and in time so far deceive ourselves, as to quiet all our suspicions, lay all our terrors asleep, and believe what at first we only wished. (Yale Works, vol. xii, 771)

In the following paragraphs, the Secretary suggests that such political fantasizing affects not just the Opposition Whigs, but all of Europe. According to this argument, political unrest can occur when men are prone to believe fictional speculations. To anyone familiar with Rasselas (1759), this argument recalls many of the salient ideas Johnson would later raise about general psychology in ­chapter 44, “The Dangerous Prevalence of the Imagination.” Of particular note in Rasselas is the all-​too-​human tendency to succumb to a kind of madness that not only mistakes fantasy for reality, but also persists in substituting the former for the latter until it is no longer possible to discriminate between them. Anyone who cannot distinguish between these two positions, like the astronomer in Rasselas, risks permanent confusion. And while Manushag Powell warns against the reductive conflation of an eidolon with the author, much criticism of Rasselas has decided that Imlac is relatively close to Johnson’s own views on madness. Thus, it is similarly likely that here in the Debates, the congruence between author and eidolon may articulate Johnson’s view of the divergence that separates political sanity and political madness. And indeed, though this is subjective speculation, this passage seems to surge beyond the documentary confines of reporting and speak in propria persona with the characteristic gravitas and solemn articulation of general principles that animates much of Johnson’s best writing. The remainder of the speech by the Nardac Secretary sustains this pitch of eloquence. If Newcastle really did seek to undermine Walpole, it is convoluted to argue that Johnson lent this much suasive force to his position as an indirect attack on the Ministry. A simpler explanation is that Johnson articulates aspects of his own sense of European politics in this passage—​but probably only part. Since Johnson does not tip his hand in single speeches in the debates, each successive speech adds further nuance to an understanding of politics. This process of slowly accumulating knowledge illustrates the confused state of political decision-​making. Throughout the Nardac Secretary’s speech one point remains clear: that the imagination should not be allowed to override the judgment by substituting pleasing fictions for disagreeable facts. In Johnson’s text, the Opposition argues that the Ministry should have had greater foresight; the Ministry counters by pointing out that such foresight is nearly impossible and that all actions are taken with only partial intelligence. In this version of events, it seems that the Opposition calls for an end to the Ministry by appealing to a political fantasy.

236   Christopher Vilmar Had this debate ended here, it would lend credence to Donald J. Greene’s position that the Debates show Johnson maturing beyond and perhaps even renouncing the Opposition stance of the early political pamphlets.19 Yet this is not its end. The Hurgo Agryl stands again to rebut these charges: “But addresses . . . are in reality nothing more than replies to a speech composed by the Minister, whose measures, if we should appear to commend, our panegyrick may, in some future proceeding, be cited against us. Every address ought, therefore, to be considered as a public record, and to be drawn up to inform the nation, not to mislead our sovereign” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 794). This statement implies that speeches in Parliament are not confined to Whitehall but are meant to be communicated to the nation at large. In an age of print, therefore, where debates are reproduced and sold to the public, these speeches must be considered a part of the public record. During the seventeenth century, when print reproduction was forbidden, Parliament addressed the sovereign with compliments and deference. Nevertheless, accounts of these proceedings circulated both orally and in manuscript letters, which meant that the prohibition of parliamentary reporting in 1738 was nostalgic in the worst sense of the term, a vain attempt to preserve a fictional privacy which earlier sessions were imagined to have, but in reality did not. The pressure of these historical changes meant that parliamentary speeches were slowly morphing in form, partly due to this new status as part of the public record in multiple versions: private accounts, like those of Bishop Secker and Sir Dudley Ryder, as well as print accounts like those in the London and Gentleman’s Magazines. It is significant, therefore, that in the remainder of this debate Johnson addresses a final question in several brief speeches: whether the public status of parliamentary deliberation leads to better-​informed citizens or better-​informed decisions in government. Once again caution is recommended with regard to the difficulty of arriving at certainty on political questions: “It is necessary . . . in common life to every man who would avoid contempt and ridicule, to refrain from speaking, at least from speaking with confidence, on subjects with which he has not made himself sufficiently acquainted” (Yale Works, vol. xii, 796). The warning seems aimed not just at common readers who are too prone to opine decisively despite having inadequate information, but also at Opposition Hurgoes whose decisive condemnation of the Ministry is itself based on a political illusion. Taken as a reflection on the preceding debate, this counsel suggests that, in light of the human proclivity to error, circumspection is the better part of valor for everyone involved, from the Ministry to its critics. The entire debate seems to castigate the vehement certainties of public rhetoric, calling instead for cautious judgments based on prudent, modest assessment of facts. This call for skepticism with regard to individual judgments seems congruent with many of Johnson’s opinions in subjects that are adjacent to political science, such as literary criticism and moral philosophy. In this debate, Johnson treats politics as he does most questions which do not admit of mathematical

19 Greene, Politics, 140.

Polemic   237 certainty: as a subject without final answers that requires humility in the face of one’s individual shortcomings. One final speech by Sholmlug concludes this debate; once again, a defender of the Ministry is given the final word. Sholmlug reminds the council not only that ignorance of the future renders the best intentions insufficient, but also that a similar ignorance prevents underlings from making an accurate judgment of the decisions made by their superiors: That the justest intentions may be sometimes defeated, and the wisest endeavours fail of success, I shall readily grant; but it will not follow that we ought not to acknowledge the wisdom and integrity which is exerted in the prosecution of our interest . . . The wisdom of His Majesty’s counsels . . . is not sufficiently admired, because the difficulties which he has had to encounter are not known, or not observed. (Yale Works, vol. xii, 800)

Yet, even though all should be modest, those given the authority to act must still do so in spite of their shortcomings. This conclusion shares a theoretical framework with a number of other Johnsonian statements. In Rasselas, Imlac lauds the expertise of the scholar who is “neither known nor valued but by men like himself ” (vol. xvi, 31). In the preface to the Dictionary and the definition of lexicographer, Johnson is simultaneously self-​deprecating and aware of the tremendous labor that he has completed. And throughout the moral essays, a common topos is the examination of misfortune and its demand for sympathy, especially when the cause of one’s misery is beyond one’s control.20 The question implied by Sholmlug’s speech is, therefore, who among the readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine—​or even the House of Lords—​knows from experience the difficulties of king and minister well enough to judge their actions correctly? The answer is obvious and forms the basis of Johnson’s reticence throughout this debate about the nature of political judgment, which is always incomplete and therefore, at best, tentative. The claim that only the very highest echelon of politicians can accurately judge the actions of the King and his ministers fatally undermines the basis of the Opposition polemic against Walpole, which was predicated on accusing these men of poor judgment. The implication of this argument is not deduced by logical argument, in keeping with later works where Johnson reached a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Rather, it is an inference able to be made after reading this particular arrangement of individual polemical speeches in an interlocking series. This formal arrangement of speeches constitutes the key aspect of the Debates described earlier in this chapter as complex or polyvalent polemic. In this concatenation of polemic, the dialogic response of speeches to one another is far more significant than any single position. As Sholmlug suggests, in politics certainty is a chimera. The best outcome that can be hoped for is an educated guess. Any reader

20 

The example of the prostitute Misella, in Rambler nos. 170-​7 1, is typical.

238   Christopher Vilmar of the Debates who works through them slowly and carefully is therefore subjected to a process of uncertainty not unlike that faced by the highest government officials. Perhaps this resemblance between the encounter with polyvalent polemic in the Debates and the impossible decisions faced by politicians was what led to one of the indexes to the Gentleman’s Magazine, possibly written by Johnson himself, to describe the Debates as “such a Series of Argumentation as has comprised all Political Science.”21 In this view, political science is not determinate knowledge, but rather a sea of human action barely navigable by the combined resources of history, journalism, rhetoric, economics, and psychology. Greene suggests that the Debates are Johnson’s arrival at political maturity, but still further they are an early arrival at the mature style that characterizes his most consequential works. The eidolon that Johnson creates in the Debates is far more than news you can trust. It is, like Mr. Rambler or the common reader of the Lives of the Poets, and like Knowledge in Everyman, someone who will go with you and be your guide.

Conclusion: Polemic, Late Political Writing, and Criticism The Debates represent an especially noteworthy elaboration of polemic in Johnson’s corpus, but he resorts to its more usual forms often at many places throughout his works. A few examples must suffice to suggest its sustained presence in his style and across his career. In Johnson’s later political writing, especially the four tracts written during the 1770s after he had received a government pension, polemic continues to play a significant role. Though Johnson probably did not think that the pension made him a hired scribbler for the government, Robert DeMaria argues that after the pension Johnson felt “some obligation to his patrons,” that is, to the government of George III.22 DeMaria also wisely points out that in these pamphlets Johnson does not write in favor of positions he does not support, but rather buttresses the government’s position with his own principles.23 And if the argument of the present chapter is correct, it should not be surprising that Johnson sometimes expresses his principles in the fiery denunciations of polemic. In January 1770, Johnson wrote The False Alarm as a response to the Wilkes crisis—​ a lengthy affair during which John Wilkes sought, lost, sought again, and finally won a seat in the Commons, which various parties then attempted to prevent him from taking.24 The title suggests Johnson’s resolve to defend the legitimacy of the general 21 

See DeMaria, Life, 314. Cf. DeMaria, Life, 243-​5. 23  As DeMaria claims, “The underlying assumptions . . . come from deep down in Johnson’s reservoir of thought where partisan politics are submerged in broader concerns” (DeMaria, Life, 245). 24  For a summary of the background, see Yale Works, vol. x, 313–​17; further discussion may be found in Greene, Politics, 205–​9, and DeMaria, Life, 245–​8. 22 

Polemic   239 election that gave Wilkes his seat; it was only following his initial victory that various schemes were introduced to prevent its outcome. Much of the pamphlet is devoted to an impartial description of the stratagems intended to deny Wilkes his seat. But near its end Johnson accuses the collective judgment of those who oppose Wilkes of being not only faulty but also seditious: “As we once had a rebellion of the clowns, we have now an opposition of the pedlars. The quiet of the nation has been for years disturbed by a faction . . . The whole conduct of this despicable faction is distinguished by plebeian grossness, and savage indecency” (Yale Works, vol. x, 341). The comparison with the “clownish” Parliamentarians during the civil wars is obvious. Likewise, anyone who opposed Wilkes is “despicable,” marked by a “grossness” indistinguishable from “savagery” and marked by an “indecent” exhibitionism. This vicious, bigoted, even racist attack on the common voter argues that he cannot exercise the franchise any better than a colonial savage. Polemic of this kind reveals Johnson in an unattractive light, at least as far as modern sensibilities are concerned, but the strike is nevertheless effective. Any subsequent justification of the anti-​Wilkes position would begin on the defensive, which is precisely the kind of reversal sought by aggressive polemic. Johnson’s next pamphlet, Thoughts on the Late Transaction respecting Falkland’s Islands, appeared in 1771. DeMaria claims that, in this pamphlet, Johnson condemns the tendency of a political “infatuation with adventurous enterprise” to give “fantasy and fiction . . . the sway over accuracy, good sense, and moderation.”25 This denunciation of political illusions recalls the position taken by Sholmlug (Cholmondely) in the debate above, and the continuity of this pragmatic position, found in Johnson’s early and late political writings, challenges various attempts to link Johnson with more extreme political ideologies throughout the course of his career.26 This consistency in Johnson’s views suggests rather that Johnson had long steered a course of relative independence from political orthodoxies of whatever stamp and likewise long recommended the same independence to his readers. In the opening section of The Patriot (1774), written on the cusp of the American Revolution, Johnson distinguishes between love of one’s country and open rebellion in a lengthy series of litotes attacking the traditional British meaning of patriotism: Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king yet not love his country. (Yale Works, vol. x, 390–​1) This practice is no certain note of patriotism.

25 DeMaria, Life, 249. 26  See,

(vol. x, 391)

for example, Greene, Politics, 139–​40. J. C. D. Clark argues that Johnson was a Jacobite in Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Nicholas Hudson claims that Johnson took a Broad-​ Bottom approach in Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 90–​100.

240   Christopher Vilmar Still less does the true Patriot circulate opinions, which he knows to be false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous complaints. (vol. x, 392)

In the Life, Boswell records Johnson’s famous definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel” (vol. ii, 348). In The Patriot, Johnson revisits this idea in a way that recalls the opinion of Sholmlug in the Debates and the pamphlet on the Falkland Islands. He rejects self-​proclaimed patriots who ground their romantic illusions in the vacuity of political rhetoric untethered from the vexations of political debate, and instead encourages grounded, mutually illuminating deliberation. In one of his final political essays, Taxation No Tyranny (1775), Johnson once again denigrates the position of the American colonists (see Chapter 22, “Commerce”). The Americans are “libertines of policy” (Yale Works, vol. xi, 418), by implication as promiscuous in their politics as the libertine is in choice of sexual partners. The idea of unfettered American liberty is further undermined in the following passage: “These lords of them selves, these kings of Me, these demigods of independence, sink down to colonists, governed by a charter” (vol. x, 429). For Johnson, the conceit of the three nominative metaphors self-​marginalizes the Americans. Led astray by political illusions, the Americans simply cannot grasp the extent to which their desired exemption from Crown taxes resembles their own predicament. Near the end of his argument against the colonies, Johnson calls attention to the hypocrisy at the root of their desire for independence: “If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we have the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes” (vol. x, 454). The politics of this sentence, placed in the career of Johnson, are complex.27 But the immediate hit is palpable and unanswerable—​and it demonstrates Johnson’s cognizance of race as a nuanced category consisting of power relations as well as genetic ones. According to this view, the rhetoric of the colonists is deceptive with regard to more than the wishes of the Crown. They reject the king’s demand of loyalty, but conversely demand absolute obedience from African slaves. Therefore, as Johnson suggests, if their demand is just, then it should be universally so, for slaves as well as colonists. Johnson intuits the imbalance between their own sense of the injustices committed against them by the Crown, and the greater injustices they daily commit, which reveals their arguments to be a willful distortion of the political situation rather than a legitimate attempt to ground their claims within a coherent framework of principle. In this pamphlet, Johnson does not pursue either racial or political justice per se; his main intention seems to be a polemical attack on the colonists. But, nevertheless, his sense of the nuances of slavery and his reference to these concepts in a single sentence challenges the prerogatives of the Crown just as it does the hypocrisy of the soon-​to-​be rebellious slavers. While in this pamphlet Johnson upheld established authority against active rebellion, Boswell records another example 27 See, for example, James G. Basker, “Multicultural Perspectives: Johnson, Race, and Gender,” in Philip Smallwood, ed., Johnson Re-​Visioned: Looking Before and After (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 64–​79.

Polemic   241 where Johnson sided entirely with the cause of the rebels: “Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” His violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity” (Life, vol. iii, 200). With regard to actual slavery and oppression, Johnson seems to have extended the right to liberty impartially to all. While referring to him as a “social justice warrior” would be a distorting anachronism, his intellectual rigor on the subject of liberty constitutes a kind of revolutionary challenge in its own right. In the preceding examples, Johnson resorts to polemic in ways that, on closer examination, reveal its intimate connection with his foundational habits of intellection and judgment. Polemic turns out to be far more than an occasional alleviation of spleen or an exaggerated outburst of disagreement. It was, rather, central to the logic and rhetorical sinew of his prose style. Examples from much of his work as a literary reviewer and critic might be culled, but for reasons of space, one, from the middle of his career, may suffice. In his review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756), Johnson dismantles, point by point, much of Jenyns’s platitudinous defense of optimism—​the eighteenth-​century argument for divine goodness and divine providence in the face of the problem of evil.28 The review itself is basically negative. On the rare occasion that Johnson agrees with Jenyns, even on a minor point, he conscientiously points this out. But most of the review is simply a rehearsal of its lapses into absurdity, commonplace, or non sequitur, accompanied by Johnson’s easy rebuttal of these misleading points. Johnson is not convinced by most of the grand claims of the book, and he states the reasons for his differences of opinion in clear, convincing prose. The cumulative effect of so much carefully reasoned disagreement is damning to Jenyns. Even more damning, however, is how quickly the review descends from a purported overview of Jenyns’s book to (in the fourth paragraph) a polemical attack on Jenyns himself. He is the “speculatist” in the following passage: I am told, that this pamphlet is not the effort of hunger; What can it be then but the product of vanity? and yet how can vanity be gratified by plagiarism, or transcription? When this speculatist finds himself prompted to another performance, let him consider whether he is about to disburthen his mind or employ his fingers; and if I might venture to offer him a subject, I should wish that he would solve this question, Why he that has nothing to write, should desire to be a writer? (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 399–​400)

28  Johnson’s review can be found in Yale Works, vol. xvii, 397–​432. Analysis of Johnson’s review can be found in DeMaria, Life, 191-​3. The tradition of works on the philosophical question of optimism is heterogeneous; a brief history can be found in Mark Larrimore, The Problem of Evil: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 147–​234, and a philosophical analysis with regard to eighteenth-​century thought in Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. 18–​36, 116–​48.

242   Christopher Vilmar In this blast of invective, Johnson accuses Jenyns of vanity, plagiarism, idleness, empty speculation, writing to occupy his fingers rather than his mind, and empty-​headedness. This goes far beyond a simple review of the book to become itself a speculation about Jenyns’s inner life. An alleged lack of intellectual rigor becomes a way of inferring and then judging his vanity. Even the most diligent examination of the remainder of the book—​a review which almost trips over itself to acknowledge each time that the reviewer agreed with some minor point—​cannot recover from the effect of this early character assassination of the author. Perhaps it was the depth of this antagonism that led Johnson to confess each moment of agreement, however minor, as a kind of penance for having so thoroughly anatomized what he saw as Jenyns’s alleged shortcomings of character. To attack the character of an author whose book is under review hardly seems worthy of a critic widely considered to be one of the finest in the history of European literature. Yet much of the edifice of modern criticism, especially during those centuries between the Renaissance and Johnson’s era—​and well into our own—​has been built on foundations of personal animus. And, of course, it was largely philology, from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century, which provided Johnson with examples of the principles and practice of literary criticism. Even highly technical discussions of philological theory could quickly devolve into long-​standing vendettas between rival critics. As Johnson described such controversies in the “Preface” to Shakespeare: “There is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired to defame” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 102). The same forceful disagreement and combative antagonism found in the dismissal of Jenyns colors the astute insight and theoretical acumen of the Lives of the Poets as well (1779–​81): the attack on Milton, the disgust with Swift, the feud with Gray. Far from transcending the ingrained pettiness of these inherited practices, Johnson incorporated them into his criticism as he did in the remainder of his writing—​where he habitually figured significant aspects of his thought in the warlike aggression of polemic.

Further Reading Basker, James G. “Multicultural Perspectives: Johnson, Race, and Gender.” In Johnson Re-​Visioned: Looking Before and After, edited by Philip Smallwood, 64–​79. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Bloom, Edward A. Samuel Johnson in Grub Street. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957. Brack, O M, Jr. “The ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ Concealed Printing, and the Texts of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of Admiral Robert Blake and Sir Francis Drake.” Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987): 140–​6. Brack, O M, Jr. “Samuel Johnson Revises a Debate.” The Eighteenth-​Century Intelligencer n.s. 21, no. 3 (September 2007): 1–​3. Clark, J. C. D. Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Polemic   243 Giddings, Robert. “The Fall of Orgilio: Samuel Johnson as Parliamentary Reporter.” In Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, edited by Isobel Grundy, 86–​106. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984. Greene, Donald J. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. 2nd ed. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Hoover, Benjamin Beard. Samuel Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting: Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliput. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1953. Hudson, Nicholas. Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kaminski, Thomas. The Early Career of Samuel Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Kaminski, Thomas. “Three Contexts for Reading Johnson’s Parliamentary Debates.” In Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, edited by Howard D. Weinbrot, 195–​216. San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014.

Chapter 14

Trav e l Anthony W. Lee*

Well, I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I’ll go and visit the Universities abroad. I’ll go to France and Italy. I’ll go to Padua. —​Boswell, Life, vol. i, 73 The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. —​Johnson to Hester Thrale, in Letters, vol. ii, 78

To find out what Samuel Johnson thought about travel, one could do worse than consulting his Dictionary of the English Language. His first and third definitions of travel v.n. read: 1. To make journeys: it is used for sea as well as land, though sometimes we distinguish it from voyage, a word appropriated to the sea. 3. To make journeys of curiosity.

The third definition dilates upon the motivation for travel: curiosity. But it is not an idle curiosity he invokes, as the passage from Isaac Watts—​one of Johnson’s favorite authors—​appended beneath it enforces: “Nothing tends so much to enlarge the mind as travelling, that is, making a visit to other towns, cities, or countries, beside those in which we were born and educated.”1 In this the first and third entries cohere: a principal

* I would like to thank Thomas E. Curley, Christine Jackson-​Holzberg, and Lance Wilcox for generously reading and acutely commenting upon earlier drafts of this chapter. 1  Isaac

Watts, The Improvement of the Mind (London, 1741), chap. 6, “Of Enlarging the Capacity of the Mind.”

Travel   245 motivation to leave one’s familiar home is to seek self-​improvement by engrossing within the consciousness new matter for reflection and action. Under travel n.s. we find “4. Account of occurrences and observations of a journey into foreign parts.” Beneath the definition is, “Histories engage the soul by sensible occurrences; as also voyages, travels, and accounts of countries.”2 Johnson recurs again to Watts to enforce the moral imperative underlying this genre of writing. For Johnson, both travel and travel-​writing represent, at their most fundamental level, a vehicle for humanistic improvement.3 The travel writer should be dedicated to the truth of existence, in no uncertain terms.4 As he writes in Idler 97, an essay devoted the travel genre, “Every writer of travels should consider, that, like all other authors, he undertakes either to instruct or please, or to mingle pleasure with instruction.” (Johnson invokes here the Horatian dictum utile et dulce—​useful and entertaining—​a formula reflexively summoned in his writings.) The following pages discuss Johnson’s drive to “make journeys of curiosity” and the textual “accounts of occurrences and observations” generated by them as opposed to the traditional stereotype of him as a xenophobic Englishman. As we shall see, his moral imperative and commitment to truth is strongly leavened—​“mingled”—​with pleasure, with a firm commitment to an aesthetic dimension. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s oft-​cited, stereotypical view of his “fierce and boisterous contempt” of travel has long been set to rest.5 By my count, Johnson made at least fifty-​five journeys over the course of his life. After the bestowal of the royal pension in 1762, he set out from London every year until his death, often multiple times in the same year. He traveled to Oxford at least twenty times—​but only once to Cambridge, clearly proclaiming his Oxonian bias.6 He traveled for six weeks to Devon with his close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. James L. Clifford wrote of this, “although not as famous as his later visits to the Hebrides, with Boswell, or to Wales and Paris with the Thrales, the tour of Devon was one of Johnson’s most delightful jaunts.”7 2 

Watts, chap. 15, “Of Fixing the Attention.” For Johnson’s relation to the travel genre of his day, see Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), chap. 2, “Johnson and the Tradition of Travel Literature,” 47–​78. 4  See, e.g., his approving comment on Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia: “He appears by his modest and unaffected narration to have described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to have consulted his senses not his imagination; he meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rock without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants” (Yale Works, vol. xv, 3). 5 See, e.g., Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel. For Macaulay’s remark, see “Essay on Boswell’s Johnson,” in Macaulay’s Life of Samuel Johnson Together with His Essay on Johnson, ed. Huber Gray Buehler (New York, 1896), 73. 6  According to his friend and biographer, Thomas Tyers, Johnson “visited [Oxford] almost every year”; see O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 89; Tyers is prone to error, but the point is well taken. For an entertaining account of the Cambridge trip, see B. N. Turner, The New Monthly Magazine 10 (Dec. 1818), 385–​91. 7  James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years (New York: McGraw-​ Hill, 1979), 278. 3 

246   Anthony W. Lee Johnson traveled widely elsewhere in England. He forayed, for example, to Harwich with Boswell and to Salisbury with Bennet Langton. He visited Thomas Percy at Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire, taking an excursion to the estate at Horton, birthplace of the Earl of Halifax whose life he would later write.8 So thorough was Johnson’s inspection of the ecclesiastical geography of his country that Boswell was moved to remark, “You have, I believe, seen all the cathedrals in England, except that of Carlisle” (Life, vol. iii, 456). In his imagination, however, Johnson traveled much more extensively, projecting visits to Spain, Italy, Iceland, Sweden, the Baltic, Egypt, India, and China. He once contemplated “an expedition around the world” (Life, vol. iii, 456). While these eventually proved unrealized fantasies, his imaginative attraction to global excursions did bear fruit in other ways. His first published book was a translation and adaptation of Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. And imaginary travels populate many of his major works: think of the narrative structure of Rasselas, for example, or the opening lines to his greatest poem, “Let observation with extensive view, | Survey mankind form China to Peru,” or the first motto to this chapter: “Well, I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I’ll go and visit the Universities abroad. I’ll go to France and Italy. I’ll go to Padua.”9 Clifford identified three of Johnson’s journeys as most significant: those to Scotland, Wales, and France, undertaken in 1773, 1774, and 1775, respectively. This trio is certainly important because we witness in them the only instances of Johnson crossing the English border. But apart from presenting him as a stranger in a strange land, these are also the ones for which we possess the fullest written documentation—​in the first, one of Johnson’s most distinguished publications, and in the others, private memoranda. The last two lack narrative cohesion and remain stylistically unpolished, if not downright fragmented and crude (bien maigre, as Hester Piozzi remarked of the Wales tour).10 Despite these limitations, the pair contain matters of interest. And all three reflect, in the words of Richard Duppa, “how the mind of a man such as Johnson received new impressions, or contemplated for the first time, scenes and occupations unknown to him before.”11 It is these three excursions and their surviving documentation, then, that I shall principally examine here.

8   See Boswell, Life, vol. i, 553. It was during this visit that Johnson wrote the dedication to Percy’s Reliques: see Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces & Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 160, just as his Devon trip later resulted in the “Character of Zachariah Mudge” (see Yale Works, vol. xx, 477). We find that, if his travels do not always produce a polished travelogue, they at times provide grist to his literary mill. 9  In the event, he made it to France but not Italy, despite two intended visits. Cf. his remark, “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see” (Life, vol. iii, 457–​8). 10  The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–​ 1821 (Formerly Mrs. Thrale), ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, and O M Brack, Jr., 6 vols. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989–​2002), vol. v, 524. 11  Samuel Johnson, A Diary of a Journey into North Wales, in the Year 1774 (London, 1816), vi.

Travel   247

Wales The catalyst for the Welsh tour (July 5 to September 24, 1774) was the death of Hester Thrale’s uncle, Sir Thomas Salusbury.12 She subsequently inherited the family estate at Bachygraig, near Denbigh, in North Wales, and Henry Thrale agreed to pay the expenses for Johnson, his wife, their ten-​year-​old daughter “Queeny” (Hester Maria), as well as himself, to inspect the property and explore Hester’s childhood environs. A. M. Broadley conjectured of the Wales journey, “it may be doubted if in reality he [Johnson] ever made a more enjoyable excursion” (Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, 155), albeit one abruptly discontinued because of the dissolution of Parliament (Thrale was one of the MPs for Southwark at this time). It included not just Wales but also Johnson’s familiar terrain (Lichfield, Birmingham, Ashbourne, Oxford) and some less familiar English spots: Hagley (the seat of George Lyttelton, whose unflattering life Johnson would later write), Leasowes (which Johnson would later famously, and mischievously, write about in the Life of Shenstone), Woodstock, Blenheim, and Chatsworth—​of which he amusingly wrote in an earlier visit: “They complimented me with playing the fountains, and opening the cascade, But, when one has seen the Ocean, Cascades are but little things” (Letters, vol. i, 411). The Welsh journal possesses, as it stands, an architectonic epanalepsis, focusing upon Wales at its core while enveloped by commentary upon English sites at its beginning and end. At times the fragmentary narrative reveals biographical nuggets. On the cusp of entering into Wales, for example, Johnson remarks, “In the afternoon we came to West Chester; (my father went to the fair when I had the small pox)” (Life, vol. v, 435). This is a tantalizing biographical snippet: we don’t know a precise date for his father’s trip, but the fact of his remembering is significant—​especially the detail about his father leaving him to set up a book stall. Perhaps this early memory betrays feelings of resentment and abandonment by his father, who often left the home abruptly. If so, it may explain Johnson’s refusal to go to Uttoxeter to man his father’s stall when the latter was ill in bed—​a guilty memory that compelled him to pay a public penance when an adult.13

12 Johnson’s Journey into North Wales, in the Year 1774 was unknown to Boswell; Richard Duppa came

across the MS (it is now in the British Library, Add. MS 12070), which he published in an inaccurate edition (London, 1816). According to J. W. Croker it was preserved by Johnson’s servant, Francis Barber: see Boswell, Life of Johnson, 10 vols. (London, 1835), vol. v, 193 n; see also Piozzi Letters, vol. v, 522. The best text of the Wales Journey remains the Hill-​Powell recension, found in Boswell, Life, vol. v, 427–​61. The Yale version (Yale Works, vol. i, 163–​222) is more recent (and contains some “new readings,” vol. i, p. xix), but is textually untrustworthy. However, it, like Adrian Bristow’s edition, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale’s Tour in North Wales, 1774 (Wrexham, Clwyd: Bridge Books 1995), possesses useful notes. Meurig Owen’s Grand Tour of North Wales (Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2003) is a modern retracing of the trip that offers some recent pictures of sites described by Johnson. For an excerpted calendar of Johnson’s correspondence relating to the Wales trip, see A. M. Broadley, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (London: John Lane, 1909), 155–​7. 13  See James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1955), 135.

248   Anthony W. Lee If there were any part of the journal that Johnson might have considered as worthy for public consumption, it would likely be the comparison between Hawkestone and Ilam: Ilam is the fit abode of pastoral virtue, and might properly diffuse its shades over nymphs and swains. Hawkeston[e]‌can have no fitter inhabitants than Giants of mighty bone, and bold emprise, men of lawless courage and heroic violence. Hawkestone should be described by Milton and Ilam by Parnel. (Life, vol. v, 434)

This is a rich and densely literary text. The “Giants of mighty bone” is a pregnant allusion to Paradise Lost that Johnson employs a number of times elsewhere.14 The pairing of Milton and the minor eighteenth-​century poet Thomas Parnell is grounded in a theoretical distinction made by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful: the “softness” of Ilam, its “vallies” that “compose and sooth,” correspond to Burke’s relaxing version of the beautiful, while Hawkstone’s “horrour of solitude” stimulates “a kind of turbulent pleasure between fright and admiration” that corresponds to Burke’s pain-​evoking sublime. And the rolling, carefully measured structure of the entire passage compares favorably to his other extended exercises in balance and parallelism, such as that between Dryden and Pope found in the Life of Pope. The fragmentary skimpiness of most of the Welsh journal may perhaps be attributed in part to this remark, from a letter to John Taylor: “But Wales has nothing that can much excite or gratify curiosity. The mode of life is entirely English,” which perhaps reflects a disappointment stemming from his 1738 idealized expectation: “Resolved at length, from Vice and London far, | To breathe in distant Fields a purer Air, | And, fix’d on Cambria’s solitary shore.”15 However, had the trip elicited more such passages as that devoted to Hawkestone and Ilam, it would be vain to blame and useless to praise it.

France Johnson’s French journal is based upon the sole surviving notebook, “France II,” used by Boswell in his Life; it records only twenty-​six days out of the time Johnson spent there. Had all three survived, we would have a much fuller account than that of Wales.16 The sketchiness of this journal is invaluably supplemented by Hester Thrale’s diary,

14 For

a discussion of these intertextual dimensions, see Anthony W. Lee, “Samuel Johnson and Milton’s ‘Mighty Bone,’ ” Notes and Queries 65, no. 2 (June 2018), 250–​2. 15  Letters, vol. ii, 151; London, lines 5–​7, in The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith, Edward L. McAdam [and J. D. Fleeman], 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 68. 16 See Life, vol. ii, 389–​401. The notebook is deposited in the British Library as Add. MS 35299.

Travel   249 published only in the twentieth century by Moses Tyson and Henry Guppy, as well as a modest scattering of letters from Johnson and a few comments related to Boswell.17 The French tour was the only time that Johnson crossed into the Continent. The party consisted of Henry and Hester Thrale, their eldest daughter “Queeny,” Johnson, and their friend Giuseppe Baretti, whose fluent French qualified him to serve as the party’s cicerone. They arrived at Calais on Johnson’s birthday, September 18, and returned to Dover on November 11. The journey lasted fifty-​eight days and ran from Calais to Paris, by way of Saint-​Omer, Arras, Amiens, and Rouen, and then back through Chantilly, Noyon, Cambrai, Douai, Lille, and Dunkirk. The surviving text is, like the Welsh journal, abbreviated, and thus it falls far short of Boswell’s hopefully suggested title, A Journey to Paris (Life, vol. ii, 386). We may, however, glean interesting information about the trip and some useful insights into Johnson as a traveler. We learn, perhaps surprisingly, that the party considered the food to be quite bad (Yale Works, vol. i, 229; Life, vol. ii, 389). As Johnson remarked in a different context, “For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind any thing else” (Life, vol. i, 467), and the renowned pleasures of French cuisine were not to his English taste. We also catch a few glimpses of the conditions that anticipate Revolutionary France. A decadent upper class is observed: the aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville’s house is “furnished with minute and effeminate elegance—​Porphyry,”18 and the house of Augustin Blondel de Gagny, “where I saw nine rooms furnished with a profusion of wea[l]‌th and elegance which I had never seen before” . . . “the whole furniture said to have cost 125000 L.” (Yale Works, vol. i, 232). The concomitant neglect of the lower orders does not escape notice: “The French have no laws for the maintenance of their poor”; “The poor taken to hospitals, and miserably kept,” and “A room with about 86 children in cradles, as sweet as a parlour. They lose a third” to death (vol. i, 231, 251). Apart from the political and economic elements implied by these comments, they demonstrate Johnson’s compassionate sympathy for the less fortunate. The French tour shows us a traveler typically interested less in sights than in people and manners: “The sight of palaces and other great buildings leaves no very distinct images” (Yale Works, vol. i, 238); “upon the whole, I cannot make much acquaintance here, and though the churches, palaces, and some private houses are very magnificent, there is no very great pleasure after having seen many, in seeing more” (Letters, vol. ii, 272–​3). An obstacle to “making much acquaintance” was his reluctance to speak French (he preferred Latin: see Life, vol. ii, 404), and the journal offers little detail about

17 

The French Journals of Mrs. Thrale and Doctor Johnson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1932). Despite its inferiority, I primarily cite the Yale Works version of text here (cross-​referenced with that found in the Life), because its annotation usefully incorporates Hester Thrale’s account. 18 Yale Works, vol. i, 230. Monville narrowly managed to escape execution, being released from prison eight days after the erstwhile accusateur public Robespierre’s execution. Some of the others Johnson met or observed were not so lucky, such as Louis XVI’s younger sister, the pious Madame Elisabeth, whom Johnson witnessed dining with the Princess de Rohan.

250   Anthony W. Lee Johnson’s personal interactions. Despite this objective terseness, it perks up at various moments, as when the party visits the menagerie at Versailles: the “Black Stag of China,” a rhinoceros, two camels, and a pelican elicit fascination. Johnson offers a detailed description of the manufacturing processes at a Parisian mirror factory, and when visiting the King’s Library, he expertly—​and correctly—​disputes the contention that the copy of the Gutenberg Bible displayed there was printed with wooden type. Probably because of his specific interest in religious retreat (see Rambler 6), as well as his general piety, Johnson was also fascinated by the various chapels and houses of devotion they saw—​he was in fact given his own cell at the English Benedictine Monastery. He was not especially impressed, however, when he visited the court and watched the king and queen eat (“The king fed himself with his left hand as we”) and the queen ride (“She galloped”) (Yale Works, vol. i, 239–​40). At dinner, however, Marie Antoinette was charmed by another queen, the Thrales’ Hester Maria (Letters, vol. ii, 272). Given Johnson’s oft-​expressed hostility toward France and the French (see, e.g., London, lines 104–​31, etc.), his French journal exhibits an energetic open-​mindedness and curiosity that reflects positively on his role as a traveler. If the journal disappoints as a literary artifact—​it possesses no fine passages such as the Ilam–​Hawkestone comparison—​it nonetheless repays careful scrutiny and meditation. Yet, perhaps the most engaging element of the journey that survives is an account Boswell has preserved: It happened that [Samuel] Foote was at Paris at the same time with Dr. Johnson, and his description of my friend while there, was abundantly ludicrous. He told me, that the French were quite astonished at his figure and manner, and at his dress, which he obstinately continued exactly as in London;—​his brown clothes, black stockings, and plain shirt. He mentioned, that an Irish gentleman said to Johnson, “Sir, you have not seen the best French players.” Johnson: “Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-​stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.”—​“But, Sir, you will allow that some players are better than others?” Johnson: “Yes, Sir, as some dogs dance better than others.” (Life, vol. ii, 403–​4)

Despite the openness to new things evident in the French journal, Johnson the Misogallo will not be repressed!

Scotland The Journey to the Western Islands must be accounted as one of Johnson’s most perennially popular works. 19 As appendix A in J. D. Fleeman’s edition indicates, thirty-​seven different 19  The

best text of the Johnson’s Journey is that of J. D. Fleeman; also worth consulting is the Yale Works edition, vol. ix.

Travel   251 texts were published between 1775 and 1985, seven abridgments, and translations into German (one) and French (two).20 So fascinating has the trip and its written account been that several people have felt compelled to retrace Johnson and Boswell’s footsteps, many providing their own accounts.21 Such enduring interest leads one to ask, what is its persistent allure? There are several answers to this question. One is the surely mythic dimensions of the trip itself. Johnson and Boswell form an odd couple, a surly London intellectual paired with an effervescently social Scot, perhaps recalling to mind the mismatched spiritualized Don Quixote and the hedonist Sancho Panza. To this aspect is closely related the oddness of Johnson himself, the towering English “Sassenach mohr,” who juts jarringly out of place amidst the exotically “primitive” Highlands. Boswell’s image for this is exquisitely vivid: writing to David Garrick from Inverness, he observed, “Indeed, as I have always been accustomed to view him as a permanent London object, it would not be much more wonderful to me to see St. Paul’s church moving along where we now are” (Life, vol. v, 347). The richness of the text is also a central attraction, inviting and affording multiple angles of interpretation. Is it a straightforward travelogue? A voyage into the unknown—​“a journey into foreign parts”? An anthropological analysis? A tragic tribute to a dying feudal culture? A veiled assault upon Scottish credibility and rapacity? A meditation upon the political and economic consequences of the 1707 Union? The book may be read in all these ways and more. Mary Lascelles has written finely of it, “For its implications (fold within fold of meaning), we must read it attentively.”22 Here I will offer attentive readings of two aspects: its intertextual density and its powerful aesthetic dimensions. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland occupies a position unique in the Johnson canon. It was composed in its earliest and roughest form in the original notebook that Johnson carried with him, likely akin to the Wales and France journals. Earlier that same year he had completed the final revisions to the Dictionary and Shakespeare edition; in both efforts he revisited his favorite play, Macbeth, one of the many intertextual pressures that would help shape the Journey; as Henry Woudhuysen has observed, “On the . . . visit to the Highlands in 1773, Macbeth was inevitably uppermost in Johnson’s mind.”23 Two additional precursors which at times helped shape 20  See

Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Since Fleeman’s tally, the German translation was revised (1986) and an Everyman edition (2002) has been published. 21   These include G. B. Hill’s coffee-​table book, Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland) (Manchester: E. J. Morten, 1890); L. F. Powell’s 1936 trip with James M. Osborn “In the Hebrides,” in Our Friend L.F.: Recollections of Lawrence Fitzroy Powell (privately printed for the Johnsonians, 1976); J. D. Fleeman’s 1981 excursion (recorded as appendix C to his 1985 edition); and Israel Shenker, In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell: A Modern Day Journey through Scotland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). The earliest were of James Bailey (fl. 1775–​1816), whose “Journey on Scotland” dates from 1787 (see Fleeman, xxxvii), and John Knox, A Tour through the Highlands of Scotland and the Hebride [sic] Isles (London, 1787). 22  Mary Lascelles, “Notions and Facts: Johnson and Boswell on their Travels,” in Mary Lascelles et al., eds., Johnson, Boswell, and Their Circle: Essays Presented to L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 215–​29, at 229. 23  Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (New York: Penguin, 1989), 3.

252   Anthony W. Lee the travelers’ perceptions were Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands and Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland.24 After the Journey was published in January 1775, numerous, often hostile responses followed.25 The published book is richly flanked and buttressed by ancillary texts, such as Johnson’s long letters to Hester Thrale, which, along with the original notebook, form the textual basis for the Journey’s narrative. His friend and traveling companion Boswell kept his own account of the trip, one which he shared with Johnson; this would later become the classic Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, refitted from Boswell’s journal. We thus have private and public pairings, parallel textual fields that form and inform Johnson’s Journey.26 We also have a response to it, written by Boswell, intended to clear up confusion and correct inaccuracies.27 To read the Journey fully and properly, one should take into account all of these peripheries: the various life writings, the Shakespeare edition notes, the verbal glosses offered by the Dictionary, to say nothing of the Latin poems also generated by the tour—​these last accounted by some as Johnson’s finest efforts in this vein28—​as well as the precursors and controversial responses. The battery of auxiliaries we possess provide a cornucopia with which to excavate this text. At one point in his journal, Boswell remarked, “I looked on this Tour to the Hebrides as a copartnership between Dr. Johnson and me. Each was to do all he could to promote its success” (Life, vol. v, 278). While the phrase “Tour to the Hebrides” appears to refer to the trip itself, it could very well be taken as the written accounts emanating out of it: his own Tour to the Hebrides (eventually published a decade after Johnson’s, 1785) as well as Johnson’s Journey. Johnson read the journal as it was being composed and thought highly of it;29 likewise, his own final text would never have come to pass without Boswell’s suggesting and organizing the travel.

24  Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands (London, 1703); as the title page to the copy of Martin located in the Advocates Library at Edinburgh indicates, Boswell and Johnson had a copy of Martin with them, borrowed by Boswell, when they made their trip. See Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland (London, 1771; 2nd ed., 1772); for Johnson’s affirmative estimation of Pennant, see Life, vol. iii, 271–​8. 25 The primary source of outrage was the response to Johnson’s dismissal of the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian poems; see Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 26  Johnson’s “Book of Remarks” has not survived. 27 See The R. B. Adam Library Relating to Dr. Samuel Johnson and his Era, 4 vols. (Buffalo: privately printed, 1929–​30), vol. ii, between pp. 45 and 46; and Catalogue of the Johnsonian Collection of R. B. Adam (Buffalo: privately printed, 1921), not paginated. Johnson, either carelessly or deliberately, neglected to use them. 28  The “Skye Ode” and “Verses upon Inckenneth.” Sir Walter Scott remarked of the former, “About fourteen years since, I landed in Sky, with a party of friends, and had the curiosity to ask what was the first idea on every one’s mind at landing. All answered separately that it was this Ode” (Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. J. W. Croker, 5 vols. [London, 1831], vol. ii, 388 n. 1). 29  See, e.g., “He said to-​day, while reading my Journal, ‘This will be a great treasure to us some years hence’ ” (Life, vol. v, 277).

Travel   253 Much the same, however, may be said of the influence of a person emotionally even closer to Johnson than Boswell. Johnson composed the Journey with his letters to Hester Thrale in hand; the former text may be said to be an objectified, public reimagining of the private letters. The Journey thus bears the strong impression of three points of consciousness: Johnson’s, his traveling companion Boswell’s, and Thrale’s. Despite Boswell’s immediate physical presence during the trek, it is Thrale’s that is the most decisive—​it was for her that Johnson generated (and preserved) his observations and shaped them into the literary epistles that at times rival the Journey itself. If it is too much to say that Johnson saw Scotland through Thrale’s eyes, it was for her responsive eyes that he accumulated and meditated upon the empirical data he collected. The fact that he accompanied Hester Thrale on the trips to Wales and France perhaps goes a long way toward explaining why we have no officially published accounts of those tours. He was with the person to whom he would have posted detailed letters, and so neither the larger incentive nor the raw materials were to hand once the excursions were done.30 Thus, perhaps, it is to the absence of Hester Thrale on the Scottish tour, and her imaginatively constructed presence, that we owe the very existence of the Journey to the Western Islands. For an example of these multiple “co-​partnerships,” let us examine this passage from the Journey, Johnson’s account of the arrival at Glenelg: Out of one of the beds, on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge. Other circumstances of no elegant recital concurred to disgust us. We had been frighted by a lady at Edinburgh, with discouraging representations of Highland lodgings. Sleep, however, was necessary. Our Highlanders had at last found some hay, with which the inn could not supply them, I directed them to bring a bundle into the room, and slept upon it in my riding coat. Mr. Boswell being more delicate, laid himself sheets, with hay over and under him, and lay in linen like a gentleman. (Journey to the Western Islands, ed. Fleeman, 38–​9)

Compare that with his letter to Thrale: Towards Night we came to a very formidable hill called Rattiken, which we climbed with more difficulty than we had yet experienced, and at last came to Glenelg a place on the Seaside opposite to Skie. We were by this time weary and disgusted, nor was our humour much mended, by our inn, which, though it was built of lime and slate, the highlander’s description of a house which he thinks magnificent, had neither wine, bread, eggs, nor any thing that we could eat or drink. When we were taken up stairs, a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed where one of us was to lie. Boswell blusterd, but nothing could be got. (September 21, 1773, in Letters, vol. ii, 76)

30 

For other motivations, see Letters, vol. ii, 274, 277; Life, vol. iii, 301.

254   Anthony W. Lee The Thrale epistle provides the raw data from which the more generalized and polished published account is sublimated. Details omitted in the published version find inclusion in the epistle, such as the structure “built of lime and slate” that the innkeeper takes such pride in, the transmutation of Boswell’s “bluster” into “a gentleman.” The literary decorum Johnson valued discourages highly specific details, especially the latter; however, we are compensated by his allusive simile, “black as a Cyclops from the forge,” drawn from Theocritus’s Idyll 11. This artful inclusion implicitly points the primitive gloom he finds at Glenelg contrasted with the sunny pastoral fields of Arcadia. Boswell’s account provides further illumination: We came on to the inn at Glenelg. There was no provender for our horses; so they were sent to grass, with a man to watch them. A maid shewed us up stairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in King Lear, “Poor Tom’s a cold.” I sent for fresh hay, with which we made beds for ourselves, each in a room equally miserable. Like Wolfe, we had a “choice of difficulties” [a famous phrase coined by Gen. James Wolfe before his successful attack upon Quebec, in 1759]. Dr. Johnson made things easier by comparison. At M‘Queen’s, last night, he observed, that few were so well lodged in a ship. To-​night he said, we were better than if we had been upon the hill. He lay down buttoned up in his great coat. I had my sheets spread on the hay, and my clothes and great coat laid over me, by way of blankets. (Life, vol. v, 145, 146–​7)

Boswell also offers allusions that serve to ornament his prose but lack the concentrated force of Johnson’s. However, the accretion of detail here is much more pronounced than that found in the Journey. A single clause, “damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table,” book a congeries of sensory detail that bring the scene vividly to life in a way we never find in the Journey: here is the “no elegant recital.” And we are given direct speech—​a distinguishing feature of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides missing from the Journey. It was such intimate disclosures that shocked many of Boswell’s contemporary readers but that we moderns find irresistibly appealing. Both the letters to Thrale and Boswell’s journal often provide the particulars that flesh out the journey, even as they contrast with the elevated soberness that distinguishes Johnson’s account. As noted above, the trove of texts and documents that accompany and inform the Journey thus serve as interpretive tools that greatly enhance our apprehension of Johnson’s greatest travelogue. What remains to be discussed in this chapter is the nature of the journal as a literary artifact. Claudia Thomas Kairoff has recently emphasized Johnson’s lack of sympathy with the landscape of Scotland. Comparing the Journey with Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, she observes, “both writers shared a lack of interest in picturesque landscapes for their own sake.” Commenting on the famous passage where Johnson describes his first inspiration to write the Journey, she remarks,

Travel   255 Johnson did not compliment his surroundings when he compared them with a romance-​writer’s feigned landscape. A mountain stream is not a place where one might expect to encounter adventure or even pastoral lovers, but merely the site of “rudeness, silence, and solitude.” The eye is not captivated by the surrounding mountains but feels imprisoned within their narrow bounds. Johnson explains that this was not the kind of place to induce “a placid indulgence of voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers.” Instead, he is reminded of “want, misery, and danger” and the terrors awaiting unprepared travelers.31

Kairoff is not alone in reading the Journey as hard-​nosed, objective, and unsentimental in its portrayal of the Hebrides.32 Nor is she wrong. Johnson’s own statement to Hester Thrale (which also serves as the second motto to this chapter) clearly supports it: “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” However, this is not the only way to read the Journey, as the first motto’s emphasis upon imaginative excursions enforces. I would like to offer a counterexample that, while focusing upon Kairoff ’s “rudeness, silence, and solitude,” allows us to discern in Johnson a greater sympathetic engagement with the natural surroundings, one that permits him to imaginatively process his perceptions into high literary art. Take, for example, the following description of Loch Ness on August 30, 1773, which may serve as exemplum of the acuity and breadth of Johnson’s imaginative vision: Most of this day’s journey was very pleasant. The day, though bright, was not hot; and the appearance of the country, if I had not seen the Peak [at Derby], would have been wholly new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were, therefore, at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks, shaded with birch, the hardy native of the north, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and then we espied a little corn-​field, which served to impress more strongly the general barrenness. (Journey, ed. Fleeman, 22)

As is typical with the Journey, the passage is strongly marked by a visual perception: “now and then we espied.” But the sensory apprehension expands to sound: “the 31 

Claudia Thomas Kairoff, “Samuel Johnson and Anna Seward: Solitude and Sensibility,” in Anthony W. Lee, ed., Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2018), 295–​330, at 303–​4, 305–​6. The passage Kairoff addressed is found in Journey, 31–​2. 32  See, e.g., Charles H. Hinnant, “The Anthropology of Natural Scarcity in A Journey to the Western Islands,” in Samuel Johnson: An Analysis (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 103–​25, and Ruth Mack, “The Limits of the Senses in Johnson’s Scotland,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 279–​94.

256   Anthony W. Lee limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank.” And we are afforded a tactile apprehension of an architectonics of space: the Loch, “a large hollow between two ridges of high rocks,” is structurally defined by the looming hang, on one hand, of “high and steep rocks,” on the other, “rocks . . . towering in horrid nakedness.” In particular, the closing detail, the “little corn-​ field,” at once climaxes and constitutes the passage. This small “espied” patch vividly tosses a splash of warmth into a landscape otherwise dominated by the darker hues of gray, green, and blue.33 It summons the glimpse of human activity, the fruitful cultivation of soil, amidst isolation and loneliness of the scene. The deliberateness of this moment is verified by the re-​emergence of human contact, a few pages later, in the plaintive glimpse of “a corn field, in which a lady was walking with some gentlemen” (Journey, 27; my italics)—​ a snapshot that, in its conjoining of male and female, suggests a corresponding fecundity opposing the general barrenness otherwise predominant. That is to say, the presence of human relationship confers upon the passage an animating radiance. In this small moment we witness Johnson’s evocation of human consciousness confronting an inert, brute, and potentially hostile, face of nature—​one that dramatically contrasts with Johnson’s typical milieu, the bustling spaces of the city, where the needs and comforts of humanity are easily satisfied, and where the thronged avenues and numerous warm, social interiors offer easy and welcome redress from the inhuman “barrenness” in the Highlands.34 To the descriptions by Boswell (Life, vol. v, 133) and Johnson’s original letter to Hester Thrale (Letters, vol. ii, 65). Boswell’s two laconic sentences describe a “scene”—​a metaphoric framing that perhaps solicits human artifice, as in drama—​and one that dwells upon the human pleasures afforded for his entertainment. Johnson’s account is more deeply and more thoughtfully discerning. The Thrale letter offers one short paragraph, one that offers much less descriptive exuberance. This itself demonstrates the retroactive power of Johnson’s imagination as he recreates the original setting. His tranquil reflections philosophically and poetically invigorate the plainness found in the epistolary antecedent. Despite their temporal propinquity, Johnson inhabited a different cultural universe than did his Romantic successors. Unlike Shelley, he did not thrill to the sublime immensities of Mont Blanc. In the phrase “horrid nakedness,” the literal force of the adjective derives from the older Latinate meaning, as found in the Dictionary’s third definition, “rough, rugged.” Yet the connotation of “hideous, dreadful, shocking” (found in the Dictionary’s first definition) informs the phrase as well. This complex word, horrid, solicits a simultaneous fascination and revulsion that similarly emerges

33 

The corn would be either barley or oats; see Fleeman, Journey, 65. Johnson’s psychological need for social company see this anecdote from Piozzi’s Anecdotes: “When he was about nine years old, having got the play of Hamlet in his hand, and reading it quietly in his father’s kitchen, he kept on steadily enough, till coming to the Ghost scene, he suddenly hurried up stairs to the street door that he might see people about him” (G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 158). 34 For

Travel   257 from an earlier passage in the Journey, where Johnson stands before the bay window at Slains Castle: We came in the afternoon to Slanes castle, built upon the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, the foot of which is beaten by the waves . . . From the windows the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence must enjoy all the terrifick grandeur of the tempestuous ocean. I would not for my amusement, wish for a storm; but, as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should willingly look out upon them from Slanes castle.35

Here, as with the “horrid” rocks (think of Chaucer’s “grisly rokkes blake”), Johnson confronts the spectacle of brute nature, aloof and obdurate—​even inimical—​to human desire and need.36 In the face of this harshness, Johnson retains his civilized composure, “I would not, for my amusement, wish for a storm.” Nevertheless, he tantalizingly allows himself to verge upon (and tempts the reader to follow) the alien and horrific. If Johnson humanely gestures toward resisting this terror, he nonetheless allows himself to indulge it, if only provisionally: “as storms . . . will sometimes happen . . . I should willingly look out upon them from Slanes castle.” This reminds us of his remark in Rambler 114, “We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 242). Brooding over a dark, unruly sea, Johnson perhaps remembers a passage from another classical text, Lucretius’s De rerum natura, one that he alluded to earlier in Rambler 52: There is another kind of comparison, less tending towards the vice of envy, very well illustrated by an old poet, whose system will not afford many reasonable motives to content. “It is,” says he, “pleasing to look from shore upon the tumults of a storm, and to see a ship struggling with the billows; it is pleasing, not because the pain of another can give us delight, but because we have a stronger impression of the happiness of safety.” Thus when we look abroad, and behold the multitudes that are groaning under evils heavier than those which we have experienced, we shrink back to our own state, and instead of repining that so much must be felt, learn to rejoice that we have not more to feel. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 282–​3)

35  Journey, 13. For an account of the Journey that emphasizes the romantic elements my reading discerns, see Eithne Henson, “Johnson’s Romance Imagery,” Prose Studies 8, no. 1 (1985), 5–​24, and Alison Hickey, “ ‘Extensive Views’ in Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 32 (1992), 537–​53. 36 A little later in the Journey Johnson expands upon his theme of the human consciousness confronting an inhospitable terror: “The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditation shews him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform” (Journey, 32).

258   Anthony W. Lee

Conclusion Here is the concluding paragraph from the section of the Journey on the isle of Raasay, which finds Johnson readying his departure to Skye: Raasay has little that can detain a traveller, except the laird and his family; but their power wants no auxiliaries. Such a seat of hospitality, amidst the winds and waters, fills the imagination with a delightful contrariety of images. Without is the rough ocean, and the rocky land, the beating billows, and the howling storm: within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance. In Raasay, if I could have found an Ulysses, I had fancied a Phaeacia. (Journey, 54)

Here we may find all the characteristic aspects of Johnson the travel writer. He describes a scene far from home, one that might afford the curious new matter for meditative reflection, one that might show him something new that he might turn to moral and aesthetic account. The moral imperative is subtly but distinctly embedded in the closing allusion that gestures a comparison of Raasay to Homer’s island kingdom that nobly entertained Odysseus before helping him onward to his home. It emerges from Johnson’s scrupulous use of the subjunctive “if,” which renders the comparison hypothetical. He doesn’t wish to hyperbolically claim that he himself is a “Ulysses,” which is what a strict interpretation of the allusion requires—​this would be immodestly self-​serving. However, his ethical realism does not forbid the Homeric allusion in the first place, which at once compliments the host and offers a gracious, but not overweening, return by the guest. Unlike the socially fallacious proud innkeeper at Glenelg, this “laird and his family” exemplify the genuine hospitality demonstrated by Homer’s Phaeacians, and this is the real point of the comparison. Johnson’s aesthetic control over his allusions, his similes, and metaphors, is ever precise and richly suggestive. To find this exemplified in a travelogue is perhaps remarkable: it testifies to the truth of Boswell’s remark, “His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet” (Life, vol. iv, 428). However, the artistry, like the tone here, is not flashy and ornamental but subdued and instrumentally directed to the larger purposes of the narrative. This is likewise exhibited in the previous sentence’s parallelism and antithesis: Johnson poises harsh exterior—​“the rough ocean . . . rocky land . . . beating billows . . . the howling storm”—​against a warm interior—​“plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance.” He is able to capture, in a single sentence, the dramatic contrast he found at Raasay, a contrast that stands as an emblem for the version of Scotland he conveys in the Journey: it is a land of civilized and hospitable people enveloped by a forbidding, often hostile environment. Mere survival, he suggests throughout the narrative, is often all to

Travel   259 be expected, and to thrive and excel, as the people of Raasay do, is testimony to the character of the Scottish people and nation.37 We thus find in this paragraph the coalescence of artistic imagination and empirical observation, the double-​angled focus upon things (the landscape) and the human (the people who populate that landscape), that distinguish Johnson as both traveler and travel writer.38

Further Reading Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Henson, Eithne. “Johnson’s Romance Imagery.” Prose Studies 8, no. 1 (1985): 5–​24. Hickey, Alison. “ ‘Extensive Views’ in Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.” SEL 1500–​1900 32 (1992): 537–​53. Hill, G. B. Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland). Manchester, 1890. Hinnant, Charles H. “The Anthropology of Natural Scarcity in A Journey to the Western Islands.” In Samuel Johnson: An Analysis, 103–​25. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988. Kairoff, Claudia Thomas. “Samuel Johnson and Anna Seward: Solitude and Sensibility.” In Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, edited by Anthony W. Lee, 295–​330. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2018. Lascelles, Mary. “Notions and Facts: Johnson and Boswell on their Travels.” In Johnson, Boswell, and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell, in Honor of His Eighty-​Fourth Birthday, edited by Mary Lascelles, 215–​29. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Mack, Ruth. “The Limits of the Senses in Johnson’s Scotland.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 279–​94. Shenker, Israel. In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell: A Modern Day Journey through Scotland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

37  Johnson

modestly admits at the conclusion of his book that “I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners, are the thoughts of one who has seen but little” (Journey, 137). And in addition, his perceptions and reflections were tinged by his preconceptions: “ ‘You are my model, Sir,’ said he to Dr. Burney, soon after he published his Tour to the Hebrides. ‘I had that clever dog Burney’s Musical Tour in my eye,’ said he to many friends on the same occasion”: G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. ii, 303. 38  As we saw in the discussion of “horrid” above, this coalescence of contrasts may be seen even at the smallest levels of Johnson’s prose.

Chapter 15

Bio gra ph y Nicholas Seager

In 1763, Johnson declared that “the biographical part of literature” was “what I love most” (Life, vol. i, 425). He was a biographer from the start to the end of his writing career and enjoyed an illustrious reputation as a writer of lives. Boswell begins the Life of Johnson by expressing his anxiety about writing “the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others” (vol. i, 25). Johnson’s career as biographer divides into three phases—​not quite the same trichotomy used in the biographical chapters of this Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson. The “early” phase began with several lives of men of learning, and of naval and military heroes, published anonymously in Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine from 1738 to 1742. This phase culminates with the outstanding Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). In a long “middle” phase, Johnson contemplated many biographical projects but produced just a few lives alongside the substantial periodical, lexicographical, and editorial contributions of this stage in his career. In his essays, however, he formulated a theory of biography that was arguably more influential than his practice. The “late” phase began late indeed, in 1777, when a consortium of booksellers commissioned Johnson to contribute biographical and critical prefaces to a grand edition of English poets from the Restoration onwards. Owing to a characteristic mixture of sluggish production and ambitious conception, Johnson’s prefaces were too tardy and lengthy to appear with the edition. They therefore came out in a parallel series, eventually known as the Lives of the Poets (1779–​81). In delineating these stages of Johnson’s career, this chapter shows that biographies furnish occasions for many of Johnson’s most percipient comments as a literary critic, moralist, social commentator, and Christian. Biography was a key genre in Johnson’s outlook because it could potentially offer timeless lessons without resorting to distortive fictions. Yet it was an elusive genre because its ideal and actual form continually pull apart. Johnson attains excellence as a biographer and theorist of biography without quite matching up the two roles.

Biography   261

Early Biographies, 1738–​4 4 In his Gentleman’s Magazine biographies, Johnson reworked existing sources while adding salient reflections and generalizations of his own. His first effort was “The Life of Paolo Sarpi” (November 1738), written to promote Johnson’s then-​forthcoming but never-​realized translation of this Venetian priest’s History of the Council of Trent (1619), a critique of the Counter-​Reformation attractive to eighteenth-​century British Protestants.1 Johnson’s source was Pierre-​François le Courayer’s Vie, prefaced to the 1736 French translation of the History. Johnson creatively translated Le Courayer’s French and skillfully condensed it to about an eighth of the original.2 His reward was further commissions. Johnson again worked from one source for his life of the recently deceased Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (January–​April 1739). As well as abridging and translating the official Latin eulogy by Albert Schultens, Johnson simplified aspects for a more general readership and drew surmises where the record called for doubt or debate. Skeptical treatment of received accounts would become a hallmark of Johnsonian biography.3 In the headnote, he told readers: “We could have made it much larger, by adopting flying reports, and inserting unattested facts.” However, he pledges, “a close adherence to certainty has contracted our narrative” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 26 n. 1). When Johnson encounters potentially dubious information, he steps back from his source. Of Boerhaave’s diagnostic infallibility, “such wonderful relations have been spread over the world, as, though attested beyond doubt, can scarcely be credited.” Having awakened readers’ suspicions, he immediately reverses the issue by reminding them of Boerhaave’s deep learning, which lends greater credibility to his vaunted abilities. Then he reflects: “Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 46). An invitation to readerly skepticism thus becomes a lesson in humility and assiduity. Here are several tenets of Johnsonian biography that remain throughout his career: a test of credibility based on knowledge of human nature; an insistence that a subject’s merits be neither forgotten nor deprecated when worthy of emulation or admiration; and a jolt out of complacent judgment for the reader. In the Gentleman’s Magazine years, Johnson’s favored subjects were men of learning from across Europe. He wrote biographies of the German prodigy Jean-Philippe

1 

Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8–​ 9, 67–​73. 2  John Lawrence Abbott, “Dr. Johnson and the Making of ‘The Life of Father Paul Sarpi,’ ” John Rylands Library Bulletin 48 (1966), 255–​67. 3  Relating Johnson to an epistemological shift toward skepticism and probabilism, Martin Maner argues that “biographical writing required Johnson to shape and manipulate doubtful material in service of moral truth.” The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 31.

262   Nicholas Seager Baratier, the French physician and botanist Louis Morin, and the Dutch historian Pieter Burman. Reaching further back, he tackled the Byzantine physician Alexander of Tralles and the Chinese philosopher Confucius. But current affairs led Johnson to compose biographies of two British naval heroes, the Cromwellian admiral Robert Blake and Elizabethan adventurer Francis Drake. The opening to “Blake” signals the political motivation: At a time when the nation is engaged in a war with an enemy, whose insults, ravages and barbarities have long called for vengeance, an account of such English commanders as have merited the acknowledgements of posterity, by extending the power, and raising the honour of their country, seem[s]‌to be no improper entertainment for our readers. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 60)

The high-​handed treatment of British ships by Spanish customs officials in the Americas had occasioned war despite the reluctance of prime minister Robert Walpole. Johnson had criticized Walpole’s failure to stop Spain preying on British shipping in London and Marmor Norfolciense. Now he celebrated the intrepidity and patriotism of Blake and Drake by way of rebuke to the politicians and encouragement to the sailors. Again, these two short biographies exhibit features characteristic of Johnson’s maturer method. O M Brack, Jr. suggests that by this time Johnson “had developed virtually all of the techniques for handling factual sources he was to use through the Lives of the Poets.”4 Johnson closely followed those sources, Thomas Birch’s article on Blake in his General Dictionary Historical and Critical (1734–​41) and a collection of pamphlets called Sir Francis Drake Revived (1653), but he had to be selective and reorganize details, as well as intervene with pertinent interpretations. Johnson was finding his voice as a moralist who approached biography as a genre for eliciting the unvarying features of human existence in different eras and conditions. Johnson’s universalism—​the “uniformity in the state of man”—​underpins his sense of the purpose of biography (Yale Works, vol. iii, 320). With respect to Drake, he pronounces that “Resolution and success reciprocally produce each other,” and he extracts explicit lessons for readers: “They may learn from the example of Drake, that diligence in employments of less consequence is the most successful introduction to greater enterprises” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 95). It is tempting to read this mantra as presciently autobiographical: Johnson’s meticulousness with the “hackwork” magazine lives enabled his own “greater enterprises” in life-​writing. Another trait of these biographies, one that persists until the Lives of the Poets, is Johnson’s own imaginative projection onto his subjects. For example, Drake’s unobsequiousness resembles that of his biographer: he “was very little acquainted with policy and intrigue, very little versed in the methods of application to the powerful and great.” We hear Johnson’s own distaste for licking spittle. At Oxford, Blake was reputedly 4 

O M Brack, Jr., “Johnson’s Life of Admiral Blake and the Development of a Biographical Technique,” Modern Philology 85 (1988), 523.

Biography   263 diligent but did not get on, so we “may safely ascribe his disappointment to his want of stature.” Johnson’s source has not led him to this inference, but his own academic experience perhaps suggested it. What Robert Folkenflik calls Johnson’s “biographical realism” was taking shape in these early efforts: life histories must be kept within compass.5 Johnson was always interested in illuminating aspects of a subject’s infancy, traits that herald adult performances, but he pragmatically acknowledged a lack of evidence. “Of [Blake’s] earliest years we have no account, and therefore can amuse the reader with none of those prognosticks of his future actions, so often met with in memoirs.” The early lives make heroes of their subjects, whereas panegyric is famously banished from Johnson’s later biographies; he would tell Boswell that “if a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was” (Life, vol. iii, 155). Even in the laudatory early lives, however, Johnson feels obligated to reflect on defects. For instance, Blake is culpable of rashly attacking a far superior Dutch force: “We must then admit, amidst our eulogies and applauses, that the great, the wise, and the valiant Blake was once betrayed to an inconsiderate and desperate enterprise, by the resistless ardour of his own spirit, and a noble jealousy of the honour of his own country” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 72). Johnson recognizes that compulsion more than volition drove the deed, which after all was a selflessly patriotic, not a selfishly vainglorious, action, a solecism in Blake’s career, and an extension of, rather than an aberration from, what made him great. What seems like a sardonic list of merits about to be at least qualified, if not totally invalidated (“great,” “wise,” and “valiant”), is actually confirmed through phrases that point to the heroism, not ineptitude, exhibited in this “desperate enterprise.” Johnson was finding ways of complicating the ethical presentation of a life, without compromising the realism that demanded an unstinting examination of motives; and he exercised his power in this regard in the unsurpassed Life of Savage. In August 1743, Johnson announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine his intention to publish a biography of the recently deceased scapegrace poet and playwright, Richard Savage. He warned off rivals by insisting that he had not only the best sources but also intimate personal knowledge of this fascinating individual: “The Author of this Narrative was inform’d by Mr. Savage himself of the Facts related in it” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 242). Johnson alleged that “under the Title of the Life of Savage” his rivals would “publish only a Novel filled with romantick Adventures” (Letters, vol. i, 33). He must have recognized that the story felt like the stuff of fiction. Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of the then Countess of Macclesfield, the occasion indeed of her notorious divorce from the Earl in 1697. In 1715, Savage emerged from obscurity as a shoemaker’s apprentice to claim kinship with Mrs. Anne Brett. She wanted nothing to do with him, however, probably believing her son dead and reluctant to revive the scandal of her affair with Savage’s supposed father, the late Earl Rivers. The charismatic but dissolute Savage turned to lamenting his bastardy and decrying Brett’s cruelty in witty poems, and he associated

5 

Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 30.

264   Nicholas Seager with celebrated literary and theatrical figures like Aaron Hill, Anne Oldfield, Richard Steele, and Colley Cibber. But in 1727, the reckless Savage was condemned to death for killing a man in a tavern brawl, only to be reprieved at the last minute by the king. Savage then styled himself “volunteer laureate” to Queen Caroline when overlooked for the poet laureateship. Savage’s quest for recognition of his noble birth dwindled into a humiliating pursuit of scraps of patronage which Johnson shows Savage abasing himself to procure but haughtily receiving as no less than his desert. The revenue streams had dried up when, in 1737, Johnson swam into Savage’s waters. Savage left an indelible impression on Johnson, though their acquaintance lasted just eighteen months, because Savage’s few remaining friends, led by Alexander Pope, scrabbled together a pension for his subsistence in Wales, thus removing him from the expenses (and the bailiffs) of London. Savage, however, drank whatever money was remitted to him, alienated his sponsors with arrogant demands and self-​delusive ambitions, and in 1743 died in a Bristol debtors’ jail en route back to London. His life had been sensational.6 His misfortunes were largely self-​inflicted but to some extent he was a victim of both particular malice and general misfortune. Johnson saw an opportunity to write a new kind of biography. The novelty of the Life of Savage is its complex treatment of a subject whose personality is at once unique and representative. It is not just that Johnson makes Savage admirable and despicable by turns, but that Savage’s constitution is an admixture of magnetic and repulsive qualities. The authoritative narrator at times chastises Savage like an errant schoolboy (“his Actions, which were generally precipitate, were often blameable”), but at times takes his part like a blinkered accomplice or advocate, such as when Johnson traduces the prosecution’s several witnesses in Savage’s murder trial as “a common Strumpet, a Woman by whom Strumpets were entertained, and a Man by whom they were supported.”7 Johnson consistently upends the reader who would naively assume a moral superiority to Savage, culminating in the penultimate paragraph: “Those are no proper Judges of his Conduct who have slumber’d away their Time on the Down of Plenty, nor will a wise Man easily presume to say, ‘Had I been in Savage’s Condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage.’ ” This was a man whose abilities deserved a greater use: his plays and poems certainly have faults but, given that he was scribbling them on scraps of paper while sleeping rough, defects can surely be forgiven. Considerable blame is turned on a society that failed to accommodate such an outstanding talent: On a Bulk, in a Cellar, or in a Glass-​house among Thieves and Beggars, was to be found the Author of the Wanderer, the Man of exalted Sentiments, extensive Views and curious Observations, the Man whose Remarks on Life might have assisted the Statesman, whose Ideas of Virtue might have enlightned the Moralist, 6  Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). 7  Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 74, 34.

Biography   265 whose Eloquence might have influenced Senates, and whose Delicacy might have polished Courts.8

It is testament to Johnson’s indignant tone, which rises out of judicious detachment, that this does not register as bathos. Though when Savage enjoys prosperity he underperforms or self-​destructs, the cycle of his failure can be explained by his unpreparedness for comfortable circumstances. But Savage himself is not off the hook. Johnson developed a mode of ironizing Savage through grandiloquently describing his sordid actions or motives, such as with elegant litotes and abstractions. So, in denigrating in verse a person he tolerated in life, Savage “was not altogether free from literary hypocrisy”; and in pursuing patronage by praising Walpole, a man he considered “an Enemy to Liberty, and an Oppressor of his Country,” Savage “had not Resolution sufficient to sacrifice the Pleasure of Affluence to that of Integrity.”9 This ironic mode remained an important technique in the Lives of the Poets. Johnson’s own place in Savage’s story is curiously muted, which is peculiar given that he not only used it to market the life and warn off rivals, but also often remarked that the ideal biographer was one who enjoyed a personal acquaintance with his subject. “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him,” he told Boswell in 1772 (Life, vol. ii, 166). This happy combination of opportunity and aptitude was rare: “They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him” (vol. ii, 446). Johnson’s only explicit reference to himself comes when Savage is taking his leave of London, bound for Wales, when he “parted from the Author of this Narrative with Tears in his Eyes.”10 The ambiguity about which man is crying is apparently resolved by Johnson’s marginal comment in a copy of the book—​“I had then a slight fever”—​though whether that is an excuse or an innocent recollection again hints at Johnson’s studied self-​erasure.11 In fact, Johnson’s sonorous pronouncements disavow rather than appeal to personal intimacy. For example, when Savage encounters one of the (allegedly) perjured witnesses against him as a beggar, instead of reproaching her, he splits his last guinea to relieve her needs: This is an Action which in some Ages would have made a Saint, and perhaps in others a Hero, and which, without any hyperbolical Encomiums, must be allowed to be an Instance of uncommon Generosity, an Act of complicated Virtue; by which he at once relieved the Poor, corrected the Vicious, and forgave an Enemy; by which he at once remitted the strongest Provocations, and exercised the most ardent Charity.12

8 Johnson, Life of Savage, 97. A “Bulk” is a ledge in front of a shop; the homeless used discarded cinders from glassworks to keep warm at night; The Wanderer is Savage’s philosophical poem of 1729. 9 Johnson, Life of Savage, 50, 51. 10 Johnson, Life of Savage, 114. 11  Glasgow University Library, Sp Coll BD20-​i.41. It dates from after 1769. 12 Johnson, Life of Savage, 40.

266   Nicholas Seager Johnson demonstrates that Savage’s compassion more than compensates for his lack of prudence. Blakey Vermeule’s reading of this scene as an idealization of picking up a prostitute (a scene at which Johnson may have been present, given his nighttime strolls with Savage) is perhaps unwarranted, but Vermeule is right that “the moralist’s initial tone of awe . . . means that Savage only has farther to fall.”13 Here bathos is available, if not inherent, in the account. Savage is the exemplary proponent and object of the sympathy Johnson cultivates in a narrative that idealizes disinterested charity rather than prideful patronage. This brings into sharper relief Savage’s own neglectful conduct and unconscionable behavior in numerous episodes. But for Savage’s putative mother, Mrs. Brett, Johnson has only censure. We may never know whether Savage was a conscious impostor, an unwitting one, or the genuine article, but, despite casting a skeptical eye on most scraps of evidence, Johnson never doubts his friend’s claim to noble origins or that the perfidy of his mother is an unnatural deviation from proper maternal affection. Later writers, beginning with Boswell, saw this credulity as a failing on Johnson’s part that vitiates the work as a biography; others have taken the opportunity to rewrite the story in stage-​plays and fictions that in various ways appropriate Johnson’s authoritative moral commentary.14 The Life of Savage transformed Johnson’s theory, practice, and reputation as a biographer: as much as the Dictionary or the Rambler, it was how Young Sam became the Great Cham.

Mid-​C areer: Johnson’s Theory and Practice, 1744–​7 7 Between the Life of Savage in 1744 and the Lives of the Poets thirty-​five years later, Johnson wrote just six substantial lives, published in magazines or as prefaces to editions. The sense of lack was felt even at the time, because the Life of Savage had been so well received as “a Masterpiece of Biography,” “an excellent model for this species of writing,” “one of the most excellent pieces of biography in the English language,” and “a true species of the narrative, embellished with all the powers of moral observation.”15 “It is universally allowed that no species of writing is more pleasing than biography,” wrote one commentator, “and nobody ever read the Lives that have been written by this author without regretting that he did not write more.”16 Until recently critics were 13 

Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 122. 14  Nicholas Seager, “Johnson, Biography, and the Novel: The Fictional Afterlives of Richard Savage,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 51 (2015), 152–​70. 15  William Rider, An Historical and Critical Account of the Living Authors of Great-​Britain (London, 1762), 9; [Robert Shiells], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1753), vol. v, 65; Monthly Review 55 (1776), 71; Lloyd’s Evening Post, March 8–​10, 1769. 16  Editor’s preface, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage (London, 1767), ii.

Biography   267 content to say that “the truly biographical products of Johnson’s career fall into two phases: the early biographies . . . and the Lives of the Poets.”17 But, as we shall see, the mid-​career was no hiatus. Three mid-​career lives address seventeenth-​century figures: the poet Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1748); the Presbyterian clergyman Francis Cheynell (1751); and the Anglican polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1756). Johnson dipped into the sixteenth century for the scholar Sir Roger Ascham (1761), commemorated Edward Cave shortly after his death (1754), and wrote his only biography of a living figure, Frederick II, King of Prussia (1756). Besides these, he wrote a couple of shorter “characters” for recently deceased men he had met, the poet William Collins and clergyman Zachariah Mudge. The meagerness of Johnson’s output contrasts with the grandness of his unfulfilled designs. He considered but never realized a range of biographies, including lives of illustrious authors from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Garrick and Goldsmith. He considered historical figures from King Alfred to Oliver Cromwell as potential subjects, but also contemplated his wayward schoolfellow Joseph Simpson and the former slave Ignatius Sancho. Furthermore, Johnson plotted to produce larger biographical collections, including the “Lives of the Painters,” the “Lives of the Philosophers,” and the “History of the Revival of Learning in Europe . . . with the lives of the most eminent patrons and the most eminent professors of all kinds of learning in different countries” (Life, vol. iv, 381–​2 n).18 He turned down the opportunity to undertake a new edition of the Biographia Britannica (1747–​66).19 Though ambitious biographical compilations never appeared, Johnson did write influential essays on biography in the 1750s, especially in Rambler 60 (1750), which, John J. Burke, Jr. demonstrates, represents “both a criticism and a vindication” of his own practice as a life writer.20 In Rambler 60, Johnson notes that instruction through the emotional involvement of the reader—​“so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever emotions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves”—​is likeliest to succeed in “narratives of the lives of particular persons”: Therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 319)

17 David Wheeler, “Introduction: The Uses of Johnson’s Biographies,” in David Wheeler, ed., Domestick Privacies: Samuel Johnson and the Art of Biography (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 4. 18 Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer, 23–​ 5. See also Paul Tankard, “ ‘That Great Literary Projector’: Samuel Johnson’s Designs or Catalogue of Projected Works,” The Age of Johnson 13 (2002), 103–​80. 19 See Life, vol. iii, 174. 20  John J. Burke, Jr., “Excellence in Biography: Rambler No. 60 and Johnson’s Early Biographies,” South Atlantic Bulletin 44 (1979), 31.

268   Nicholas Seager To those who would claim that humdrum “relations of particular lives”—​scholars pursuing scholarship, merchants conducting trade, and so on—​lack illuminating variety or momentous occurrences, Johnson counters that “the business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.” This represents a new claim for biography’s capacity to capture a personality for its typical, not remarkable, quality. Johnson urges that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” This is not a democratic principle that all lives matter in their particularity, but rather a conviction that universal significance can be extracted from any life, and that starting out clear from “adventitious” trappings like high status will help one burrow more quickly to what is essential and unchanging. The biographer’s treatment of the subject is crucial. Run-​of-​the-​mill biographies merely “exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments” and “little regard the manners or behaviour of their heroes,” failing to access “a man’s real character.” The task is not just to recount events already captured in the public record but to illuminate a personality based on more fleeting, private information.21 Apparently trivial or idiosyncratic details can provide crucial insights into a man’s character or else present a universally applicable lesson. And the end of biography is the educational process, for author and reader, of imagining another’s life and mind in order to enlarge one’s horizons and escape a narrow, self-​oriented outlook.22 However, perhaps mindful of his precipitate Life of Savage, Johnson adds: “If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 323). As Johnson stated in Idler 84: “He that writes the life of another is either his friend or his enemy, and wishes either to exalt his praise or aggravate his infamy” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 263). In turn, however, “if a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 322–​3). On this basis, Johnson advised Bennet Langton not to delay gathering materials on his uncle Peregrine: We must now endeavour to preserve what is left us, his example of Piety, and economy. I hope you make what enquiries you can, and write down what is told you. The little things which distinguish domestick characters are soon forgotten, if you delay to enquire you will have no information, if you neglect to write, information will be vain. 21 

See Yale Works, vol. iii, 318–​23. See Catherine N. Parke, Samuel Johnson and Biographical Thinking (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 2. 22 

Biography   269 His art of life certainly deserves to be known and studied. He lived in plenty and elegance upon an income which to ma[n]‌y would appear indigent and to most, scanty. How he lived therefore every man has an interest in knowing. (Letters, vol. i, 266–​7)

Biography can preserve and transmit felicitous examples of the “art of life.” “To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.”23 But it remains within reach only briefly. Reflections in Johnson’s “Life of Browne” compound the latent problems in his biographical ideal: Of every great and eminent character, part breaks forth into publick view, and part lies hid in domestick privacy. Those qualities which have been exerted in any known and lasting performances, may, at any distance of time, be traced and estimated; but silent excellencies are soon forgotten; and those minute peculiarities which discriminate every man from all others, if they are not recorded by those whom personal knowledge enabled to observe them, are irrecoverably lost. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 330)

Despite having said in Rambler 60 that the ideal biographer will have broken bread with his subject, Johnson in Idler 84 is wary of such familiarity. He is equally anxious about a distance that may indeed confer impartiality but compromises the ability to gain the intimate details biography should attain. The Johnsonian ideal is elusive because it aspires to record people doing the right thing when no one is looking. Moreover, anyone close enough to record the “silent excellencies” that illustrate an ideal modus vivendi may be disqualified as a witness, let alone judge. In an Idler essay at the end of the 1750s, Johnson expresses a preference for autobiography. The suspicion that a memoirist might conceal or falsify the truth is countervailed by Johnson’s conviction that the author will be compelled to veracity by conscience. The key passage for Johnson’s idea of biography is his acknowledgment that “what we collect by conjecture, and by conjecture only can one man judge of another’s motives or sentiments, is easily modified by fancy or by desire; as objects imperfectly discerned, take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 261–​4). He was ever more aware of the biographer as a mediator; in the Lives of the Poets he makes a virtue of the fact, using his own critical presence to lend significance to the careers he recounts. But Johnson imposed his ideas on the mid-​career lives too. Several were written to pay the bills. Some, like “Cheynell” and “King of Prussia,” were interventions in topical affairs at local and international levels.24 “Browne” is Johnson’s most ambitious

23 

The Patriot (1774), in Yale, Works, vol. x, 389. F. P. Lock, “The Topicality of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life’ of Francis Cheynell,” Review of English Studies 65 (2014), 853–​65; Nicholas Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 66. 24 

270   Nicholas Seager application of his theoretical principles. Johnson tackled a subject he admired yet found quite alien, encountering in Browne’s works an idiosyncratic, imaginative theology that jarred with his own pragmatic and practical faith. For these reasons, writing the biography exercised in Johnson the empathy he had argued was requisite for biography. His frequent grumpiness is tempered by admiration. For instance, after reflecting on his scholarly experiences and residence abroad, Browne makes the “solemn assertion” that “His life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” Johnson is prompt in pulling the imaginist back to earth, contrasting the real miracle of “Life” (“a succession of motions of which the first cause must be supernatural”) with the actually quite banal existence of Browne: “A scholastick and academical life is very uniform . . . A traveller has greater opportunities of adventure; but Browne traversed no unknown seas, or Arabian desarts.” Johnson chastises Browne for “imagin[ing] himself distinguished from the rest of mankind,” which offends Johnson’s sense of man as a social being as well as his universalism. But when Johnson explains the discrepancy, the transgression is turned to use: The wonders probably were transacted in his own mind: self-​love, co-​operating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Browne, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man’s life: and, perhaps, there is no human being, however hid in the crowd from the observation of his fellow-​mortals, who, if he has leisure and disposition to recollect his own thoughts and actions, will not conclude his life in some sort a miracle, and imagine himself distinguished from all the rest of his species by many discriminations of nature or of fortune. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 312–​13)25

This is not a concession to narcissism as inevitable but rather an attempt to grasp how Browne’s capacious intellect worked, recognizing that what seemed extraordinary to him may well not be inferable from the bare facts Johnson has: that he resided at Montpellier, took his degree at Leiden, and so on. Johnson grounds the flighty Browne without wholly dismissing his experience, and from it he extrapolates a more commonly applicable idea about the human need to feel exceptional, delusive as that may be. Johnson admired Browne’s piety and believed it, like Peregrine Langton’s thriftiness, worthy of emulation. Especially admirable is Browne’s imperturbable modesty and constancy during a period when dangerous religious views were multiplying and encroaching. Browne’s faith is fantastical without trespassing against orthodoxy: It is observable, that he who in his earlier years had read all the books against religion, was in the latter part of his life averse from controversies. To play with important truths, to disturb the repose of established tenets, to subtilize objections, and elude proof, is too often the sport of youthful vanity, of which maturer experience commonly repents. There is a time, when every wise man is weary of raising difficulties

25 

Compare the opening to Rambler 21, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 113–​14.

Biography   271 only to task himself with the solution, and desires to enjoy truth without the labour or hazard of contest. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 335)

A biographical progression is hereby recommended to readers. Johnson praises Browne’s “method of encountering these troublesome irruptions of skepticism” by deferring consideration of them, trusting maturer reason to provide resolutions. In this context, Johnson opposes those who view Browne as heterodox, decrying the “two sorts of men willing to enlarge the catalogue of infidels”—​atheists and bigots. The first are desperate to enlist writers to their cause; the other zealously ostracize sound believers with misplaced punctility. In this respect, Browne’s life and “Life” exemplify a charitably capacious conception of Christianity, and it becomes one of Johnson’s “fullest expressions about the essentials of the Christian faith.”26 Its charitableness is the religious equivalent to the charity extended toward and lauded in Richard Savage. Likewise, in “Browne” tolerance of nonessential differences in faith is espoused as well as modeled: Men may differ from each other in many religious opinions, and yet all may retain the essentials of Christianity; men may sometimes eagerly dispute, and yet not differ much from one another: the rigorous persecutors of error should, therefore, enlighten their zeal with knowledge, and temper their orthodoxy with Charity; that Charity, without which orthodoxy is vain; Charity that “thinketh no evil,” but “hopeth all things,” and “endureth all things.” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 340)

Johnson evidently felt that biography could help achieve such forbearance. Elsewhere he used biography to denounce its absence. His life of Cheynell, the most hostile biography he ever wrote, exposed its subject as “turbulent, obstinate and petulant,” denounced “the asperity of his carriage, and the known virulence of his temper,” and decried “his disregard both of humanity and decency” (Yale Works, vol. xix, 272, 288, 268). In short, the disputatious and doctrinaire Cheynell lacks the charitable outlook that would emphasize—​like the ideal biographer—​the fundamental similarities between men.

Late Career: Lives of the Poets (1779–​81) Johnson’s last major work was the fifty-​two literary biographies that constitute the Lives of the Poets. Johnson often singled out writers as fit illustrations of the vicissitudes of life and vanity of human wishes. In Rambler 21, he ponders “whether the happiness of a candidate for literary fame be not subject to the same uncertainty with that of him who governs provinces, commands armies, presides in the senate, or dictates in the cabinet.” Getting to the top costs the author as much effort as the statesman, and the desire to 26  Maurice

Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 151.

272   Nicholas Seager stay there entices him, like his political equivalent, to “innumerable artifices which they make use of to degrade a superior, to repress a rival, or obstruct a follower” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 115–​20). Fame is equally fickle and precarious in the civic and the literary realms. In Idler 102, Johnson says why writers are ideal subjects for biography: An author partakes of the common condition of humanity; he is born and married like another man; he has hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys, and friends and enemies, like a courtier or a statesman; nor can I conceive why his affairs should not excite curiosity as much as the whisper of a drawing-​room or the factions of a camp. (Yale Works, vol. ii, 312)

If readers prefer political or military biographies for their “deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune,” for accounts of “success and miscarriage,” these are readily found in authorial careers, where there are hopes and disappointments, triumphs and defeats, analogous to all walks of life (Yale Works, vol. ii, 311–​14). In the preface to the Dictionary, Johnson wrote that “the chief glory of every people arises from its authours,” and to Boswell he reported that he “did not think that the life of any literary man in England had been well written” (Savage might be an implicit exception) (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 109; Life, vol. v, 240). As well as a philosophical exploration of the human condition, the Lives of the Poets was thus the culmination of Johnson’s lifetime objective to elevate the vocation of author and to dignify and methodize a canon of modern English poetry. Biography was the form in which he sought to achieve these goals. The Lives came about because a consortium of booksellers collaborated “to print an elegant and accurate edition of all the English Poets of reputation” and approached Johnson to supply what, early on, he referred to as “little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets” (Life, vol. iii, 110; Letters, vol. iii, 20). The edition was a rival to John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain, which commenced its serial publication in 1777, ran to 109 volumes, and included prefatory biographies.27 The consortium realized that Johnson’s name attached to their edition would give it the commercial edge over Bell’s. Johnson’s payment of 200 guineas (later raised to 300) reflects the relatively modest scope of the envisaged prefaces; when it was suggested the booksellers had rewarded him beneath his deserts, Johnson stated: “The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but that I have written too much” (Life, vol. iv, 35 n). To one of the booksellers, Thomas Cadell, in October 1778, he wrote: “I have taken a course very different from what I originally thought on. I thought to have given four o[r]‌five pages to an authour, and to three of them I have given little volumes.”28 That refers to three so far: others expanded beyond what Johnson intended—​“an Advertisement . . . containing a few dates and a general character” (Lives, vol. i, 189). Boswell fretted that the commercial

27  See T. F. Bonnell, “John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: The ‘Little Trifling Edition’ Revisited,” Modern Philology 85 (1987), 128–​52. 28  Quoted in The Lives of the Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vol. i, 30.

Biography   273 origins of the Lives would reduce Johnson to discussing, even praising, poets properly beneath his attention: I was somewhat disappointed in finding that the edition of the English Poets, for which he was to write Prefaces and Lives, was not an undertaking directed by him: but that he was to furnish a Preface and Life to any poet the booksellers pleased. I asked him if he would do this to any dunce’s works, if they should ask him. Johnson. “Yes, Sir, and say he was a dunce.” (Life, vol. iii, 137)

Johnson was piqued at Boswell’s implication. He undoubtedly maintains his critical independence, and the Lives often reads like an exercise in fault-​finding. Johnson abides by the principle expressed in the Life of Smith that “every human performance has its faults,” pulling no punches even with acknowledged greats like Milton, Dryden, and Pope (Lives, vol. ii, 176). The ten-​volume Lives came out in two installments: twenty-​two biographies in four volumes in 1779; the remaining thirty in six volumes in 1781. Because of Johnson’s delays, the publishers abandoned their plan of distributing the prefaces throughout the fifty-​ volume edition and settled on two parallel sets of volumes, sold together for a whopping £7 10s. Once finished, Johnson reflected that he had written the Lives in “my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour, and haste,” and the record from his letters to Hester Thrale shows alternations between periods of procrastination, slogging away (“my Lives creep on”), and lightning-​fast productivity.29 Johnson’s reluctance to do research is often overstated. He dispatched Boswell on fact-​ finding missions, corresponded with people who had known his poets, and visited the Bodleian Library himself. He sought existing lives of his subjects, as well as entries in collective biographies (Yale Works, vol. i, 304; Letters, vol. iii, 254).30 Evidence from Johnson’s surviving working notes, manuscripts, and corrected page proofs show him taking care in refining the Lives, though the Life of Pope, for which there is the fullest trail, is an exceptional case owing to its length, range of sources, and the fact that it was last written.31 Johnson generated barely any fresh biographical knowledge but transformed the facts he inherited from sources into a coherent and profound vision of human effort; he contributed judgments that bestowed significance on the factual details he gathered.

29 

See William McCarthy, “The Composition of Johnson’s Lives: A Calendar,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981), 53–​67. 30  Pat Rogers, “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries,” Review of English Studies 31 (1980), 149–​7 1. 31 Frederick W. Hilles, “The Making of The Life of Pope,” in Frederick W. Hilles, ed., New Light on Dr. Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 257–​84; J. D. Fleeman, “Some Proofs to Johnson’s Prefaces to the Poets,” The Library 17 (1962), 213–​30; Harriet Kirkley, A Biographer at Work: Samuel Johnson’s Notes for the “Life of Pope” (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Manuscripts with Johnson’s corrections survive for the lives of Pope (Pierpont Morgan Library MS205) and Rowe (Houghton Library MS Hyde 50 [53]).

274   Nicholas Seager The point is that, as he entered his seventies, Johnson, in the process of writing the Lives, transformed what started as a small job on the side into a masterpiece comparable in his career only to the Dictionary. In terms of structure, Johnson’s Lives are typically divided into “a sketch of [the subject’s] life, and a character of his writings” (Letters, vol. iii, 43). First biography, then criticism. Many also have a comparatively brief “character sketch,” bridging these two main sections. The chronological account covered public and exterior actions: education, dealings with the book trade, and careers outside writing, such as clerical or political offices. The character sketch gave a psychological interpretation of inner “personal qualities” (Dictionary, s.v. character). Martine Watson Brownley demonstrates that Johnson transformed the traditional character sketch, which conventionally offered a categorical and singular impression of a person, to emphasize instead individual nuance, complexity, and contradictions.32 In the Lives, the character sketch is a fulcrum which fulfills Johnson’s aim “to discriminate [the subject] from all other persons by any peculiarities of character or sentiment he may happen to have,” using illuminating anecdotes.33 For instance, John Philips is addicted to tobacco to the point of “celebrating the fragrant fume” in numerous poems (Lives, vol. ii, 69). Swift’s “tyrannick peevishness” to servants is indicative not just of his crankiness but of “that vigilance of minute attention which his works discover.”34 Johnson is often subtle enough to withhold explicit inferences. He discovered precious little about Dryden’s “petty habits or slight amusements,” but recounts that he had a favorite armchair at Will’s coffeehouse, “which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and his summer seat.”35 The poet’s domain is diminutive but his amused awareness of that fact, and the simple pun, humanize him. The extent to which Johnsonian critical biography reads life and art in conjunction—​ or as separable—​remains keenly contested by critics. In Rambler 14 (1750), Johnson wrote that “there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings,” and the Life of Savage spelled out that, in all-​too-​ frequent contrast to Savage’s conduct, his poetry promoted virtue, illustrating Johnson’s belief that often “a man writes much better than he lives,” it being “easier to design than to perform” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 74–​5). This is clearly about ethics, an author’s failure to live up to ideals promoted in their works. In the most sophisticated and substantial cases of his late-​career Lives, Johnson’s view of an author’s personality and habits of life shape his judgments about their literary achievements. The biographical section of the Life of Milton, suffused with personal and political animosity, depicts that “acrimonious

32 “Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets and Earlier Traditions of the Character Sketch in England,” in James Engell, ed., Johnson and His Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 29–​53. 33  Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), vol. ii, 3. 34  Lives of the Poets, vol. iii, 210. (“Discover” means “reveal.”) 35  Lives of the Poets, vol. ii, 118. (“Seat” means “house,” and aristocrats often had two for the different seasons of the year.)

Biography   275 and surly republican” as a man who set himself apart from others, scorned authority, and sought self-​sufficient independence (Lives, vol. i, 276). Johnson perhaps saw something of himself in his portrait of the bookish, reserved, and domineering intellectual. Either way, the assessment of Milton’s life colors Johnson’s view of his writings, both his “minor” writings and Paradise Lost. The deficiencies Johnson sees in Comus, for instance, are a consequence of Milton’s self-​imposed social inhibitions: “He knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring, or the perplexity of contending passions. He had read much, and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer” (Lives, vol. i, 293). By contrast, Milton succeeds as an epic poet because Paradise Lost’s concern with divine and angelic beings depends on a lofty, aloof imagination, not penetrating social insights: “To display the motives and actions of beings thus superiour, so far as human reason can examine them, or human imagination represent them, is the task which this mighty poet has undertaken and performed” (Lives, vol. i, 284). Johnson does not naively apply an author’s life to his writings; as Leopold Damrosch, Jr. states, Johnson is “commendably cautious in establishing relations between poetry and biography.”36 The point is not that there are straightforward correspondences between life and art but that the same ethical vision that drives Johnson as a biographer impels him as a critic, so that his Lives amount, in Lawrence Lipking’s words, to “literary criticism based on a criticism of life.”37 For Richard Altick, Johnson stands out as a literary biographer for “the application of the biographer’s experience of the world to the moral and psychological problems his narrative raises.”38 We can add artistic problems, because Johnson’s moral and psychological profiles are given in the context of authorial careers, which had patterns Johnson had experienced: application to one’s studies, juvenile efforts, seeking models and originality, trying to break through, dealing with rejection, seeking and offering patronage and mentorship, sustaining success, and so on. Johnson’s Life of Dryden is in many respects a sympathetic account of a poet Johnson admired. His main failings are servility and languor. Johnson is especially severe on Dryden’s dedications of his writings to the wealthy and powerful, as when Johnson applies a fanciful simile to his mock-​ praise of Dryden’s resourceful sycophancy: “As many odoriferous bodies are observed to diffuse perfumes from year to year, without sensible diminution of bulk or weight, he appears never to have impoverished his mint of flattery by his expences, however lavish” (Lives, vol. ii, 113). The natural image suitably morphs into a monetary one. And, as good as Dryden was, he failed to strive for excellence, resting content to surpass the also-​rans of his age: “From his contemporaries he was in no danger. Standing therefore

36  Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 126. 37 Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 461. 38 Richard Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1956), 57.

276   Nicholas Seager in the highest place, he had no care to rise by contending with himself; but while there was no name above his own, was willing to enjoy fame on the easiest terms” (Lives, vol. ii, 152). Johnson, who had worked his way up as a professional writer, is always scathing in his attention to idleness. The Lives in some respects is a moral fable that maps on to the Parable of the Talents. The Life of Pope best exemplifies the drama of human expectation, effort, and achievement in the context of the authorial career which Johnson directs in the Lives. Pope’s translation of the Iliad is “certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen,” yet in its delayed composition (was Johnson thinking of his own Lives?) even this demonstrates that “the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility.” Johnson rues that in a poet’s career, as in life more generally, “indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation”; and he ends this strain of thought with a memento mori: “He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties” (Lives, vol. iv, 16). For all Pope’s greatness, he is mortal and heir to all flesh. “Let no man dream of influence beyond his life,” Johnson intones, and presents Pope’s own death as farcical, a mock-​heroic demise for the master of the mock-​heroic mode: “The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. Hannibal, says Juvenal, did not perish by a javelin or a sword; the slaughters of Cannae were revenged by a ring. The death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys” (Lives, vol. iv, 53). Ultimately, the Lives teach the Christian lesson of Rambler 2, concerning the restless dissatisfaction that impels people perpetually to hanker for future felicity: Perhaps no class of the human species requires more to be cautioned against this anticipation of happiness, than those that aspire to the name of authors. A man of lively fancy no sooner finds a hint moving in his mind, than he makes momentaneous excursions to the press, and to the world, and, with a little encouragement from flattery, pushes forward into future ages, and prognosticates the honours to be paid him, when envy is extinct, and faction forgotten, and those, whom partiality now suffers to obscure him, shall have given way to other triflers of as short duration as themselves. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 12)

Authors are representative of humanity as triflers of short duration, especially when they strive for greatness and fall short, or when they achieve it but fall silent, vanquished by Time, which it has been their ambition to arrest through their art. However, the critics of the present and posterity are also implicated. The unity of his final major work comes from Johnson’s own critical presence, emphasizing propriety in art and ethics, sounding the theme of the limitations of human efforts and expectations, and insisting that poetry is a noble and useful vocation, able to ameliorate if not remove life’s bitternesses. But a digression in the Life of Addison threatens to derail the entire enterprise:

Biography   277 The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known. The delicate features of the mind, the nice discriminations of character, and the minute peculiarities of conduct, are soon obliterated; and it is surely better that caprice, obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might delight in the description, should be silently forgotten, than that, by wanton merriment and unseasonable detection, a pang should be given to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a friend. As the process of these narratives is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished, and coming to the time of which it will be proper rather, to say nothing that is false, than all that is true. (Lives, vol. iii, 18)

In this self-​reflexive moment, we still hear Johnson’s belief in the unstinting pursuit of truth via the exercise of critical judgment that ruthlessly recounts frustrated ambitions, human frailties, and flawed artworks; but here it is in conflict with a more humane desire to pull punches, to contribute to contentment and solace, rather than to exacerbate suffering. Rigor might be what a self-​deceiving critic calls cruelty. The sense of time trickling away, a theme in many poets’ lives besides Pope, and which must have been preying on the mind of the aging biographer, is a condition of the genre itself, because valuable biographical knowledge is fugitive and ever receding. The gap between ambition and achievement central to many poetic careers in the Lives is ironically turned back on Johnson’s own effort. This awareness of the proximity of life, art, and death constitutes the greatness of Johnson’s Lives.

Further Reading Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1976. Folkenflik, Robert. Samuel Johnson, Biographer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Kirkley, Harriet. A Biographer at Work: Samuel Johnson’s Notes for the “Life of Pope.” Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Maner, Martin. The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets.” Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Parke, Catherine N. Samuel Johnson and Biographical Thinking. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Wheeler, David, ed. Domestick Privacies: Samuel Johnson and the Art of Biography. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

PA RT I I I

TOP IC S

Chapter 16

Au thor sh i p Benjamin Pauley

The Adventures of Books Near the end of a volume focused more on Johnson the conversationalist than Johnson the writer, Hester Lynch Piozzi notes, “Mr. Johnson’s knowledge of literary history was extensive and surprising: he knew every adventure of every book you could name almost, and was exceedingly pleased with the opportunity which writing the Poets’ Lives gave him to display it.”1 Piozzi’s observation offers an intriguing contrast between the stated subject of Johnson’s project (poets’ lives) and the actual object of the knowledge that enabled Johnson to pursue it (“every adventure of every book”). Johnson has long been considered a central figure in what he himself termed “the Age of Authors,” but he also spent an entire career immersed in practical ways in the world of London publishing.2 A “book,” as Johnson well knew, is at once an abstract artistic or intellectual creation (a thing that is written) and a material object (a thing that can be held in the hand or placed on a shelf). Consistently, Johnson’s writings attend to the adventures of books in both senses. Taken together, his accounts of authors’ lives, his advice to prospective authors, and his remarks on his own experiences in the world of publishing represent an invaluable resource for understanding the circumstances that conditioned writing and reading in the eighteenth century. Though I will have cause to refer to a number of different books in which Johnson had a hand or upon which he remarked, I will recur frequently to two Johnsonian anecdotes,

1 

Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 298. 2  Adventurer 115, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 456–​61. For Johnson as author and an actor in the world of print, see, for instance, Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971); Alvin Kernan, Print Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

282   Benjamin Pauley in particular: one fictitious, about a book that never made its way into print; the other historical, about a book whose appearance Johnson considered a landmark of English publishing. The first appears in Idler 55, which presents the grievance of a would-​be author frustrated in his efforts to publish an exhaustive natural history of the county in which he lives. The second is in the Life of Pope, where Johnson deduces “minutely the history of the English Iliad,” explaining how the book came to be and considering its fortunes in the market. The divergences between the adventures of these two books illustrate some of the central features of printed publication in the period. The correspondent of Idler 55 presents his complaint in hopes that the Idler and his readers will side with him in the “common cause of literature” against the indifference of patrons and the philistine commercialism of the book trades. After more than a decade spent choosing a topic, collecting specimens, and (eventually) writing, he pleased himself with imagining the inevitable rewards of his labor: “I computed that universal curiosity would call for many editions of my book, and that in five years, I should gain fifteen thousand pounds by the sale of thirty thousand copies.” But these fantasies prove illusory, as he finds upon hasting to London. Though he expects to find “the patrons of learning” vying with one another to secure “the honour of a dedication,” he resolves “to maintain the dignity of letters, by a haughty contempt of pecuniary solicitations.” Strangely, the patrons do not come to him and, when he decides to go to them, his proposals are turned away with one excuse or another. Slighted by potential patrons, he sends the plan of his book to the principal booksellers and rents a large room at a tavern to accommodate the crowd of bidders he expects to press in upon him. Like the patrons, however, the booksellers unaccountably decline to take up the prize. Finding no encouragement from the booksellers, he “condescended to step into shops, and mentioned [his] work to the masters.” But even the mechanic printers offer only varied excuses for declining the publication (though one “offered to print my work, if I could procure subscriptions for five hundred, and would allow me two hundred copies for my property”). The letter writer is reduced to begging for guidance from the Idler: “Where must knowledge and industry find their recompence, thus neglected by the high and cheated by the low?” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 171–​4). Johnson’s account of Pope’s Iliad provides a mirror image of this narrative. Though young, Pope was, in 1715, an author “in the full bloom of reputation,” and sought to transmute regard into reward with an ambitious plan for publication. In an echo of Idler 55’s dreams of a hopeful author “[enjoying] the contest, while [the booksellers] were outbidding each other,” Johnson reports that “The greatness of [Pope’s] design, the popularity of the author, and the attention of the literary world, naturally raised such expectations of the future sale, that the booksellers made their offers with great eagerness.” In the end, Bernard Lintot secured the project. Pope would produce a six-​volume translation “with large notes,” to be released a volume at a time over the course of six years, costing subscribers six guineas. Lintot would produce at his own cost all of the subscription and presentation sets in quarto with engraved headpieces, tailpieces, and initial capitals, and would pay Pope £200 per volume copy money, besides, in return for the right to publish subsequent editions (though never in quarto and never with the

Authorship   283 engravings from the subscription issue). The subscription was successful enough to make Pope a fortune—​if not the £15,000 the would-​be author of Idler 55 imagines, then at least, by Johnson’s calculation, “five thousand three hundred and twenty pounds four shillings.”3 There are obvious differences in the two stories: one features an unknown country gentleman and amateur scholar, the other a celebrated young poet; one author writes a voluminous work whose appeal is far more limited than he is willing to recognize, the other translates a venerated classic. But the most important difference between them is that Pope understands—​in a way the naïf of Idler 55 does not—​how books are made.

Authors and Patrons The one point on which Pope and the letter writer of Idler 55 have something in common is that neither secures a patron for his book. While the would-​be author of Idler 55 sought patronage and failed to find it, Pope declined the patronage he was offered. As Johnson tells the story, the Earl of Halifax “made some advances of favour” in hopes of receiving the dedication of the work, but Pope met these overtures with “sullen coolness”: “Their commerce had its beginning in hope of praise on one side, and of money on the other, and ended because Pope was less eager of money than Halifax of praise” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1089–​90). The eagerness with which the letter writer of Idler 55 courts patronage suggests he does not understand his business so well as Pope did. By the time he wrote Idler 55, Johnson was identified with a notable critique of patronage. His remarks in The Vanity of Human Wishes (which numbers “the patron” among the “ills [that] the scholar’s life assail”), the jibe in the definition he offers in the Dictionary (“a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery”), and his rhetorically masterful letter to Lord Chesterfield, have often been read as proud assertions of authorial independence from the presumption of patrons. In Alvin Kernan’s words, Johnson “proclaimed his sole ownership of the Dictionary, and the professional writer’s ownership of the language.”4 These memorable asperities, however—​all of which date from early in Johnson’s career—​make it easy to exaggerate his stance. As Lawrence Lipking notes, Johnson’s complaint isn’t against patronage as such (he was happy to accept a pension when one was offered), but rather against bad patrons who fail to uphold their end of a mutual, complementary relationship.5 Johnson’s statements about patronage became more moderate and more nuanced with time and perspective and, as Dustin Griffin suggests,

3 Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1067, 1075. For a full discussion of the contract that corrects some errors in Johnson’s account, see James McLaverty, “The Contract for Pope’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad,” The Library 15, no. 3 (September 1993), 206–​25. 4  Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 202. 5 Lipking, Samuel Johnson, 15.

284   Benjamin Pauley must ultimately be viewed in light of his broader ideas of social mutuality and subordination. In Johnson’s mature view, Griffin argues, the system of patronage was certainly subject to abuse, but was generally effective in supporting writers.6 Even if Johnson’s views on patronage in the 1750s really were more negative than they would become later in life, the object of his satire in Idler 55 is not the patron class, but rather the letter writer’s patron-​hunting. His disavowal of any interest in “pecuniary solicitations” is, of course, belied by his daydreams of wealth just a paragraph prior. His eager courting of patronage is quite transparently motivated by nothing other than a desire for money (as evidenced by his readiness to approach one earl after another—​any patron will do). Johnson’s account of Pope’s studied neglect of the Earl of Halifax’s offers is instructive (though Pope’s career is too exceptional to be taken for a standard). Pope, Johnson says flatly, aimed to make money (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1065). By the time of Halifax’s overtures, however, the poet’s need for the earl’s money and countenance was less acute, precisely because of his arrangements with Lintot. Johnson’s pragmatic approach to patronage is reflected in a letter of 1782 to James Compton. Johnson tries to decline Compton’s offer of a dedication by suggesting there are better targets for him to cultivate: “If You succeed in selling your book, You may do better than by dedicating it to me. You may perhaps obtain permission to dedicate it to the Bishop of London or to Dr. Vyse, and make way by your book to more advantage than I can procure You.”7 Johnson urges Compton to seek patronage, but to seek it from those who can actually do him good. Crucially, his advice to Compton is introduced by a conditional: “If You succeed in selling your book.” Compton would be better off attending to the booksellers first, and, if he is successful there, looking out for a likely patron to augment the rewards of publication. (Compton’s book remains unidentified, and it seems likely that it was never published.) In seeking a patron before seeking a bookseller, the would-​be author of Idler 55, like Compton, has gotten things backwards.

Booksellers, the Patrons of Literature If the letter writer of Idler 55 is inappropriately deferent to the wealthy and aristocratic men he styles “the patrons of learning,” he is also too dismissive of the booksellers whom Johnson called the “patrons of literature.” Johnson seems to have been largely content to trust the booksellers’ management of publishing, even if, as James Raven notes, it was generally they, and not authors, who benefited from the eighteenth-​century “market 6 Dustin

Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–​ 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 244–​5. See also Griffin, “The Rise of the Professional Author?” in Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and Michael L. Turner, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133. 7  Johnson to James Compton, October 24, 1782 in Letters, vol. iv, 82.

Authorship   285 boom” in books.8 In a conversation recorded by Boswell, Johnson laid out succinctly a would-​be author’s options for publication: “If the authours who apply to me [for advice] have money, I bid them boldly print without a name; if they have written in order to get money, I tell them to go to the booksellers, and make the best bargain they can” (Life, vol. ii, 195). To be sure, the best bargain an author could make was not always an especially good one, but Johnson does not generally figure authors simply as the victims of rascally booksellers. Even in the early Life of Savage he observes that one must feel “indignation and concern” that the copyright of The Wanderer yielded Savage only ten guineas, but places the blame for it squarely on his friend’s own imprudence: That he sold so valuable a performance for so small a price was not to be imputed either to necessity, by which the learned and ingenious are often obliged to submit to very hard conditions; or to avarice, by which the booksellers are frequently incited to oppress that genius by which they are supported; but to [Savage’s] intemperate desire of pleasure, and habitual slavery to his passions . . . being without money for the present occasion, [he] sold his poem to the first bidder, and perhaps for the first price that was proposed, and would probably have been content with less, if less had been offered him. (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 895)

Other similar instances are easy to find. Johnson noted to Boswell that Goldsmith didn’t reap the advantage for The Vicar of Wakefield that one might have expected, because he sold the copy before the appearance of The Traveler, though it was not published until after: “The bookseller had the advantage of Goldsmith’s reputation from ‘The Traveler’ in the sale, though Goldsmith had it not in selling the copy.” When Boswell lamented that Johnson had not made more money from the Dictionary, Johnson answered, “I am sorry too. But it was very well. The booksellers are generous liberal-​minded men” (Life, vol. iii, 320–​1; vol. i, 304). Booksellers are not infallible, of course. Millar notoriously bet wrong on a large edition of Fielding’s Amelia (which Johnson recalled as “perhaps the only book, which being printed off betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night”) and was left with copies on his hands for years afterwards.9 On the other hand, Strahan initially declined Hugh Blair’s Sermons before Johnson vouched for their excellence. Individual cases may excite indignation, as when the bookseller who purchased Savage’s Bastard for “a very trivial sum” declined to share the profits with the author even when 8 

James Raven, “The Book as Commodity,” in Suarez and Turner, eds., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. V, 86. See also Jack Lynch, “Generous Liberal-​Minded Men: Booksellers and Poetic Careers in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (205), 93–​108. For an important account of printers and booksellers as partners, rather than servants in an age of print, see Lisa Maruca, The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–​1760 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007). 9 Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 297.

286   Benjamin Pauley “the success [proved] so uncommon that five impressions were sold, of which many were undoubtedly very numerous” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 907). But there are at least as many countervailing examples. When Blair’s Sermons proved far more popular than they had expected, Strahan and Cadell made him two additional payments of £50 each and paid him £300 for a second volume two years later (Life, vol. iii, 97–​8). Johnson himself, after having agreed for payment of 200 guineas for the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, received a similar bonus of 100 guineas from the booksellers, and an additional 100 guineas when the octavo edition of the Lives was published.10 On the whole, Johnson seems to have concurred with Dr. William Robertson’s opinion (recorded by Boswell): “An authour should sell his first work for what the booksellers will give, till it shall appear whether he is an authour of merit, or, which is the same thing as to purchase-​money, an authour who pleases the publick” (Life, vol. iii, 334). There is certainly room to question whether Johnson made the most of his own status as an author of merit. (Boswell suggests that “he had . . . less attention to profit from his labours than any man to whom literature has been a profession”).11 But Johnson generally seems not to have resented the bargains he made. Nichols notes that, of the Lives of the Poets, Johnson remarked, “Sir, I always said, the Booksellers were a generous set of men. Nor, in the present instance, have I reason to complain. The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but that I have written too much.”12 Taking a broad view, Johnson seems to have concluded that the business of bookselling had been beneficial for authors—​even if it was more beneficial for the booksellers, themselves.

Works and Books What marks the letter writer of Idler 55 out for an object of satire is not his desire to publish his work and to make money from it, but rather the immoderate scope of his desire, which is utterly unconnected to any sense of how books are produced. In his catalog of rejections, the would-​be author of Idler 55 records the sole response he received from a bookseller who, without opening the manuscript, told him that “a book of that size ‘would never do’ ” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 174). The would-​be author takes this response to indicate the bookseller’s indifference to the substance of the works he handles, but there is more to the bookseller’s observation than the letter writer realizes. This would-​be author thinks only of his own work—​meaning both the intellectual labor he has done and the written form he has given it—​and considers questions of the printing, distribution, and sale of books as entirely incidental to the great work of authorship. Johnson, however, had a far more practical understanding of how the intellectual or artistic work of “a 10 

John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London, 1812–​15), vol. viii, 416–​7. Life, vol. iii, 110, 111 n. 1. On this point, see Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 110–​12; and David Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 304. 12 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii, 417. 11 

Authorship   287 book” is necessarily tied to the material facts of the printed and bound object in which that work is instantiated. Throughout his career, Johnson shows an awareness of how authors’ works must take on printed form. Though he flatteringly declares, in some of his earliest correspondence, that Edward Cave is not “a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase, and considers nothing but the bulk,” he also shows that he, like Cave, can think in terms of typographical as well as metrical lines.13 As the time of printing London draws near, Johnson compares his book to Thomas Beach’s Eugenio, published the year prior. Though Eugenio was a longer poem, Johnson reckons that the quotations from Juvenal that will appear at the bottom of his own poem’s pages will mean that London will “very conveniently make five sheets.”14 Johnson’s calculation was correct: as printed, London comprised ten leaves in folio—​exactly five sheets. Nearly forty years later, in a letter to William Strahan, Johnson expresses misgivings about a passage in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland: “Can a leaf be cancelled without too much trouble? . . . if you will cancel it, I will write something to fill up the vacuum.”15 With the sheets already printed, Johnson recognizes, changes to the text are still possible, but only in ways consonant with—​indeed, dictated by—​the workings of the press. Replacing the offending passage entailed, as William B. Todd demonstrates, resetting both sides of the leaf (D8r–​v) as part of an octavo half-​sheet that also included another cancellans (U4r–​v), as well as a page of errata (2C1r, blank on the verso) and the title page (A1r, blank on the verso).16 In his letter to James Compton, Johnson notes that he doesn’t really understand what the proposed book is supposed to be about, but he does know what kind of book it should be: “The Scheme of your book I cannot say that I fully comprehend. I would not have you ask less than an hundred Guineas, for it seems a large octavo.”17 Johnson’s discussion of Pope’s Iliad shows a close engagement with the question of making books. Indeed, he devotes much more detailed attention to the publishing of the work than to its composition. It is not Pope’s translation, but rather the publication of that translation that Johnson considers “one of the great events in the annals of learning” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1076). As a critic, Johnson is interested in observing the development of Pope’s verse and compares lines of the published translation with corresponding lines from a manuscript state, noting deletions and insertions. While he quotes at length, however, Johnson offers little discussion, and breaks off abruptly, noting that, while connoisseurs may desire more examples, “most other readers are already tired, and I am not writing only to poets and philosophers” (vol. xxiii, 1086). By contrast, he takes considerable pains to work out the story of the notes, which Pope largely (and silently) contracted out, primarily to William Broome and John Jortin. Johnson directs his attention here, in part, because “The history of the notes has never 13 

Johnson to Edward Cave, April 1738, in Letters, vol. i, 14. Johnson to Edward Cave, April 1738, in Letters, vol. i, 16. 15  Johnson to William Strahan, November 30, 1774, in Letters, vol. ii, 157. 16  William B. Todd, “The Printing of Johnson’s Journey (1775),” Studies in Bibliography 6 (1954), 248. 17  Johnson to James Compton, October 24, 1782, in Letters, vol. iv, 82. 14 

288   Benjamin Pauley been traced.” But it’s also the case that Pope needed to supply “large notes” to justify the project: “the six volumes would have been very little more than six pamphlets without them” (vol. xxiii, 1071–​2). The content of Pope’s book, then, was in a sense dictated by its form: a six-​volume Iliad required more matter than the translation of the verse, by itself. The notes serve not simply to illuminate Homer’s poetry, but also (and perhaps primarily) to pad it. Pope’s Iliad offers an especially clear reminder of the materiality of books, since it appeared from the beginning in more than one form—​Lintot produced small and large folio issues on his own account at the same time that he produced the quarto issue for Pope’s subscribers. Johnson pursues the publication of Pope’s Iliad past its first edition when he notes that an unauthorized duodecimo edition was published in Holland and imported clandestinely to address a market of “those who were impatient to read what they could not yet afford to buy.” This fraud could only be counteracted by an edition equally cheap and more commodious; and Lintot was compelled to contract his folio at once into a duodecimo, and lose the advantage of an intermediate gradation. The notes, which in the Dutch copies were placed at the end of each book, as they had been in the large volumes, were now subjoined to the text in the same page, and are therefore more easily consulted.18

In producing his own duodecimo edition, Lintot sought not merely to match the Dutch import but to outdo it, and so reclaim the market for Pope’s translation. Lintot’s duodecimo edition was advertised at 2s. 6d. per volume in sheepskin binding (fifteen shillings for the set), whereas an advertisement for T. Johnson’s “English Books, Neatly printed in pocket volumes” from this time lists the six volumes of “Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad” at six gilders (approximately eleven shillings).19 Lintot’s duodecimo edition would not seem to have competed with the “piracy” directly on price. Rather, the advertisement in the Daily Courant emphasizes its superior elegance (“finely printed in an Elzevir letter”) and its convenience (“with Notes at the Bottom of each Page”).20 Johnson’s attention to such questions of format emphasizes that what Pope and Lintot published—​and what readers bought—​was not a single, uniform “Iliad of Homer, Translated by Mr. Pope,” but rather books with different characteristics (of size, of paper quality, of ornamentation, of mise en page), costing different amounts to produce (and to purchase), and signifying differently, as well (from the social cachet of the subscription issue, boasting a list of distinguished subscribers; to the luxury of the folio; to the 18 Yale

Works, vol. xxiii, 1068. The Dutch piracy would seem to be that of T. Johnson. See R. H. Griffith, “A Piracy of Pope’s ‘Iliad,’ ” Studies in Philology 28, no. 4 (1931), 737–​41. 19  This advertisement appears, for example, in George Etherege, The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter (London: Printed for the Company of Booksellers, 1720?; ESTC T14909). In converting gilders to shillings, I have followed the rates in John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1699–​1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 58. 20  The Daily Courant, June 27, 1720.

Authorship   289 economy of the duodecimo). The publication of Pope’s Iliad can be understood as an episode in the life of an author, but it also constitutes a larger story of its own: it is an adventure of books.

Editions and Copies The letter writer of Idler 55 imagines a grand adventure for his own book, one involving “many editions” and sales of thirty thousand copies in five years. An analysis of English Short Title Catalogue records for the period 1755–​60 can begin to suggest just how fantastical these dreams are.21 Of the somewhat more than 17,500 records from this period, only around 15 percent include a determinate edition statement of any sort. (While edition statements are not always veracious, I don’t believe false ones are so endemic as to counter the broad pattern I am describing.) About 5 percent of total records announce themselves to be the second edition; less than 3 percent are said to be the third edition; less than 2 percent are said to be the fourth edition. Taken all together, the records said to belong to the fifth edition or higher amount to just over 5 percent of the total—​less than the number of second edition records. The number of titles published in this five-​year span that claim to be in even a second edition, then, is fairly small, and the number of titles to go through “many editions” within five years of their first appearance is much smaller still. Though it was not impossible for a book to meet with the kind of demand for repeated editions that the author imagines, it was very rare. Still more implausible is his fantasy of the number of copies that will sell. Though edition sizes could vary considerably, the odds of any book selling 30,000 copies in five years would have been quite low. As James Raven notes, a typical edition might have run to 750 copies (some would have been larger, but then some “light fare,” including novels, could appear in smaller editions). While certain classes of books for which there was a large and steady demand could, indeed, command large editions, these were confined almost entirely to religious and educational texts.22 Four editions of Frances Burney’s Evelina appeared between 1778 and 1779, but these editions comprised, all told, 2,800 copies (800, 500, 500, and 1,000 copies, respectively). By contrast, the sixth edition of Johnson’s abridged Dictionary in octavo, also published in 1778, comprised 5,000 copies (78 percent more than Evelina’s four editions combined). This is not to diminish the phenomenon of Evelina—​it was, legitimately, a “runaway success,” as Raven notes—​but 21 

In the discussion that follows, I am drawing on a copy of ESTC data that I received in 2010. A search of the live catalog would surely yield different results today, but would probably not substantively alter the patterns described. For necessary caveats on bibliometric analysis using ESTC records, see Stephen Karian, “The Limitations and Possibilities of the ESTC,” The Age of Johnson 21 (2011), 283–​97; James May, “Who Will Edit the ESTC? (And Have You Checked OCLC Lately?),” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 12, nos. 3–​ 4 (2001), 288–​ 304; and Stephen Tabor, “ESTC and the Bibliographical Community,” The Library 8, no. 4 (December 2007), 367–​86. 22  James Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 304.

290   Benjamin Pauley to place it in perspective: even an immensely popular novel was dwarfed in scale by a reliable seller of a reference book. It is also worth bearing in mind that each of the first five editions of Johnson’s abridged Dictionary (in 1756, 1760, 1766, 1770, and 1773) had also comprised 5,000 copies each. Johnson’s abridged Dictionary, then, provides an example of a work that did sell 30,000 copies—​but took more than twenty years to do it.23 In dreaming of a rapid series of editions and a huge volume of sales, then, the letter writer of Idler 55 imagines something vanishingly improbable: that his natural history of an English county will somehow combine the popularity of a bestselling novel with the ubiquity of a standard reference work.

Booksellers’ Bargains If the letter writer’s visions of blockbuster bestsellerdom seem wildly inflated, his dreams of wealth from that sale seem still more unlikely, given what we know about the business of publishing. A would-​be author who thinks he’s going to sell 30,000 copies in five years is naive. But a would-​be author who thinks he’s going to make £15,000 from the sale of 30,000 copies is simply delusional. The author’s calculation seems straightforward enough: he appears to imagine earning ten shillings for every book sold. It is true that a prestigious, large-​format scientific work could sell for a guinea.24 It is also not unreasonable for the author to imagine dividing the profits with his bookseller—​that was Robert Dodsley’s counteroffer to Thomas Percy when he demurred at Percy’s initial request of 100 guineas for his three-​ volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. This was a proposal, Johnson reassured Percy, that was “moderately good, that is, not so good as might be hoped, nor so bad as might be feared.”25 (In the event, the Dodsleys did eventually agree to Percy’s original proposal, and purchased the copy from him without a profit-​sharing arrangement.) In imagining that he could earn £15,000, however, the would-​be author would seem to be counting on getting nearly half of the retail price of every copy sold, neglecting to deduct the costs of manufacturing, distributing, and marketing his book. Questions of “the circulation of Books,” Johnson suggests in a 1776 letter to Dr. Nathan Wetherell, are ones “which perhaps every man has not had opportunity of knowing and which those who know it, do not perhaps always distinctly consider.” But they are matters which cannot be neglected, as Johnson patiently but bluntly explained to Wetherell, who, as master of University College, Oxford, was anxious about the slow

23 On Evelina, see Raven, Business of Books, 306. For the editions of Johnson’s abridged Dictionary, see J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), vol. i, 486–​99. 24  Alice Walters, “Scientific and Medical Books, 1695–​1780,” in Suarez and Turner, eds., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. V, 826. 25  Johnson to Thomas Percy, October 4, 1760, in Letters, vol. i, 191.

Authorship   291 return on sales of Clarendon’s History (the profits of which had been bequeathed for the construction of a riding school). The book’s sales were depressed, Johnson observes, by the refusal of the university’s press to sell its books to the London trade at a sufficient discount to allow for the expected 30–​35 percent profits at each stage of the books’ progress to the final purchaser: “for every book which costs the last buyer twenty shillings we must charge Mr. Cadel with something less than fourteen.”26 When the costs of production (including paper, typesetting, and printing) are reckoned in, it is less clear that there was ten shillings total profit to be had, even from a guinea book, let alone ten shillings for the author. But a more usual arrangement between author and bookseller was, in any case, for the author to receive either a lump sum for the copyright or a rate per sheet. Alice Walters’s discussion of scientific books in the first half of the long eighteenth century provides valuable context for seeing how unreasonable the letter writer of Idler 55 is in his expectations. As Walters notes, most authors of scientific texts supported themselves by an occupation or profession, or by lectures or teaching. The most important benefit of publishing their works was not financial, but lay in enhanced reputation and improved connections in the learned world. Walters notes that Henry Baker’s agreement with Robert Dodsley for the 1742 publication of The Microscope Made Easy brought him one guinea per sheet, plus twenty copies of the book; if a second edition were printed within two years of the first, Baker would receive another half guinea per sheet. All told, Walker estimates, Baker earned perhaps £35 for the first edition of the work and another £11 for the second, but the success of the work meant that Baker enjoyed more favorable terms for his second and third books, earning two and perhaps three guineas per sheet for them, respectively.27 In dreaming of £15,000 from the sales of his book, then, the letter writer of Idler 55 is thinking of sums that are simply far grander than any author could reasonably expect. It is a sum nearly three times what Johnson calculates Pope to have earned from the subscription edition of the Iliad (and the case of Pope’s Iliad is so memorable precisely because it is so exceptional), and it is orders of magnitude greater than more typical arrangements like Baker’s for The Microscope Made Easy or Percy’s for the Reliques.

Publishing by Subscription Johnson seems generally to have trusted booksellers’ commercial instincts, but if the letter writer of Idler 55 were truly bent on publication, he need not take their rejection as the final word. There were a number of alternatives to the bookseller’s speculative purchase of the copyright in a work, none of which the letter writer of Idler 55 seems

26  27 

Johnson to Dr. Nathan Wetherell, March 12, 1776, in Letters, vol. ii, 306–​8. Walters, “Scientific and Medical Books,” 821–​2.

292   Benjamin Pauley to take seriously. The first of these is publication by subscription, in which the author issued proposals for a work and sought pre-​publication commitments to purchase from readers, generally collecting some or even all of the cost of the book up front. Subscribers were generally acknowledged in printed lists included in the volumes as issued, so subscribing to a work could serve not only as a form of patronage but also as a marker of status or of cultural or ideological affinity. The indignation that the letter writer of Idler 55 expresses at having been mistaken by a noble earl for an author seeking subscriptions may imply that to publish by subscription could appear less than entirely reputable, as Thomas Lockwood suggests seems to have been the case as early as the 1720s.28 But subscription publication could be an attractive arrangement for authors and booksellers alike: it could produce more income for the author than he or she could generally expect from selling his or her copyright to a bookseller, and collecting subscriptions in advance could underwrite the costs of production for a book, hedging the bookseller’s risk. The would-​be author of Idler 55 takes exception to a printer’s proposal to give him 200 copies of his book to sell for his own benefit if he can raise a subscription for 500 copies, but this would not have been a bad deal for an unknown and unproven author. The printer, it is true, proposes to keep the proceeds from 300 of the copies for himself, but that amount must cover the costs of production and generate an acceptable profit. The offer of 200 books in lieu of cash need not seem entirely unreasonable when we recall that, in his account of Pope’s bargain with Lintot for the publication of the Iliad, Johnson makes clear that the value of the books was more than three times greater than the sum Lintot paid as copy money. Though there were alluring examples of lucrative subscriptions, like that for Pope’s Iliad and Prior’s 1718 Poems on Several Occasions (which Johnson says earned him £4,000), a subscription was not guaranteed success.29 Johnson had to counsel Charlotte Lennox in patience as she waited to see whether subscriptions would be forthcoming for an edition of her works in 1775. He acknowledges the anxiety of waiting, but insists that too much eagerness in pursuit of subscribers is self-​defeating. Johnson seems to have found Lennox’s requests for her friends to use their interest to find subscribers too importunate, for he asks her to consider his own case: “Among those whom I know how many are there to whom I should be welcome if I asked them for a Guinea?”30 Despite Johnson’s reassurances that Lennox could rely on her acknowledged abilities to open the way for her, the proposed subscription edition of Lennox’s works never appeared. Johnson had first-​hand knowledge of such anxieties from his experience with his edition of Shakespeare. There is a certain awkwardness in his letter to his old friend Edmund Hector, when, after an initial apology for a long-​lapsed correspondence, Johnson enters into his real occasion for writing: 28  Thomas Lockwood, “Subscription-​Hunters and Their Prey,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 121–​35. 29  For Johnson’s account of the subscription edition of Prior’s poems, see Yale Works, vol. xxii, 714. 30  Johnson to Charlotte Lennox, May 2, 1775, in Letters, vol. ii, 201.

Authorship   293 It is not in mere civility that I write now to you but to inform you that I have undertaken a new Edition of Shakespeare, and that the profits of it are to arise from a Subscription. I therefore solicite the interest of all my friends, and believe myself sure of yours without Solicitation . . . Be so kind as to mention my undertaking to any other friends that I may have in your part of the kingdom, the activity of a few solicitors may produce great advantages to me.31

Though Johnson is forthright enough in his request to Hector, there is always a danger of putting Hector in the same position that Charlotte Lennox was to put Johnson in 1775. Johnson’s Shakespeare edition was successful, selling nearly a thousand copies (though he didn’t experience it as a windfall, since the money “came in small portions, and departed in the same manner”).32 But that outcome was hardly guaranteed. Johnson seems to have been alert to the ways that subscription publishing could, at times, fit uneasily alongside the book trade’s usual practices. To the extent that subscription minimized or bypassed booksellers’ judgments of a title’s salability, it allowed books to be published that might not otherwise have been. This could be a good thing, enabling the publication of important or meritorious works that might not have appealed to broad audiences. As Johnson’s letter to James Boswell concerning William Shaw’s Analysis of the Galic Language suggests, however, freeing a book from the bookseller’s commercial judgment could also lead to anomalies: “The book is very little, but Mr. Shaw has been persuaded by his friends to set it at half a guinea, though I had advised only a crown, and thought myself liberal . . . You must ask no poor man, because the price is really too high. Yet such a work deserves patronage.”33 Though Shaw’s work is deserving, the author, left to his own devices on pricing, has broken what Johnson implies is a recognizable norm: a book of this size (180 pages in quarto, or 22.5 sheets) simply should not cost half a guinea. Johnson’s discussion of Pope’s subscription issue of the Iliad suggests that he may have suspected that booksellers sometimes found subscription editions actively contrary to their own interests. Pope’s contract with Lintot reserved the quarto format for the subscription issue of the book: while Lintot could issue the text in other formats, the quarto format would always be a marker that a particular copy was purchased as part of the initial subscription. As Johnson explains, Lintot printed additional copies in both small and large folio at the same time the subscription copies were produced. In Johnson’s account, Lintot’s sale of the folio issues seems somewhat underhanded: “Lintot impressed the same pages upon a small folio, and paper perhaps a little thinner; and sold exactly at half the price, for half a guinea each volume, books so little inferior to the quartos, that, by a fraud of trade, those folios, being afterwards shortened by cutting away the top and bottom, were sold as copies printed for the subscribers” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1067). As Johnson tells it, Pope’s subscription edition had to compete with 31 

Johnson to Edmund Hector, October 7, 1756, in Letters, vol. i, 142. George Steevens, “Johnsoniana,” The European Magazine and London Review (January 1785), 53. 33  Johnson to James Boswell, March 11, 1777, in Letters, vol. iii, 12. See also Life, vol. iii, 107. 32 

294   Benjamin Pauley the edition that Lintot had produced for his own benefit, which undercut the subscription issue on price by a wide margin. This impression is heightened by the way that the passage seems to attribute the “fraud of trade” to Lintot when, in fact, it was Thomas Osborne who bought up small folio copies and trimmed them so as to pass for subscription quartos, as Johnson’s discussion of Osborne’s clashes with Pope suggests he knew. (Nichols would later take pains to correct what he considered Johnson’s unjust imputation against Lintot.)34 Perhaps Johnson misunderstood his sources, or perhaps he was alert to the possibility of a bookseller undermining an author’s subscription because of the reports he had heard of his own Shakespeare edition being sold at a discount while the subscription was still fresh.35 Whatever the case, his suspicions of duplicity on Lintot’s part point to a sense that subscription publication was in some measure at odds with the booksellers’ usual practice.

Publishing for the Author The letter writer of Idler 55 touches on a final possibility for publication when he says, at the end of his letter, “I sometimes resolve to print my book at my own expence, and, like the Sibyl, double the price.” Though A. S. Collins cites contemporary complaints from authors who sought to publish their works without selling the copyright to booksellers, Keith Maslen notes that printing for the author was not uncommon, particularly in the first half of the century, and especially for certain classes of books, scientific works among them. J. A. Downie pushes the matter still further, suggesting that, “If authors really wanted to see their work in print, then the best way for them to achieve their objective . . . would have been to publish at [their] own risk.”36 Though he is, again, an exceptional case, Pope, in his later career essentially became his own bookseller, overseeing the printing and publication of his books, himself.37 Printing for themselves could lead to greater rewards for authors than they could gain by selling their copy to a bookseller, as Downie illustrates with the cases of Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. But authors who printed for themselves also assumed the risks of publication—​if they avoided booksellers’ gatekeeping, they also forfeited the benefit of their professional expertise and connections. Late in life, Johnson found himself in the uncomfortable position of offering advice to Frances Reynolds on the manuscript of her Enquiry concerning the Principles of Taste.

34 

See Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii, 169. See Johnson to Jacob Tonson, October 19, 1765, in Letters, vol. i, 258. 36  Keith Maslen, “Printing for the Author: From the Bowyer Printing Ledgers, 1710–​1775,” The Library 27, no. 4 (December 1972), 309; J. A. Downie, “Printing for the Author in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Sandro Jung, ed., British Literature and Print Culture (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 61. 37  David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 102–​52. 35 

Authorship   295 Though he offered general encouragement and praise on at least two drafts, he did not think the work publishable: “Your work is full of very penetrating meditation, and very forcible sentiments . . . but I cannot think of any profit from it; it seems not born to be popular . . . If a Bookseller would buy it at all, as it must be published without a name, he would give nothing for it worth your acceptance.”38 Nevertheless, Reynolds persisted and, setting his own opinion aside, Johnson consulted with Edmund Allen on the cost of printing the work. For £6 10s., Johnson proposed, Reynolds might cause 250 copies to be printed “and without any name [try] the sale, which may be secretly done. You would then see the opinion of the publick without hazard.” Johnson seems relieved, however, to hear that Reynolds had laid aside thoughts of publishing.39 After Johnson’s death, though, Reynolds did have an edition of 250 copies printed by William Baker and John W. Galabin, with a dedication to Elizabeth Montagu. James L. Clifford interprets Montagu’s “wordy and diffuse” response to the work as a clear signal that she did not intend to assist in its dissemination. A letter of July 12, 1785 from Reynolds to Montagu suggests the awkwardness of Reynolds’s position in the face of her patroness’s demurral: I never did entertain any desire to publish it, tho I might to sell it. And my desire of printing it, originated from a motive which tho’ vain I allow, is an natural vanity I wishd to leave behind me a respectable memorial of my existence, which I then flatterd myself this would be. Ten impressions or twenty at the most, were all I wishd to have taken off. Why I had so many as 250 was because Dr. Johnson advised me to print that number, and to sell them, to stand the sale of them was his expression.40

Reynolds’s disavowal of a desire to “publish” her work may seem at odds with her ready admission of a desire to “print” and even to “sell” it. But this distinction highlights the shifting meaning of “publish” and “publisher” in the eighteenth century: a “publisher,” in earlier usage, wasn’t the primary financier of a book (who purchased authors’ copyrights and contracted with printers for the production of books), but rather the person who issued the book to the public at retail.41 Reynolds’s insistence that she didn’t desire to “publish” her work implies that she didn’t mean it for public sale. It is possible that Reynolds is being disingenuous, in an attempt to soothe Montagu. It is also possible that Johnson misunderstood Reynolds’s desires and gave her advice predicated on a model of authorship and publication that she did not share. Whatever the case, four years later Reynolds sought not simply to print but also to “publish” her 38 

Johnson to Frances Reynolds, April 8, 1782, in Letters, vol. iv, 30–​1. Johnson to Frances Reynolds, April 30, 1784, in Letters, vol. iv, 323; Johnson to Frances Reynolds, May 28, 1784, in Letters, vol. iv, 327. 40  Frances Reynolds to Elizabeth Montagu, July 12, 1785, quoted in Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Taste, ed. James L. Clifford (Los Angeles, CA: Augustan Reprint Society, 1951), iv. 41  See Michael Treadwell, “London Trade Publishers, 1675–​1750,” The Library, 6th series, 4, no. 2 (June 1982), 99–​134. 39 

296   Benjamin Pauley work. Reynolds does not seem to have sold the copy to a bookseller (though a letter to Montagu of April 15, 1788 indicates she considered the possibility) but did cause the work to be reprinted by John Smeeton in 1789.42 In a letter to Montagu of February 5 of that year, Reynolds reports her mixed success. She had sent “the whole impression to Mr. [John] N[o]‌urse in the Strand,” but eventually heard from Nourse’s brother, Charles, that John Nourse was dead, and that he, himself, knew nothing about the matter. Reynolds took Nourse’s vague reply as an indication that he had no intention of publishing (that is, selling) her work.43 Rebuffed by Nourse, Reynolds had to find other suitable arrangements for the sale of her books, and this was apparently not entirely straightforward. Nourse had referred her intermediary, James Northcote, to “Mr. [Samuel] Bladen in Paternoster Row,” but Reynolds seems to have considered the address a poor recommendation and directed Northcote not to enter into any arrangement with him. Northcote reported that Robert Faulder would be willing to sell the work from his shop in New Bond Street for 18d., but Reynolds insisted that she would not have the book sold at less than 2s. The evidence of what actually happened is equivocal: the book is listed at 1s. 6d. in an indulgent review in the General Magazine and Impartial Review for July 1789; but is listed for 2s. in a withering one in the Monthly Review for October 1790. It was advertised as late as December 10, 1790 in the World, priced at 2s. and said “To be had of Mr. Jefferys, Pall Mall; Mr. Bell, Strand, and Mr. Kirby, Stafford-​street, Piccadilly.” As the adventure of Reynolds’s book illustrates, having a book printed was one thing, but having a book published quite another. Vending her book to the public was not a straightforward matter for Reynolds. She was clearly not indifferent to where and by whom her book was sold, but neither could she simply dictate terms to a publisher. By causing her work to be printed herself, Reynolds bypassed the question of whether a bookseller might find his account in purchasing her copyright, but also lost whatever advantage a bookseller’s connections might have brought in the distribution and sale of her work.

Conclusion The manuscript of Idler 55 and Pope’s carefully executed edition of the Iliad have served in this discussion as two poles for thinking about the production of books in the eighteenth century, but of course the reality was a varied continuum, as the many other books touched on in the course of the discussion will, I hope, have suggested. It is not quite right to say that writing and publishing were inseparable for Johnson—​Boswell notes

42  Frances Reynolds to Elizabeth Montagu, April 15, 1788, in Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp, “A Blue-​Stocking Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Reynolds in the Princeton Collection,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 41, no. 3 (Spring 1980), 203. 43  Frances Reynolds to Elizabeth Montagu, February 4, 1789, reproduced in Reginald Blunt, ed., Mrs. Montagu, “Queen of the Blues,” Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), vol. ii, 232–​3.

Authorship   297 his frequent pronouncements on the value of keeping a journal “for a man’s own use,” though it was advice Johnson could never follow, himself.44 But Johnson seems always to have thought about writing meant for the public in terms of its eventual printed form. In turning from the rehearsal of the life of the Earl of Roscommon to the critical appraisal of his works, Johnson observes dismissively, “Who would not, after the perusal of this character, be surprised to find that all the proofs of this genius, and knowledge and judgement are not sufficient to form a single book, or to appear otherwise than in conjunction with the works of some other writer of the same petty size?” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 247). In his preface to the Dictionary, Johnson had insisted that “The chief glory of every people arises from its authours” (vol. xviii, 109). Yet Johnson was also acutely aware that the works of authors are necessarily embodied in books, and (to recall the passing remark from Piozzi with which I began) his view of literary history was, in large measure, a history of books and their adventures.

Further Reading Collins, A. S. Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being a Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publisher and Public, 1726–​1780. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929. Fleeman, J. D. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Foxon, David. Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade, edited by James McLaverty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Griffin, Dustin. Literary Patronage in England, 1650–​1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Lipking, Lawrence. Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Lockwood, Thomas. “Subscription-​Hunters and Their Prey.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 121–​35. Lynch, Jack. “Generous Liberal-​Minded Men: Booksellers and Poetic Careers in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 93–​108. Maruca, Lisa. The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–​1760. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007. Maslen, Keith, and John Lancaster, eds. The Bowyer Ledgers. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1991. Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Suarez, Michael F., S.J., and Michael L. Turner, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V: 1695–​1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Treadwell, Michael. “London Trade Publishers 1675–​1750.” The Library 6, 4, no. 2 (1982): 99–​134.

44 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 177; vol. ii, 217.

Chapter 17

L anguag e Lynda Mugglestone

“It may be reasonably imagined, that what is so much in the power of men as language, will very often be capriciously conducted,” Johnson wrote in 1747 in his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 40–​1). Language is seen as variable, subject to processes of change informed by the pull of nations as well as individuals. “Power” is at the heart of what Johnson was formally to undertake, a means by which his projected Dictionary of the English Language (commissioned by a consortium of booksellers in the previous year and eventually published in 1755) was to impose a stable and invariant state upon the national tongue. “It is hoped, that our language will be more fixed, and better established when the publick is favoured with a new dictionary, undertaken with that view,” as advertising in 1749 declared.1 Johnson’s identity as language reformer remains a common element in popular apprehensions of his work on language and lexicography, as do features such as his insularity and conservatism, as well as his resistance to Scottish and French. Yet, as this chapter will explore, Johnson can also be seen as a writer who explicitly resists reform, stressing instead the limits of human power to constrain the form or use of words, as well as one whose work on language engages with change, variation, and evidential process in hitherto unprecedented ways. His continued commitment to learning a range of languages sits uneasily against popular stereotypes of linguistic xenophobia, as does his interest in processes of naturalization. Other aspects of his thinking about language practice led to an illuminating engagement with, say, the distinctive features of registers such as advertising or news (see, e.g., Yale Works, vol. ii, 125–​6), as well as a detailed probing of the norms which reference books should represent. The fact that Johnson is the first English dictionary-​maker to use women’s writing as an authority for wider use should also be given its due—​not least given previous tendencies to make women the recipients rather than agents of lexicographical advice. What, courtesy of received

1 

W. S., “The Signification of Words Now Varied,” Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (1749), 65–​6.

Language   299 wisdom, we might “reasonably imagine” about Johnson’s engagement with language can, at times, therefore reveal its own forms of “capricious” response.

Rethinking Johnsonese Johnson’s own language is a useful starting point. From an early date, this has prompted received wisdom of its own. Johnson was one of the few writers in the first edition of the OED whose language gained a distinctive appellation, but Johnsonese was by no means complimentary.2 The suffix -​ese, states the OED, is used in “designating the diction of certain authors who are accused of writing in a dialect of their own invention; e.g. Johnsonese.”3 The presence of “excessively Latinate words,” “bombastic words and expressions,” and an “inflated, stilted, or pompous style” have all been identified as relevant features. Paradoxically, while Johnson is made responsible for representing English in his Dictionary, his own language is often perceived as both anomalous and unrepresentative, removed—​in idiom and expression—​from the general currents of English use. “Someone was asking me to go hear Jackson the famous Scholar preach . . . [but] he really uses such difficult Language, & preaches in so peculiar a Style that I question a Lady’s understanding him—​Oh never fear . . . said I, I live with Mr Johnson,” Hester Thrale recounts in her diary.4 Other anecdotes she records in her Thraliana provide ample support. Discussing “the Knowledge of Books” alongside the need to look “on Life likewise with an observant Eye,” Johnson, as Thrale records, added “much may indeed be swallowed, but much must be worked off; there are fæculancies which should subside, and Froth that should be scummed before the Wine can become fit for Drinking” (Thraliana, vol. i, 171). Feculency: “Lees; . . . sediment; dregs,” Johnson’s Dictionary explained. Anfractuosity (a state characterized by the prevalence of winding passages as in a maze), which Johnson is reported to have used in discussing portraiture with Bennet Langton in 1780, provides a similar example: “Among the anfractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may not be one, that there is a superstition reluctance to sit for a picture” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 4).5

2  See OED Online, s.v. Johnsonese, n. and adj., December 2018. Web. January 12, 2019. The entry was first published in 1901, as part of the fascicle Jew–​Jywel, which made up OED1 (1884–​1928). See also Johnsonian adj., defined as “a style of English abounding in words derived or made up from Latin, such as that of Dr. Johnson.” 3 See OED Online, s.v. -​ese, suffix. Accessed January 12, 2019 OED recommend access dates. Entries frequently change. 4  Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–​1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. i, 416. YES 5 Johnson’s Dictionary provides entries for anfractuous, anfractuousness, and anfracture, but not anfractuosity. As the OED confirms, however, the latter has been used in English since 1596. See OED Online, s.v. anfractuosity n. Accessed January 13, 2019. See previous comment.

300   Lynda Mugglestone As this indicates, Johnson’s interest in words was striking in its breadth and depth, as well as in the semantic specificities he could deploy. “Though he was accused of using big Words, it was only when little ones would not express his meaning as clearly, or when the Elevation of the thought would have been disgraced by a Dress less superb,” as Thrale affirms. Macaulay likewise describes Johnson turning English into “Johnsonese” in ways which suggest the conscious styling of identity and language—​shaping a form of discourse appropriate for the performance of “Dictionary Johnson” or “Mr. Rambler.”6 “I believe that not one person in a hundred will understand this word,” Lord Chesterfield commented on tralatitious (“metaphorical”), which he encountered when reading the draft text of Johnson’s Plan for his Dictionary (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 436). Words, as well as syntax, can be a form of virtuoso display. Johnson’s private writing—​in script and not print, and particularly in his diary, annals, and personal letters—​conversely reveals a very different model of “Johnsonese,” characterized by simplicity and directness, as well as marked variabilities in spelling, form, and sentence. If, for modern sociolinguists, the endeavor to obviate the “observer’s paradox” and secure evidence on natural linguistic performance has proved a highly valuable feature, it is private texts of this kind, as Elpass contends, that provide useful equivalents in earlier periods.7 They offer, too, as Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade stresses, “a very different perspective on the language from that customarily taken in histories of English.”8 As a result, if we cannot recover Johnson’s actual voice, scrutiny of his linguistic practice in texts that are unmediated by print, and written for private rather than public communication, can provide a number of insights into ordinary English in Johnson’s hands. Johnson’s diary fragments are marked by their intimacy, documenting his “fluctuating and tormented state of mind,” as well as his daily activities (Yale Works, vol. i, p. xi). Yet they contain similarly intimate glimpses of his language, replete with revisions, informal punctuation and syntax, and other interesting “features of immediacy.”9 Johnson’s lexical precision remains in evidence. Visible, too, however, are vernacular spellings such as broath, cloath, Fryday, Frier (rather than Friar), and handkercheif, hindred (rather than hindered), and diner (alongside dinner). Equally characteristic are forms with single rather than double –​ll (Farewel; Boswel), and vice-​versa (ballanced, Pellican). Johnson’s linguistic practices demonstrate informal standard English in action. Johnson’s flexible capitalization (“Dined on Herrings and potatoes”; “I made punch for Myself and 6  Macaulay’s

highly critical review of John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson appeared in the Edinburgh Review 56 (1831), 1–​38. His comments are based on the disparities he observed between Johnson’s language in his letters to Thrale while journeying in the Western Islands, and the subsequent publication of his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1775. 7  Stephan Elspass, “The Use of Private Letters and Diaries in Sociolinguistic Investigation,” in Juan Michael Hernandez-​ Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-​ Silvestre, eds., The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 156–​69. 8 Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade, “English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition,” in Lynda Mugglestone, ed., The Oxford History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 301. 9  Elspass, “Private Letters,” 157–​8.

Language   301 my servant”) can also be included under this head, as can a range of morphological variations (“I waked”; “I woke”; “my self ” and “myself ”; “I had eat”; “Eat [ate] nothing”). Given prevalent stereotypes about “Johnsonese,” the informality, and simplicity, of his syntax is striking (“I wrote letters for Mrs. Desmoulins, then went to Streatham and had many stops. At night I took wine, and did not sleep well”; “His garden was neat, he gave me grapes”; “The king fed himself with his left hand as we”). Johnson’s correspondence confirms similar patterns. His use of staid (rather than stayed), or pamflet rather than pamphlet, and his preference for en-​versus in-​(encrease) or, say, meer (mere) and atchievement, alongside forms such as poyson, barel, or jackall (or, conversely, stalion) confirm a set of orthographical and morphological variables which take us much closer to Johnson’s “real” language behavior and, indeed, the practices of “real” eighteenth-​century English (even among highly educated users). Epistolary spelling (and punctuation) of this kind illustrate different aspects of language practice in which standard English can assume different forms depending on medium and in response to the constraints of private or public addressees. It is important to remember that modern editorial emendation often elides the full impression of Johnson’s practice in this respect. Full stops commonly replace Johnson’s own more informal commas and dashes, or are added where Johnson omitted them in ways which clearly change Johnson’s own shaping of both sentence and text.10 Johnson’s own use of scribal conventions such as superscript contractions likewise typically disappear. His tolerance of—​and participation in—​these patterns of variability before, during, and after his work on English lexicography nevertheless presents other forms of resistance and dissent in relation to his popular configuration as dictator in the world of words, bent on fixing form and meaning in determined immutability. Received wisdom, as Johnson stressed, always benefits from renewed consideration, a means by which we might “endeavour to see things as they are,” even if, in the process, familiar preconceptions might be displaced (Johnson to Bennet Langton, September 21, 1758, in Letters, vol. i, 167). The fact that other spellings take us closer to Johnson’s own speech can moreover be used to explore additional aspects of his linguistic identity. “Much less ought our written language to comply with the corruptions of oral utterance,” Johnson famously declared in the ‘Preface’ to the Dictionary (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 78). Nevertheless, instances in which “oral utterance” and “written language” align are of marked interest. Occasional forms such as stocken (stocking) or an half (rather than a half) or whould (would) suggest, for instance, corresponding variabilities in Johnson’s use of [in]/​[iŋ] and [h]‌, as well as in [w]/​[hw]. These certainly typify features of what Johnson proclaimed the “purer English” of Lichfield, the city of his birth, while further confirming his vernacular and local allegiance.11 They indicate features, too, which widely exercised prescriptive sensibilities about speech in the second half of the eighteenth century, as in

10 See Letters, vol. i, xx. 11 

On Johnson as regional speaker, see Lynda Mugglestone, “ ‘Speaking Selves’: Johnson, Boswell, and the Problem of Spoken English,” Transactions of the Johnson Society (2018), 23–​38.

302   Lynda Mugglestone the work of the lexicographers John Walker and Thomas Sheridan.12 The pronouncing dictionary might have been presented as a new subgenre in lexicography, but it was firmly dismissed by Johnson (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 161). His refusal to add normative transcriptions for speech in revising his own Dictionary for the fourth edition (1773) is equally telling. Johnson’s well-​known deafness in one ear could, of course, be part of the resistance he expressed, but his acuity in attesting other aspects of informal variation is widely apparent (see, e.g., his comments on the dissyllabic rather than trisyllabic pronunciations of words such as reverend, generous, and Chancellor) that, again contrary to the written form, remained common (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 449). Similar observations on spoken variation appear across the Dictionary, informing readers that, for example, clothes is “Pronounced clo’s” or benign as benine.

Reform It is Johnson’s writings on language which nevertheless conventionally take center stage. He worked, Burchfield notes, in a period in which “absolutist views on linguistic correctness” were a unifying force.13 That English was in need of forcible regulation was, as such, a further aspect of received wisdom, iterated alike in writers such as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison. “I see no absolute Necessity why any Language should be perpetually changing,” Swift famously declared.14 Ephraim Chambers, in his Cyclopædia, had described himself as heir to a “large patrimony” in which the legacies of previous lexicographers were plain,15 but Johnson’s “patrimony” was distinctively prescriptive, informed by the specific remit of the booksellers who initiated and funded the Dictionary project, and by comparative perspectives in which the continued absence of an English academy (and the “règles certains” such as the Académie Française promised for French) generated a pervasive sense of deficit or “want.” A normative Dictionary such as Johnson was to provide was, as the bookseller Robert Dodsley affirmed, “a Work of the greatest Importance” and one which “of all others we most want.”16 12  See,

e.g., Thraliana, vol. i, 329. Sheridan’s Dictionary of the English Language did not appear until 1780 but Johnson was aware long before of Sheridan’s plans to introduce a system of numerical diacritics and respellings by which pronunciation would be transcribed (and intentionally standardized) for each headword. 13 Robert Burchfield, “The Point of Severance: British and American English,” in Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 118. 14  Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue: In a letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain (London, 1712), 16. 15  Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London, 1728), vol. i, p. ii. 16 [Robert Dodsley], “Literary Memoirs: The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language,” The Museum; or, The Literary and Historical Register 3 (1747), 389.

Language   303 A reformer, Johnson’s Dictionary specifies, is “One who makes a change for the better; an amender.” A citation from his reading of the philosopher John Locke, used in illustration of reform v., indicates, however, the potential for different perspectives. “One cannot attempt the perfect reforming the languages of the world, without rendering himself ridiculous,” Locke warned. To reform might be defined, in the Dictionary, as “to change from worse to better,” but the eventual outcome can, as here, already be placed in doubt. Johnson was, of course, charged only with reforming a single language. Nevertheless, while a widespread rhetoric of reform was in existence by the middle of the eighteenth century, it remained markedly unspecific on the pragmatics by which this was to be achieved. Defoe and Swift, for example, shared not only a conviction that immutability and invariance were desirable but also that “some method” should be conceived by which this state of English is brought to pass. Johnson’s thinking on “method,” and the pragmatic challenges which an imposed norm presents in relation to usage remains one of his distinctive contributions to work on language in the eighteenth century. Even in his preliminary drafting of the Plan of the dictionary, he makes plain the dichotomy between what one might desire and that which can, conversely, be achieved in terms of language. Immutability was, as such, already consigned to what he described as the illusory “Phantoms of Desire” which, like the will o’ the wisp, can tempt the writer on language to follow a particular course before fading into nothing. The “Shackles of Lexicography,” by which the dictionary-​maker is bound, are instead described as constraining ventures of this kind (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 461), enforcing a commitment to evidence and observation as the basis of knowledge—and in ways which already resonate with Johnson’s interest in scientific method as extolled in his earlier “Life of Boerhaave.”17 Johnson defined lexicographer in the finished text of 1755 as a “harmless drudge,” but the dictionary-​maker’s stated role as the “slave of science [knowledge]” that he identified in the Plan is arguably more revealing (Yale Works vol. xviii, 73). Both, however, are tropes in which individual powerlessness, rather than power, remain conspicuous. Johnson’s attitudes, and praxis, in relation to his stated obligation to fix English spelling can be taken as a useful test case. “Without a demand for linguistic authority, Johnson would not have been hired, and he knew what his readers wanted. For instance, they urgently wanted standard spelling,” writes Lipking.18 Chesterfield’s manuscript emendations to Johnson’s “Fair Copy” of the Plan had, for example, emphasized its “great uncertainty among our great writers” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 442–​3). Johnson’s original convictions about the “settled propriety” of spelling (in ways which had accommodated existing variation) were, as a result, to be subject to textual emendations of their own. In the resulting processes of revision, English spelling was left open, at least in principle, to prescriptive

17  Samuel Johnson, Early Biographical Writings of Dr. Johnson, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1973), 25–​35. 18  Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 134.

304   Lynda Mugglestone “adjustment.”19 Even so, Johnson’s subsequent retreat from wholesale change in terms of practical lexicography is plain. Spelling reformers of the past, such as Alexander Gil (1565–​1635) or Sir Thomas Smith (1513–​7 7), are, for Johnson, adduced as wholly negative exemplars whose efforts at linguistic remediation have had no real-​world effect (vol. xviii, 295–​6). Johnson likewise makes plain his resolve not to be included among those who, in their attempted “reformation of our orthography . . . take pleasure in departing from custom,” and “think alteration desirable for its own sake” (vol. xviii, 36). “I suppose,” he adds with self-​evident skepticism, “they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.” Problematic, too, as Johnson indicates, are the pragmatics of imposed change. “What advantage would a new orthography procure equivalent to the confusion and perplexity of such an alteration?” he demands. The difficulty of getting an entire “nation” to change its “habits” is addressed to similar effect. Convictions that Johnson “fixed” English spelling remain commonplace. The Dictionary as text required each form to be registered by means of a headword (which, for Johnson, also serves to indicate the position of stress), hence CHA′NCEL. However, Johnson also remains closely attentive to coexisting patterns of variation and use while opportunities for active reform can be resisted. Johnson might, as under beggar, adduce greater propriety in its reformation as “begger” but “common orthography,” he states, must preclude willed intervention of this kind. Likewise, if griffon “should rather be written gryfon, or gryphon,” it is, he clarifies, nevertheless “generally written griffon.” Ideal and actuality are regularly opposed. “This word and oddness, should, I think, be written with one d; but the writers almost all combine against it,” as Johnson states to similar effect under oddly. Against expected models of dictatorship, we are, in terms of spelling and its potential reform, thereby returned to far more democratic models in which variation is actively scrutinized, and “suffrage” (Johnson’s “vote; voice given in a controverted point”) is instead given to the reader. Headwords indicate Johnson’s “preference” (as for yew against the “often written” eugh, or sithe against scythe). Nevertheless, in the illustrative citations within each entry, Johnson leaves “to every authour his own practice unmolested, that the reader may balance suffrages, and judge between us” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 77). Sithe, as Johnson’s preferred form, is, as he points out, based on considerations of simplicity as well as etymology. Yet the fact that “this word is very variously written” is also demonstrated. Accompanying citations document scythe in the print texts of Thomson, Pope, and Shakespeare, alongside sythe in Swift. When readers “vote,” their judgment is, as a result, to be fully informed by the authority of evidence, while the autocracy that the dictionary-​maker might claim is effectively diminished. Double headwords, as for eugh alongside yew, or allay alongside alloy (the latter used by “most authors,” Johnson notes), extend the potential for “suffrage” in distinctive ways, as do entries such as that

19  See

Lynda Mugglestone, Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 39–​52, for Johnson’s pattern of enforced revision, including on matters of orthography.

Language   305 for scissor—​a word “variously written,” Johnson explains, drawing attention to the continued coexistence of forms such as cisors, scissors, cisars and scissars. There are, of course, exceptions. Johnson’s stated preference for vail rather than the “now frequently written” veil is unambiguous, as is, under compatible, his resistance to a headword which he clearly does not prefer (competible, he insists, “is found in good writers, and ought always to be used”). Even so, to read across these entries as a whole is to be made aware of the wider picture by which specific forms of recommendation are placed against the diversity which “unmolested” practice continues to attest. “Unmolested,” too, is a further set of variabilities which pervade the print text; risk alongside risque, or skreen alongside screen, or, say, opake alongside opaque all appear (among a wide range of other variants) both within Johnson’s definitions, or other ancillary comments If Johnson’s own spelling, as we have seen, is by no means uniform, the spelling that the Dictionary presents can, on a range of levels, illuminate the continued flexibility of eighteenth-​century texts across both private and public use—​as well as illustrating attitudes to reform in which Johnson’s commitment to the “Shackles” of evidential lexicography clearly remain an important part, even if “Desire” can, at times, also make its presence felt.

Reading “To go through (books, newspapers, etc.) systematically in order to look for quotations suitable for use as illustrative examples in a dictionary” is a new sense of to read, added by Robert Burchfield to the Supplement to the OED in 1982. Usage was adduced from 1876, and drawn from the OED’s own history and its determined gathering of lexical evidence.20 Johnson’s own practices provide, however, far earlier exemplification. Courtesy of a series of “fortuitous and unguided excursions into books,” his reading for the purposes of the Dictionary generated well over 100,000 citations, all “gleaned as industry should find, or chance should offer it.”21 Fourteen of the books Johnson annotated in the process remain extant. Reading of this kind was, Johnson confirms, undeniably remote from the reveling in “feasts of literature” he had initially envisaged (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 100). Instead, as in his own definition of to read, it is a process of “learn[ing] by observation”22—​a form of textual scrutiny in which, as we can see in the extract below, taken from Johnson’s annotated copy of Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677), potential headwords are identified, alongside the contexts in which they are used.

20 See OED Online, s.v. read v. 5d. 21  Some

116,000 appear across the Dictionary. The surviving marked-​up texts that Johnson used in his researches confirm, however, a range of citations that did not make their way into the print text. As Johnson notes, lexicography was, as such, a process of “accumulation” and subsequent application of “method” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 74). 22  See Johnson, Dictionary, s.v. read v.a. 3.

306   Lynda Mugglestone Here, for example, Johnson underlines, in pencil, destroys (line 3) but not ordinary (line 5), unprolifick (line 14) but not Antipathy (line 1). Underlined, too, is the phrasal verb feed upon (twice, line 6) but not, say, divers in line 10 or temperament in line 13. Inserted diagonal lines meanwhile serve as instructions to the various amanuenses who assisted on the Dictionary, indicating the limits of the relevant citations they were to copy out:23 The Wise Providence hath placed a certain Antipathy between some Animals, and many Insects, whereby they delight in their destruction, though they use them not as food: As, / the Peacock destroys Snakes and Adders; the Weasel, Mice and Rats; Spiders, Flies; and some sorts of Flies destroy Spiders/. 3. The common sort of Insects are the ordinary food of divers Animals, as well Insects as others: / The Spider and all sorts of small Birds, especially the Swallow, feed upon Flies; the Mole feeds upon Worms; Ducks and divers Water-fowl upon Frogs; the Cat and Owl upon Mice: and thus Insects become the prey of other Animals, which correct their excess. / 4. As the hot and moist temperament of the Air and Earth produce and increase Insects, so that temperament of the Air, Earth, and Waters that seems most opposite to Putrefaction, either destroys many of the Individuals, or at least renders their numerous Eggs and Seeds unfruitful … 5. / Great Rains, and Showers, and Inundation of Waters drowns oftentimes many sorts of Insects, and renders their Seeds and Eggs unprolifick, or destroys them. /

Other marginal annotations (not reproduced here) confirmed the initial letter of the intended headword. The subsequent crossing through of these marginal letters by the relevant amanuensis signaled, in turn, the successful completion of Johnson’s instructions, as well as the dialogic process that this stage of the Dictionary involved. As Robert DeMaria notes, Johnson’s annotations were clearly selective—reflecting what he describes as a process of “reading by random access” (though one that was, in essence, also to be shared by the later reading program for the OED).24 Nevertheless, as David Crystal contends, these methods also underpin “the first attempt at a truly principled English lexicography” in which empirical enquiry was made to support the lexical and semantic analysis that the Dictionary provides.25 Johnson’s interest in linguistic method is evident in other ways, too. A committed interest in collecting multiple examples of the same word, used in different contexts, is clearly salient to the kind of highly perceptive analysis by which, say, for (accorded a six-​word explication in Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721) was now minutely examined in a series of forty-​two sense-​divisions and combinations. Bailey’s entry for run v., defined as “to move with a swift pace,” is, in 23 

A section of Johnson’s working copy for the Dictionary of Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (London, 1677), 210. Cited from the copy in possession of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Johnson’s annotations are in bold. 24 Robert DeMaria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 236. 25 See Eugene Thomas, “Dr. Johnson and His Amanuenses,” Transactions of the Johnson Society (1974), 20–​30.

Language   307 similar ways, anatomized into fifty-​two distinct patterns of signification in Johnson’s work. Johnson’s use of citational evidence has been erroneously summarized, as by Boswell, as merely providing examples for meanings that had already been assigned. Johnson’s meticulous engagement with the nuances of use, however, clearly depends on an extensive citation file, and the semantic probing that this, in turn, enabled. Hale’s use of destroy informs the third sense (“To kill”) in the relevant entry. Unprolifick, likewise underlined in the extract above, reappears in documenting the meaning “Barren; not productive.” “You can never be wise unless you love reading,” Johnson informed Francis Barber (September 25, 1770, in Letters, vol. i, 350). Reading for the Dictionary, however, posited specific models of both wisdom and knowledge. The “drudgery of making observations” might be “toilsome” but, as Johnson had early stressed, “all the Knowledge we have is of such Qualities alone as are discoverable by Experience.” Writing the “Life of Boerhaave,” the salience of “Testimony” in “distinguishing between those Accounts which are well proved, and those which owe their Rise to Fiction” had, for example, been given clear prominence.26 In the Dictionary, too, the absence of first-​hand evidence often serves to prompt Johnson’s skepticism of forms which, if attested in other dictionaries, continued to lack independent verification in his own research. Labeled merely Dict. or D., they are made to constitute a special category for which “Testimony”—​and the authority of evidence—​are silent, and in which usage is questioned rather than affirmed (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 88–​9).27 Conversely, Johnson’s probing of what “writers” do widely informs his scrutiny of English, whether by means of the citations per se, or in the general comments on usage that a number of entries also provide. Even “the exactest writers,” he therefore observes under figure, “confound” the theoretical distinction by which “the change of a word is a trope, and any affection of a sentence a figure.” Against received wisdom, very different realities of usage are, he argues, to be supported in this respect.28 In similar ways, while the use of blush to mean “sudden appearance” might raise prescriptive sensibilities (it “seems barbarous,” Johnson acknowledges, in idioms such as “at first blush”), the fact that it is “used by good writers” acts as testimony in its favor while accompanying evidence from Locke adds further support. Johnson’s comments on the meanings acquired by blight reveal a parallel process. Stephen Skinner (in his Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae) had equated blight only with “mildew” but “most writers,” as Johnson points out, instead use the word “in a general sense, for any cause of the failure of fruits.” While Johnson’s collective evidence is not, of course, a corpus in the modern sense, his interest in using quantitative markers (however impressionistic these might be) as part of his approach to language forms a further noteworthy feature. Johnson hence adduces tweak rather than tweag on the basis of what “other writers” do, here discarding

26 

Early Biographical Writings, 30, 32. See, e.g., Johnson’s entries for verecund (“Modest, bashful”) and macilency (“Leanness”). 28  See Johnson, Dictionary, s.v. figure n.s. 11. 27 

308   Lynda Mugglestone Skinner’s stated preference for tweag. Likewise, “the universal use of writers” supports the “ill import” and negative connotations of the word outrage, even if, as he observes, it “seems to be used by Phillips for mere commotion.” The fact that Johnson’s citation file was considerably larger than the citations he used for illustrative purposes in the Dictionary clearly aided conclusions of this kind. As Johnson’s annotated copy of Hale confirms, for example, a wide range of citations—​as for equation, or historiographer, or abstemious—​were created which, even if unused in the entries as eventually printed, would nevertheless have been scrutinized in the process of anatomizing meaning for the relevant word. Feed upon provides a further example. As illustrated above, this was likewise underlined in the course of Johnson’s reading of Hale, and duly marked for copying by his amanuenses.While it presumably made its way into his citation file, it was not cited in the final text. Anomalous or unrepresentative uses—​even by great writers such as Shakespeare and Dryden—​can, by extension, prompt caution. Writative—​an adjectival neologism by Pope—​elicits firm censure (“A word of Pope’s coining: not to be imitated”). The hollowness of Lord Chesterfield’s professed linguistic obedience to the lexicographical edicts Johnson would provide (“I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-​born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship,” as he had declared in the World in 1754) is, ironically, revealed by Chesterfield’s own later use of this word.29 For Johnson, Dryden’s attempted reconstruction of falsify to mean “to pierce; to run through” (based on falsare in Italian, rather than the well-​documented precedents of vernacular English use) was likewise resisted in ways which illuminate the salience of usage against individual desire. As Johnson’s lengthy entry for falsify explores, Dryden’s preferences are plain: “Why am I forbidden to borrow from the Italian, a polished language, the word which is wanting in my native tongue?” he had demanded: “I use the word falsify, in this place, to mean that the shield of Turnus was not of proof against the spears and javelins of the Trojans, which had pierced it through and through.” Nevertheless, as Johnson states, individual inclination is not enough: “Dryden, with all this effort, was not able to naturalize the new signification.”30 For change to take place, it must be “copied” and assimilated into general practice, and common use. In similar ways, Johnson resists the premise that dadal means “skillful” (even if it was so used by Phillips), or that exorcist means “enchanter,” even if used in this sense by Shakespeare. “This is not the true meaning, nor should be imitated,” Johnson notes of the former. The latter, with reason, is judged to be “improper”—​a verdict which, importantly, again derives from observation of the wider norms of use. Johnson in the Dictionary can therefore clarify meanings of this kind for the benefit of “common readers,” yet make plain their distance from the common

29  Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, letter to The World 100 (28 Nov. 1754), 603. See OED Online, s.v. writative adj. 1: “1755 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 19 Dec. (1932), V. 2170, ‘Deaf people are commonly as frivolously writative, as blind people are often frivolously talkative.’ ” 30 See Dictionary (1755), s.v. falsify v.a. 4.

Language   309 bounds of usage.31 The dictionary-​maker, as Derwent Coleridge later stressed, must provide a regulative text which guides as to the general properties of words, and how they might be used.32 Nevertheless, the problems of a single-​handed enterprise can also be plain in Johnson’s work. “This word I have met with only in Spenser, nor can I discover whence it is derived,” he notes, for example, under awhape. “Of this meaning I am doubtful,” he states under staddle, defined as “a tree suffered to grow for coarse and common uses.” Skilt is similar: “A word used by Cleaveland, of which I know not either the etymology or meaning.” The entry provides the relevant citation so readers can exercise “suffrage” in this respect, too. The realities of Johnson’s lexicographical practice can, in such ways, perhaps disconcert, reminding readers across a range of entries of what remains to be discovered, while rendering the dictionary intriguingly dialogic. “I confess my ignorance, which is seldom done by commentators,” as Johnson states of the methods he will adopt in his work on Shakespeare (Johnson to Charles Burney, March 8, 1758, in Letters, vol. i, 159). But, as these and similar examples confirm, it was a process he had already explored, and implemented, across the Dictionary.

Place and Time Johnson’s thinking about, and interest in, place and time in relation to language is equally significant. His Dictionary is commonly equated with a fervent nationalism in which purism operates in local and global terms, and dictionary-​making becomes a defense of standard English, forcibly distancing regional and extraterritorial influence alike. Garrick’s military metaphors by which Johnson “well-​armed like a hero of yore | Has beat forty French and will beat forty more” famously map divisive Anglo–​French relations onto lexicography, positing national triumph against the Académie Française as a symbol of Johnson’s endeavors. Johnson’s praxis in terms of language, and languages, is, in reality, more complex. The resolution to acquire and use more languages is, for example, a recurrent aspect in his diaries and private papers. Comments are made in Latin and Greek, while Johnson refers repeatedly to his determination to gain knowledge of Dutch as well as Italian. He refers, too, to his extensive reading in French, a language which he can deliberately (and fluently) adopt for the purposes of private communication (see, e.g., Johnson to Hester Thrale, June 5, 1777, in Letters, vol. ii, 216). Gaelic prompts comment in 1777 while his interest in Welsh, and its preservation, is also plain. Johnson rightly draws attention to his “zeal for Languages,” as well as his interest in the kind of comparative and philological inquiry that such study permits. As he stresses, it is “the similitude and derivation 31 See Dictionary, s.v. exorcist n.s. 2. 32 

Derwent Coleridge, “Observations on the Plan of the Society’s Proposed New English Dictionary,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1860–​1), 152–​68.

310   Lynda Mugglestone of languages” that provides “the most indubitable proof of the traduction of nations,” as well as the “genealogy of mankind.” Loss of knowledge here, too, is to be regretted. As Johnson adds, “the continuance of every language, however narrow in its extent, or however incommodious for common purposes” is vital, at least until “it is reposited in some version of a known book, that it may be always hereafter examined and compared with other languages” (Johnson to William Drummond, August 13, 1766, in Letters, vol. i, 270). Johnson might, therefore, refer to the “dusty desarts of barren philology” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 94), but comments across his Dictionary testify to a detailed engagement with the history and cross-​fertilization of different languages, and the diverse sources from which English derives. He discusses “Gothick” and Germanic in his “History of the English Language,” and documents Old English by means of Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (as well as establishing comparative frameworks of his own by including extracts of Boethius as translated by both Chaucer and George Colville). Considerations of method, in relation to historical exegesis, again prompt close attention. “The same book, being translated in different ages, affords opportunity of marking the gradations of change, and bringing one age into comparison with another,” he notes (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 132). The same scholarly bent underpins the etymologies he provides within the Dictionary. These have, of course, often prompted criticism. “One does not look in Johnson for Etymology, any more than in 18th c. writers for biology or electricity. Etymology began about 1850 in England,” as James Murray declared, midway through working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.33 Even so, to look at Johnson’s etymologies is often to encounter a form of linguistic history in which his skills in other languages are self-​evident, as is his wide reading in available authorities. In conversation with Boswell (Life, vol. ii, 156), he carefully probes questions of contact and descent, tracing, for Boswell’s benefit, the ways in which Latin dies becomes French jour, by way of Italian giorno. Even so, he was, as he admits, often at the limits of what is known. The philological revolution, and the real advances of comparative philology, were yet to happen. “This etymology, though the best that I have found, is not very probable,” Johnson states under squib, deducing it from German schieben, to push forward; “This word is variously speltled; as copel, cupel, cuple, and cuppel; but I cannot find its etymology,” we are informed under coppel. Modal expressions and epistemic qualifiers can likewise signal continued uncertainties (“I know not whether it may not come from scape,” Johnson tentatively suggests under skip). Etymology, as Johnson reminds us, is dynamic, an exercise in linguistic deduction in which definitive resolution is by no means easy. Recent language history—​ and issues of naturalization and adoption between languages—​also merit detailed scrutiny. Johnson’s definition of nation stressed the

33 

James A. H. Murray to Jenkinson, December 20, 1906, Murray Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MP/​20/​12/​06.

Language   311 interrelationship of political and linguistic identity (“A people distinguished from another people; generally by their language, original, or government”). Nevertheless, the borders of discourse are permeable and words, like people, prove highly mobile. Johnson’s “History” makes plain the heterogeneous descent of English in ways which problematize rigid models of purism. The Plan, as such, can offer schemes of restitution (“The chief intent of it is to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of the English idiom”), but these are swiftly tempered by Johnson’s acknowledgment of diversity within English such that “if foreign words . . . were rejected,” the resulting work would be “little regarded, except by critics, or those who aspire to criticism” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 29–​30). Popular ideologies can, as such, be addressed but Johnson is equally clear that lexicography cannot construct an entirely hypothetical state of language. His decision to document a cline of naturalization or assimilation whereby, to different degrees, some forms within the nation state of words are “naturalized and incorporated,” but others continue “aliens, and are rather auxiliaries than subjects” is, in this light, particularly interesting (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 31). As he makes plain, however, it is usage—​and “admission into common speech” or “the consequence of long intermixture and frequent use”—​which will, in reality, secure such assimilation rather than the dictionary-​maker’s decree. Britain might be an island but the converse of nations continues, while the prospect of dictionary-​making as a form of defensive border to be patrolled in case of incursion, is firmly cast aside (“With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 105). Even so, incursion is by means always viewed with equanimity. Johnson’s objections to words such as ruse (“A French word neither elegant nor necessary”) and finesse (“An unnecessary word which is creeping into the language”) are well-​known, even if evidence is also provided for their use. Johnson’s progressive tense (“is creeping”) confirms a state of transition in which language is clearly on the move. “Unnecessary” meanwhile offers a wider apprehension of the shape of English and the resources of relevant semantic fields—​exemplifying, too, the kind of “struggle” referred to in the Dictionary preface by which, even if “the changes we fear be thus irresistible,” recommendations can still be voiced (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 109). By the same token, Johnson can, however, also advocate adoption where perceived semantic or lexical gaps are at stake (and in ways which mirror, in effect, the practices of the early Royal Society in which lexicography was also viewed as a means of judicious change and importation). Pictorial, used by Thomas Browne and borrowed from Latin, might, Johnson suggests, productively be “adopted by other writers” in view of its “elegance and utility.” Instances of dissuasion and persuasion in this context are nevertheless relatively rare. Instead, the Dictionary often presents a snapshot of various trajectories of assimilation in which, say, trait remained, as yet, “scarce English” (pronounced as /​trei/​, its French origins were audible in eighteenth-​century use), while acknowledging (in the sense “grateful”) was deemed a “Gallicism”—​a mode of speech which is, the Dictionary

312   Lynda Mugglestone explains, “French rather than English,” just as indulge (in the sense “to be favourable to”) and expound (in the sense “to examine; to lay open”) are “Latinisms”—​“modes of speech peculiar to the Latin.” “He expounded both his pockets,” a citation from Butler states, confirming the distance from idiomatic English use. Similar is Dryden’s “He has shewn his hero acknowledging and ungrateful.” Forms of this kind are calques or loan-​ translations, existing on the borders of discourse—​and standing, too, as Johnson critically observed, as a form of linguistic display, a witness to “affectation” in ways which repeatedly elicit caution rather than endorsement in the Dictionary. Other words, such as sublime, are conversely defined in relation to their confirmed citizenship, in which usage is given the last word: “The grand or lofty stile. The sublime is a Gallicism, but now naturalized.” Other markers of place and time offer further testimony for Johnson’s calibrated engagement with the shape of English. English might be a national language but diatopic variation, as Johnson’s observations confirmed during his travels in 1773, was widely visible. His letters draw attention to local patterns of use by which valley is displaced by glen (“a small glen, so they call a valley”) while “Moss in Scotland, is Bog in Ireland, and Moss Trooper is Bog Trotter” (Johnson to Hester Thrale, September 21, 1773, in Letters, vol. ii, 73–​4). Johnson’s regional attentiveness likewise intervenes in his work on Shakespeare, so that his knowledge of local Lichfield practice yields cognates for bill in As You Like It (“A ‘bill’ is still carried by the watchmen at Lichfield”) while, in the Dictionary, Staffordshire provides continued authority for the otherwise obsolescent eame (“uncle”) as well as for words such as kecksy (“Skinner seems to think kecksy or kex the same as hemlock. It is used in Staffordshire both for hemlock, and any other hollow jointed plant”). In Johnson’s linguistic modeling, regional norms are hence often visible alongside supra-​local ones. Ambry, meaning “The place where plate, and utensils for housekeeping, are kept; also a cupboard for keeping cold victuals,” is described as “a word still used in the northern counties, and in Scotland.” Likewise, bannock is “used in the northern counties, and in Scotland” where it signifies “A kind of oaten or pease meal cake, mixed with water, and baked upon an iron plate over the fire.” Entries of this kind point to the restricted diffusion of the form in question. Johnson’s stance remains carefully objective. As under gill, regionally specific senses (“In the northern counties it is half a pint of liquid measure”) are documented alongside non-​localized practice in ways that remind readers of the diversity which makes up the diction of a nation. Spatial relations in the use of words are, in turn, seen more narrowly still. A brace is therefore, in general, “that which holds any thing tight” but, across a range of senses, Johnson also adduces contextual or register-​specific uses in relation to “architecture” or “sea terms,” “in printing,” or when used in relation to coaching. A brace in this latter sense, for example, refers to “the thick straps of leather” on which a coach was supported, in ways that illuminate material culture and other forms of temporality. Likewise, canal acquires separate meanings “in anatomy,” garden design, and transport while canon is differentiated according to uses in typography, surgery, religion, as well as law.

Language   313 Differences in tone prompt other specificities. DeMaria has pointed to Johnson’s acute awareness of register and address.34 This, too, is refracted in the observations Johnson strives to include so that, in defining tar, the fact that to apply this word to a sailor inevitably connotes “contempt” is made a salient part of its signification, as is the similar impact of Cockney in relation to a Londoner. Lexicography, as well as literary criticism, is, in Johnson’s hands, a way of unpicking the nuances of expressivity in a textual engagement in which the intricacies of sense and sense-​relationship take center stage.

Human Failings Johnson’s poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, written in 1749, deftly anatomizes the fallibilities of human desire and expectation, and the hopes that, against reason, individuals repeatedly maintain. “Great Xerxes’s” attempt to “enchain the wind” and “lash” the waves is presented as futile; pride and human power alike come to nothing (Yale Works, vol. vi, 102–​3). The echoes in the 1755 Preface to the Dictionary (“to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength”) are unmistakable (vol. xviii, 105). The relationship of dictionary-​maker to language is, as Johnson demonstrates, one informed by dedication and unremitting industry, and by the pursuit of that which “its own nature forbids to be immortal” (vol. xviii, 109). The “chains” that Xerxes and dictionary-​maker might desire to impose are, as we have seen, repeatedly set against other “Shackles” by which work on language, at least in principle, removed from temptations of this kind. If Johnson is expected to prescribe, this is a process which, as his own Dictionary confirms, can also mean “to influence by long custom” in ways that suggest its own descriptive foundations. Johnson’s eloquent figuration of the obligations of descriptive rigor against the easy temptations of prescriptive desire (and the tensions—​and conflicts—​that can ensue) can, in this light, render his work on language an all-​too-​human enterprise in which hope and experience can at times jostle for supremacy, and vanity (“Fruitless desire”) can exercise its own persuasive charms. Johnson’s core aim might be to “register, not form” the language, disentangling senses and subsenses to enable understanding, but absolute neutrality can be difficult to sustain. As under viz, three citations demonstrate a utility which Johnson formally denies (“A barbarous form of an unnecessary word”). A similar dialectic between aspiration and actuality is evident in shabby (“A word that has crept into conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language”). As under lesser, a grudging respect for the authority of custom is provided, alongside a self-​ evident wish that this were not so (“A barbarous corruption of less, formed by the vulgar from the habit of terminating comparatives in er; afterwards adopted by poets, and then by writers of prose, till it has all the authority which a mode originally erroneous can

34 

See DeMaria, Life of Reading, 34.

314   Lynda Mugglestone derive from custom”). “To influence arbitrarily” stands as another meaning of prescribe, accompanied by another warning from Locke. “The assuming an authority of dictating to others, and a forwardness to prescribe to their opinions, is a constant concomitant of this biass of our judgments.” Johnson can as elsewhere, hence exhibit a characteristic doubleness, reading with documentary intent yet swayed at times by his own subjectivities and, in similar ways, being able to acknowledge change while, as under touching in a revision added in 1773, proffering a sense of regret for forms now lost (“With respect, regard, or relation to . . . [It] is now obsolete, though more concise than the mode of speech now adopted”). Even as the Dictionary is published, some words are “budding, and some falling away,” Johnson reminded his readers in 1755. The stasis of the print text is not mirrored by the language it records just as, in relation to texts more widely, he stressed that a glossary or some other means of elucidation will inevitably be required within fifty years (Johnson to William Strahan, in Letters, vol. ii, 130–​1). It is a process which, as he recognized, the dictionary-​maker is powerless to stop.

Further Reading Clifford, James L. Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years. New York: McGraw Hill, 1979. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. “The Theory of Language in Johnson’s Dictionary.” In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 159–​74. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Iamartino, Giovanni, and Robert DeMaria, Jr., eds. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and the Eighteenth-​Century World of Words. Special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy, 19 (2006). Lynch, Jack, and Anne McDermott, eds. Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s “Dictionary.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mugglestone, Lynda. Samuel Johnson & the Journey into Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Mugglestone, Lynda. “The Values of Annotation: Reading Johnson Reading Shakespeare.” In Revision and Revaluation: New Essays on Samuel Johnson, edited by Anthony W. Lee, 3–​24. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2018. Mugglestone, Lynda. “ ‘Speaking Selves’: Johnson, Boswell, and the Problem of Spoken English.” Transactions of the Johnson Society (2018): 23–​38. Reddick, Allen. The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Thomas, Eugene. “Dr. Johnson and his Amanuenses.” Transactions of the Johnson Society (1974): 20–​30.

Chapter 18

History Jenny Davidson

We were now treading that illustrious island, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and all the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona? —​Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), in Yale Works, vol. ix, 148

A deep sense of history permeates Samuel Johnson’s published writing, but the single work of his that most explicitly foregrounds questions about the human struggle to recover a lost past is surely the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Johnson took this trip to the Highlands and the Hebrides with his younger Scottish friend James Boswell; the tour lasted a hundred days, beginning and ending in Edinburgh and taking in many of Scotland’s most remote environs along the way. The two men’s tour took place in the aftermath of radical recent historical transformation. Not quite thirty years had passed since the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the massive crackdown that ensued, a government campaign of “pacification” that, among other measures, banned the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands from carrying arms or wearing the plaid, a traditional signaling mechanism for clan identity. The idea was that eliminating the distinct

316   Jenny Davidson tribal Scottish identity that had helped power Charles Stuart’s campaign to retrieve the throne would forestall any future attempts along those lines. The English government in this respect followed the model of the Roman Empire’s dependence on the universal language and uniform manners of the conquerors overwriting and supplanting national particularities, a mode of cultural imperialism well known in our own time as well (think of the Uighurs in China). “Like the Greeks in their unpolished state, described by Thucydides,” Johnson observes, “the Highlanders, till lately, went always armed, and carried their weapons to visits, and to church” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 45); the allusion to Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian Wars, like the reference to the battle of Marathon in the passage that serves as this chapter’s epigraph, speaks to Johnson’s regret that there isn’t a narrative history that preserves the former manners and customs of the Highlanders, and that there will never now be one given all of the changes that have taken place.1 The narrative Johnson published about his Scottish travels is saturated with the feeling of loss: There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws. We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty. Their language is attacked on every side. Schools are erected, in which English only is taught, and there were lately some who thought it reasonable to refuse them a version of the holy scriptures, that they might have no monument of their mother-​tongue. (vol. ix, 57–​8)

Johnson’s sympathies for the losers in this struggle come through clearly in his choice of words; his outrage at the idea that the Highlanders should not be allowed a Scots Gaelic translation of the Bible is especially pronounced. Note, too, his figurative use of the term “monument” to accentuate the significance of that linguistic and cultural deprivation. Johnson believes that history can scarcely be preserved without writing, and a largely oral culture will be especially vulnerable to losing its identity in the face of the

1  This chapter was composed during a year spent as a fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Special thanks to those who organized the delivery from New York of the books I needed, especially Grant Rosenberg, the Institute’s research officer, and Zack Lane and his staff at Delivery Services, Butler Library. Thanks are also due to Brent Buckner for his unparalleled willingness to travel thousands of miles to see me and then assent gladly to my requests that he not talk to me until I am done working!

History   317 British government’s method of eradicating political dissent by stamping out cultural difference.2 Without written records, material traces of the past assume undue importance. Elsewhere in the Journey Johnson makes the following observation: “Edifices, either standing or ruined, are the chief records of an illiterate nation” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 73). The challenge, then, will be to reconstruct a historical past that is precious partly because it embodies the lost identity of a people now dispersed by emigration and denatured by the ban on traditional habits.

History-​writing c. 1770 Despite the popularity of history-​writing in his lifetime, Samuel Johnson did not choose to write a major historical narrative on the scale of those composed by David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and any number of others. There is a practical issue: Johnson was a man of less ample means than Hume or Gibbon, which meant he wasn’t in the position to amass the kind of personal historical collection that Gibbon did, or to have easy access to a university library as did Hume, who also had a significant personal library. The British Museum, whose original basis was the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, was founded in 1753, and Johnson helped catalog the Harleian Library, another foundational collection for the museum, but he mostly relied on booksellers and wealthier friends for access to the printed books he needed to compose the Dictionary and establish the texts and annotations for his edition of Shakespeare: “his was not a precious collection, not a gentleman’s collection,” writes Robert DeMaria, Jr.3 Another kind of explanation lies in the fact that Johnson’s intellectual and cultural affinities were not well aligned with the cutting edge of the discipline of history in an age committed to “enlightened” thought. Although Johnson was contemporary with the intellectual movement we call the Enlightenment and knew the work of many of the authors most strongly associated with it, he resisted certain of its founding premises and core values. The great Enlightenment histories (Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV, Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline) differed in important ways from the masterpieces of classical historiography (they were more 2 

In the journal he wrote during the same trip, later published as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell quoted Johnson as saying: “There is no tracing the connection of ancient nations, but by language; and therefore I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations” (Life, vol. v, 225). For a fuller description of Johnson’s thinking on oral tradition, see Paula McDowell’s discussion in her superb book The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 267–​81. 3 Robert DeMaria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 34; and see also the description of Johnson’s book-​borrowing practices in Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 35–​6.

318   Jenny Davidson theoretical, they were more open about their sociopolitical and philosophical agendas), and Johnson felt more discomfort with, than affinity for, the secular skeptical mode that dominated most of the best-​regarded histories written in his own time. That’s not to say that he wasn’t influenced by their modes of thinking and methods of argument. In an essay that argues for the centrality of the marginal gloss in eighteenth-​century literature, for instance, Lawrence Lipking suggests that the mode of “perpetual commentary, in which the sequence of thought depends on reviewing all known sources of information” is a central organizing principle for Johnson in the Lives of the Poets; it is an inductive method developed and propagated by the notoriously skeptical Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique as a point of origin, so that we can see Johnson borrowing an innovative historical method even as he rejects some of what would seem to be its intrinsic traits.4 In an essay that provides a useful overview of where the genre of the history stood in the 1770s in Britain, Tim Stuart-​Buttle quotes Hume’s famous declaration in a letter to his publisher that “I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation”: in terms of the second point, Hume was talking about Scotland (his fellow Scot William Robertson received £4,000 for the copyright of his History of Charles V), but in England and in the rest of Europe as well, history was at the forefront of Enlightenment intellectual life.5 Enlightened history departed from classical historiography, says Stuart-​Buttle, partly by way of its commitment to the idea of the progress of human civilization over time, a predisposition that could give it the air of what he describes as “a smug complacency in reason and progress which, dispelling the clouds of ignorance and superstition, might ensure that the modern age need never revisit the violence and internecine strife which had bedeviled past societies.”6 The first distinctively modern histories began to appear in the opening decades of the seventeenth century; one especially worth singling out is Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, of which Johnson translated a significant portion early in his career.7 History as a discipline had, by Johnson’s time, thoroughly assimilated the concerns of seventeenth-​century biblical textual criticism and threatened to embroil anyone who wrote it in a philosophical debate about the status of early textual authorities, including but not limited to those that testified to miracles in the documentary archive of early Christianity. This was a debate whose very existence 4  Lawrence

Lipking, “The Marginal Gloss,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (1977), 609–​55, at 625, original emphasis. A fuller discussion of Johnson’s affinity with Bayle can be found in Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 82. 5  Tim Stuart-​Buttle, “Gibbon and Enlightenment History in Eighteenth-​Century Britain,” in Karen O’Brien and Brian Young, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 110–​27, at 110. 6  Stuart-​Buttle, “Gibbon and Enlightenment History,” 111. 7 See Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 44–​5. For a good overview of Sarpi’s History and why it was important to so many different eighteenth-​century readers, see David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 104–​17; and for a riveting recent account of the Council itself, see John W. O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

History   319 threatened to erode the power of established religion by chipping away at the fundamental beliefs shared across most variants of Christianity.8

Historical Evidence and the Journey Though the historical narrative remained an important pattern or prototype for other kinds of writing during the period, with novels especially likely to think of themselves as a kind of history (think of Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, a Foundling or Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady), it should be clearer by now why Johnson’s intellectual and cultural affinities would not have made history the obvious genre for him to work in. And yet these intellectual debates can be intuited around the edges of Johnson’s writing even when he doesn’t tackle them head on. One notable strand of eighteenth-​century controversy over how history should be written concerned the weighting of inherited tradition versus physical evidence when it came to establishing what had happened in the past. As suspicions grew not just about the accuracy of the ancient textual authorities but about their essential underlying credibility, physical evidence seemed to promise some of the reassuring stability that even well-​known sources no longer could command. The permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-​Lettres in Paris, Nicolas Fréret, was one influential spokesperson for this newer way of thinking: “In the absence of certainty,” argued Fréret and his sympathizers (this summary is Stéphane van Damme’s), “the contemporary historian must first rely on comparative philology and then draw on non-​textual traces in the form of the numismatics and archaeology dear to the antiquaries.”9 Mabillon, too, author of L’Antiquité expliquée par les monuments, was associated with a “new order of proof . . . no longer based on words and quotations, but on material evidence,” and more generally it can be said that archaeological excavation becomes much more central to the practice of history in the first half of the eighteenth century because it is “part of a wider regime of knowledge drawing on physical traces of the past.” 10 This trend certainly affected Johnson’s ways of thinking about the material traces of the past in the Journey. It is difficult for a historian to work in a critical mode when they have to depend on forms of evidence less authoritative than those we receive either at first hand by way of our own senses or at second hand in the form of well-​corroborated oral or written 8  For the larger intellectual context, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. i, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–​1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 44–​6. 9  Stéphane van Damme, “Digging Authority: Archaeological Controversies and the Recognition of the Metropolitan Past in Eighteenth-​Century Paris,” in Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, eds., Ancients and Moderns in Early Modern Europe: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Studies, 2016), 55–​69, at 56. 10  Van Damme, “Digging Authority,” 63, 68.

320   Jenny Davidson testimony. An intelligent traveler is allowed to retain some skepticism about what they learn, whatever their dislike of disbelief in a Christian context, and it surely felt intellectually and emotionally safer to Johnson to probe into the category of evidence in proto-​ ethnographic writing (the study of comparative manners was emerging as a field during exactly these decades) rather than as a means directed toward the end of establishing the true history of Christianity. In the passage that follows, we can see Johnson expressing many of his “official” historian contemporaries’ concerns in a context insulated from full-​blown questioning of whether the miracles attested to by the early Church Fathers ever actually took place. The problem that preoccupies Johnson in Scotland, as I have already mentioned, is how to write the country’s history given the paucity of textual evidence: As we sat at Sir Alexander [Macdonald]’s table, we were entertained, according to the ancient usage of the North, with the melody of the bagpipe. Every thing in those countries has its history. As the bagpiper was playing, an elderly gentleman informed us, that in some remote time, the Macdonalds of Glengary having been injured, or offended by the inhabitants of Culloden, and resolving to have justice or vengeance, came to Culloden on a Sunday, where finding their enemies at worship, they shut them up in the church, which they set on fire; and this, said he, is the tune that the piper played while they were burning. Narrations like this, however uncertain, deserve the notice of a traveler, because they are the only records of a nation that has no historians, and afford the most genuine representation of the life and character of the ancient Highlanders. (Yale Works, vol. ix, 49–​50)

In the first paragraph here, Johnson amplifies his own aphoristic assertion that “Every thing in those countries has its history” by showing how the song the bagpipe plays (note that the “thing” that has a history in this case isn’t the physical musical instrument but rather the tune of the song) prompts an onlooker to share a story. It’s not Johnson’s own immediate experience, and it’s also part of an oral tradition that because it isn’t textual can’t be examined critically with the same tools used on ancient texts. Listening to the song allows for a sort of “fade” in time and space, taking Johnson and, by extension, the reader back to the site of a gruesome episode in Scottish history by way of a shared soundtrack. The sentence that follows offers essential commentary on what it means to experience history in this way. The role of the “traveler” is somewhere between that of the sociologist and the historian, and given that such stories “are the only records of a nation that has no historians,” they should be attended to as seriously as any other kind of historical evidence: the written histories of Tacitus or the tax ledgers of the early Roman Empire, but also the coins, inscriptions and so forth that in Johnson’s own lifetime had assumed an increasingly central place in the historian’s evidentiary arsenal. Even printed sources, Johnson is concerned to establish, are prone to error. A nice example of his caution occurs during the visit to the isle of Raasay. One of the key sources Johnson consulted (he took it with him on the trip as a sort of guidebook) was Martin

History   321 Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland,11 which states that the death of the wife of the laird of the island of Raasay was marked by the erection of a cross. Johnson and Boswell see the stone cross and its companions, ask questions, and learn that this is not the truth, that the stones with crosses are simply boundary markers. That discrepancy prompts the reflection that though Martin could have visited the places he wrote about and investigated more closely, he didn’t imagine it would be of general interest: What he has neglected cannot now be performed. In nations, where there is hardly the use of letters, what is once out of sight is lost for ever. They think but little, and of their few thoughts none are wasted on the past, in which they are neither interested by fear nor hope. Their only registers are stated observances and practical representations. For this reason an age of ignorance is an age of ceremony. Pageants, and processions, and commemorations, gradually shrink away, as better methods come into use of recording events, and preserving rights. (Yale Works, vol. ix, 64–​5)

Johnson laments what has been lost and once again emphasizes that without writing, we will necessarily retain very little information about the past. The “registers” that do survive are cultural practices that are performed by human bodies and passed down by live contact between one person and another, something (it is implied) that is precious but fragile, necessarily superseded “as better methods come into use of recording events, and preserving rights.” It is characteristic of Johnson’s experiences on his travels that he often hears directly contradictory stories from people he talks to on the road, sometimes even from one and the same person. This prompts a certain degree of sarcasm. “He that travels in the Highlands may easily saturate his soul with intelligence, if he will acquiesce in the first account,” Johnson begins. The Highlander gives to every question an answer so prompt and peremptory, that skepticism itself is dared into silence, and the mind sinks before the bold reporter in unresisting credulity; but, if a second question be ventured, it breaks the enchantment; for it is immediately discovered, that what was told so confidently was told at hazard, and that such fearlessness of assertion was either the sport of negligence, or the refuge of ignorance. (vol. ix, 51)

The reader familiar with Johnson’s patterns of thought will not be surprised to see him move, in the sentences that follow, to the mode of moral reflection: If individuals are thus at variance with themselves, it can be no wonder that the accounts of different men are contradictory. The traditions of an ignorant and savage 11 

See Lascelles’s commentary in Yale Works, vol. ix, 64 n. 3.

322   Jenny Davidson people have been for ages negligently heard, and unskillfully related. Distant events must have been mingled together, and the actions of one man given to another. These, however, are deficiencies in story, for which no man is now to be censured. It were enough, if what there is yet opportunity of examining were accurately inspected, and justly represented; but such is the laxity of Highland conversation, that the inquirer is kept in continual suspense, and by a kind of intellectual retrogradation, knows less as he hears more. (vol. ix, 51)

In a more specific instance of the difficulty of establishing facts, Johnson and Boswell had hoped to collect testimonies in support of the occult phenomenon of the second sight, a form of clairvoyance supposed to be found in certain inhabitants of the Highlands. But they were sorely disappointed, both by the fact of their coming too late in Scotland’s history to witness what was already perceived as belonging to a bygone era and by the patent inadequacies of the testimony to which they did have access. “As there subsists no longer in the Islands much of that peculiar and discriminative form of life, of which the idea had delighted our imagination,” Johnson begins, “we were willing to listen to such accounts of past times as would be given us”: But we soon found what memorials were to be expected from an illiterate people, whose whole time is a series of distress; where every morning is laboring with expedients for the evening; and where all mental pains or pleasure arose from the dread of winter, the expectation of spring, the caprices of their chiefs, and the motions of the neighbouring clans; where there was neither shame from ignorance, nor pride in knowledge; neither curiosity to inquire, nor vanity to communicate. . . . [O]‌ne generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction; memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has past away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled. (vol. ix, 110–​11)

Alternatives to History I have said that Johnson didn’t write a major history, and an older view of Johnson suggested that he wasn’t really interested in history. In a narrow sense, that was not an unreasonable belief to have held. It would be fair to say that Johnson’s poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (a free adaptation of Juvenal’s tenth Satire) draws on historical examples without being fundamentally interested in historical processes or methodologies—​or

History   323 even, really, historical incident.12 “Let observation with extensive view, | Survey mankind, from China to Peru,” the poem famously begins (lines 1–​2), with the payoff of that survey being the realization that one rule prevails everywhere, regardless of local particularities: emotions rather than reason guide human choices, often with tragic consequences. The poem plumbs history here for a whole host of supporting instances but, despite the plethora of examples, there is a flattening-​out of individual particulars for the sake of establishing general moral rules. Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey gets his own verse paragraph because he exemplifies the characteristically human pattern of hunger for power, a rise to magnificence and then a terrible downfall: Shall Wolsey’s wealth, with Wolsey’s end be thine? . . . For why did Wolsey near the steeps of fate, On weak foundations raise th’ enormous weight? Why but to sink beneath misfortune’s Blow, With louder ruin to the gulphs below? (lines 122, 125–​8)

The point is that reversals are universal, rather than that Wolsey’s career was unique, and the insistence on generality continues all the way to the end of the poem: From Lydia’s monarch should the search descend, By Solon caution’d to regard his end, In life’s last scene what prodigies surprise, Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise? From Marlb’rough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow And Swift expires a driv’ler and a show. (lines 313–​18)

The initial couplet alludes to a famous moment in Herodotus’s Histories when the Athenian legislator Solon gives an unexpected answer to the question posed to him by Croesus, King of Lydia: what man does Solon deem the happiest, out of everyone he has met on his travels? (Solon’s name was synonymous with wisdom, while the wealth of Croesus was so remarkable that it is still recorded in the idiom “rich as Croesus.”) The examples Solon gives in response are all of men who died at the height of their success, and when Croesus is offended that Solon rates the king’s own happiness so poorly, Solon says that only men who die at peace with themselves can be called happy, since “oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin.” Indeed, Herodotus will later narrate the story of how Croesus comes to lose everything precious to him—​the life of his favorite son, his kingdom, his fabulous wealth—​and the story’s payoff in Johnson’s version is clearly mythic, moral, not primarily historical. Hopes and 12 

I follow the text of Vanity given in Yale Works, vol. vi.

324   Jenny Davidson fears are a fact of human existence, Johnson concludes at the end of The Vanity of Human Wishes, and given that we can’t prevent ourselves from wishing for specific outcomes, only certain kinds of prayer are really appropriate, which is to say that while prayer is legitimate, it must be open-​ended rather than directed to specific goals and targets: “Still raise for good the supplicating voice, | But leave to heav’n the measure and the choice” (lines 351–​2). A useful survey of the traditionally conceived histories that Johnson read, reviewed, quoted, and in several cases even translated into English, can be found in John A. Vance’s Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History.13 As Vance writes in his introduction, The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that history was one of Johnson’s major interests, that he was well versed in historical works, that his mind was ripe with historical analogues and personalities, that he was desirous of employing them in his writings, that he wrote often in the historical vein, that he was cognizant of current historical theory and articulate on what made for good history, and that his was one of the best minds of the eighteenth century.14

The last clause is an example of a kind of judgment that most critics nowadays would be uncomfortable making in writing, even if they secretly believed it: it is a good example of what Helen Deutsch calls “author-​love” in her important book Loving Dr. Johnson.

Three Histories of Language and Literature I would go one step further than Vance does and say that it is worth thinking of Johnson as a historian. Among other things, he was the century’s most ambitious and successful historian of the English language; but the sense of history is crucial to many of his other works as well. In the last section of this chapter, I will consider three major projects that are among other things fundamentally historical in their interests and influences: the Dictionary, the Shakespeare edition, and the Lives of the Poets. We will not linger on the Dictionary’s historical aspects for long, as the work is covered amply elsewhere in this volume, but his work on the Dictionary marks a major stage in Johnson’s development as a historian, and though it takes a very different form, the Dictionary shares many of the ambitions of historical narratives by Hume, Catharine Macaulay, Robertson, Gibbon, and other British contemporaries. In the preface to the 13  John A. Vance, Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984). A list of the historical works Johnson reviewed in print can be found at 84, and see also the citations on 23ff. 14 Vance, Sense of History, 3.

History   325 Dictionary, Johnson has this to say about the historical purpose of the textual authorities he compiles in support of each definition: I have sometimes, though rarely, yielded to the temptation of exhibiting a genealogy of sentiments, by shewing how one authour copied the thoughts and diction of another: such quotations are indeed little more than repetitions, which might justly be censured, did they not gratify the mind, by affording a kind of intellectual history.15

One important goal of the Dictionary is to allow readers in far-​flung places and future times to “gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 110), and in his brilliant book on how Johnson approached the project of making the Dictionary, Allen Reddick points out that the Dictionary is usefully thought of as a precursor to the Lives of the Poets insofar as “both projects constitute encyclopedic overviews, though of different kinds, of almost two hundred years of literary production” (Reddick, Making, 11). Johnson consulted a number of explicitly historical works (things like Holinshed’s Chronicles, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas More’s History of Richard III) while working on the Shakespeare edition, as well as countless classical sources including Plutarch’s Lives. In this edition, we read the plays not just through Johnson’s eyes but through the eyes of Mr. Pope and Mr. Theobald, Sir Thomas Hanmer and Dr. Warburton. As their titles suggest, these figures are social-​historical entities rather than completely disembodied editorial intelligences, and one effect of the edition itself is to bring back to life the voices of these now deceased editors so that the reader can “hear” them on the variorum page.16 There are two different ways in which Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays can be thought of as profoundly historical. The more obvious one concerns the work he does in the annotations to cite the literary and cultural contexts without which many of Shakespeare’s allusions are cryptic to the point of altogether resisting comprehension. Lewis Theobald was Johnson’s greatest predecessor in this aspect of editing; many readers will know Theobald, if at all, only as Pope’s chief target in The Dunciad, but both his Shakespeare Restored, by exposing the weaknesses in Pope’s own edition of Shakespeare (and thereby eliciting the poet’s retaliation), and the full edition Theobald subsequently undertook, offer a brilliant and innovative approach to textual editing. By consulting print and manuscript sources so as to elaborate the details of customs and beliefs which Shakespeare assumes his audience will know, but that have been lost in the nearly two hundred years that have passed between the time of composition and the

15 

Samuel Johnson, preface to the Dictionary, in Yale Works, vol. xviii, 98; a note at the bottom of the page gives a nice concrete example. 16  On what it means to call this or other Shakespeare editions “variorum,” see the discussion in Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94–​106. And see also Jack Lynch, “The Dignity of an Ancient: Johnson Edits the Editors,” in Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso, eds., Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 97–​114.

326   Jenny Davidson time of readership, Johnson creates a rich cultural and literary history of Shakespeare’s age as well as of the playwright’s own writing. The second historical aspect to the project lies in the way Johnson’s edition also serves as a history of Shakespeare editing in eighteenth-​century Britain. It does this because it is a variorum edition, an edition that incorporates into its own notes at the foot of the page observations by previous editors. The readings and comments that Johnson chooses to incorporate are interesting for many different reasons: often because they are illuminating or because they show the earlier editor to advantage, but sometimes because they are comically wrongheaded or else just wrong in a way that helps Johnson’s edition move closer toward the truth. That truth is the truth of the text itself, which in certain cases needs significant emendation to remedy printers’ errors, but also the truth of what that text can be supposed to mean, with interpretation always dependent, to a greater or lesser extent, on a historical awareness of language and culture as they have changed over time. A good example of this can be found in Johnson’s annotation to the lines in Hamlet where Claudius reproaches his nephew for his ostentatious show of mourning: ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father: But you must know,1 your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound In filial obligation, for some term, To do2 obsequious sorrow.17

In the initial note, Johnson gives an (erroneous) correction made by Pope, who preferred the greater concision of “That father, his,” and then notes that Theobald restored the correct reading, with its reduplication “father lost, lost his.” Then he quotes Warburton, one of the eighteenth century’s great mansplainers, giving snarky and highly partisan commentary (he was concerned to defend Pope against Theobald’s incursions) on Theobald’s preference for the reduplicative reading. Finally, Johnson adds his own comment: “I do not admire the repetition of the word, but it has so much of our authour’s manner, that I find no temptation to recede from the old copies.” Johnson is an arbiter, in other words, but he is also a latecomer to a long conversation that he thinks will be worth eavesdropping on. Concerning another textual dispute, Johnson writes that “Mr Theobald and Dr Warburton have both told their stories with confidence, I am afraid, very disproportional to any evidence that can be produced,” and elsewhere he chastises editors “more diligent to display themselves than to illustrate their author.”18 Near the end of the final volume, Johnson offers an even more explicit philosophical reflection

17  The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (London, 1765), vol. viii, 142. The superscript numbers signal Johnson’s original annotations, and I have included them here to anchor my discussion of Johnson’s own notes. 18  Works of Shakespeare, vol. ii, 479 n. 1, original emphasis; vol. iv, 476.

History   327 on the relationship editors have with their precursors (it has a vanity of human wishes theme, with a touch of memento mori): I know not why our editors should, with such implacable anger, persecute our predecessors . . . the dead it is true can make no resistance, they may be attacked with great security; but since they can neither feel nor mend, the safety of mauling them seems greater than the pleasure; nor perhaps would it much misbeseem us to remember, amidst our triumphs over the nonsensical and the senseless, that we likewise are men; that debemur morti, and as Swift observed to Burnet, shall soon be among the dead ourselves. (Yale Works, vol. viii, 219, original emphasis)

It is one of history’s mandates to revivify old debates by showing what’s at stake in them. The marginal notes Johnson wrote in some of his own books display another dimension of how “alive” writing from the past seemed to Johnson as he read it. In a lovely essay titled “What Swift did in libraries,” Paddy Bullard describes readerly marginalia as “a kind of conversation with the text written upon the printed page.”19 Robert DeMaria usefully distinguishes between Swift’s style of marginalia and Johnson’s: Johnson did not enter into the kind of heated debates that Swift started in his reading of Thomas Burnet, for example. Swift not only argued with Burnet’s statements but also felt compelled to fill his margins with such ejaculations as “A damnable lie,” “partial dog,” “Dog, Dog, Dog,” and the blanket condemnation “All coffee-​house chat.” Johnson behaved differently; his notation in Melanchthon registers personal surprise about a public matter and makes a public note of something that touched him personally. He was, as it were, on the fringes of a conversation, not entirely engaged in it, but not simply on the outside, analyzing, extracting, and epitomizing in a professional way.20

The final place I turn to consider the question of what it means to call a work of Johnson’s a history is the Lives of the Poets. This project was driven by publishers’ requirements rather than by Johnson’s own desires. These short critical biographies (I should note that the noun biography would not emerge in English till after Johnson’s death, and that life-​ writing is more common in this period, with the noun life serving as the name for the

19 

Paddy Bullard, “What Swift Did in Libraries,” in Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty, eds., Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-​Century Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 65–​84, at 72. For more discussion of the tone of marginalia and the nature of the conversation between reader and writer (sometimes between more than one different reader as well), see H. J. Jackson, “ ‘Marginal Frivolities’: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading,” in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (New Castle and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2005), 137–​51; and Anthony Grafton, “Discitur ut agatur: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” in Stephen A. Barney, ed., Annotation and Its Texts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 108–​29. 20 DeMaria, Life of Reading, 52.

328   Jenny Davidson genre that follows the trajectory of one person’s lived experience as well as for that life itself) were composed as prefaces to an edition in many volumes of the English poets. Delays on Johnson’s part led the publishers to decide to print the prefatory biographies separately from the poetry, and the first twenty-​two lives were printed in four volumes in 1779 under the title Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, while thirty more lives were printed in six volumes in 1781 (these ten volumes joined fifty-​six volumes of the works of the poets themselves and a two-​volume index, for a total of sixty-​eight volumes).21 I will touch on a few moments in the Lives of the Poets where Johnson either develops an argument about history or considers individual lives as significantly intertwined with the larger currents of political and cultural transformation that surround them. The best biographies integrate the history of an individual life into a larger tapestry of story; in the case of many of Johnson’s lives of the poets, that is sometimes the history of the nation but more often the history of print and publication in the British archipelago. Johnson believes that a life is best written by a biographer who knew the subject personally: “The character of [the poet Edmund] Waller, both moral and intellectual,” he writes, “has been drawn by Clarendon, to whom he was familiarly known, with nicety, which certainly none to whom he was not known can presume to emulate” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 296). It isn’t just a subject’s moral and personal character that are best known to those who have lived with them in person: “nobody can write the life of a man,” Johnson tells Boswell, “but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”22 The Lives of the Poets don’t hold themselves to this high standard, since Johnson is more critic than life writer; as he puts it in the Life of Dryden, “To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand” (vol. xxi, 400). Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Johnson believes any kind of relatively recent history should be written on the basis of first-​person testimony, with the historian ideally acquiring that testimony by talking to living witnesses if they are not themselves an eyewitness. Vance quotes another passage from the Life of Johnson in which Boswell rashly expresses a wish for “an authentic history of the 1745 Jacobite uprising” and Johnson tells him in response that, if he weren’t an “idle dog,” he might write it himself “by collecting from every body what they can tell, and putting down your authorities.”23 Although a general history might be written without that kind of sourcing, there is a clear sense that the best history depends on the meticulous accumulation and sifting of authorities, preferably the testimonies of observers present at the events the historian wants to chronicle. This is less of a problem than one might suppose for the Lives of the Poets only because of how much knowledge Johnson has sorted and stored over a lifetime of reading and listening and learning. 21 

John Middendorf, introduction to Lives of the Poets, in Yale Works, vol. xxi, p. xxvi.

22 Vance, Sense of History, 154, quoting Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 166.

23 Vance, Sense of History, 136, quoting Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 162.

History   329 Another topic of interest throughout the lives concerns the portability of anecdote and the ease with which a story told of one person can get transplanted to another, thereby eroding the very possibility of truthful history. This is Johnson on Waller’s relationship with James II: James treated him with kindness and familiarity, of which instances are given by the writer of his life. One day, taking him into the closet, the king asked him how he liked one of the pictures: “My eyes,” said Waller, “are dim, and I do not know it.” The king said, it was the princess of Orange. “She is,” said Waller, “like the greatest woman in the world.” The king asked who was that; and was answered, Queen Elizabeth. “I wonder,” said the king, “you should think so; but I must confess she had a wise council.” “And, sir,” said Waller, “did you ever know a fool chuse a wise one?” Such is the story, which I once heard of some other man. (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 293)

The last sentence is key here: it shows Johnson in the same skeptical questioning mode as in the Journey, expressing a healthy degree of disbelief in the story precisely because it is so little rooted in the individual personalities of the two participants in the conversation. A good story takes on a life of its own, independent of the particular individuals in whose bodies it is provisionally anchored.24 This doesn’t discredit the whole enterprise. Johnson continues to write the lives of the poets. But the project does ultimately deflect our attention away from historical particularities (what one king said to one poet) to general truths (human failings make it almost impossible to write true history). In the Life of Pope, we get a different glimpse of how Johnson thinks about the stories we tell and whether they do or don’t productively feed into historical narratives. The Rape of the Lock was supposed to have been written to reconcile the two families whose falling-​out is the poem’s subject, with the idea (in Johnson’s summary of Pope’s intentions) that “a ludicrous poem . . . might bring both the parties to a better temper”: The event is said to have been such as was desired; the pacification and diversion of all to whom it related, except Sir George Browne, who complained with some bitterness that, in the character of Sir Plume, he was made to talk nonsense. Whether all this be true, I have some doubt; for at Paris, a few years ago, a niece of Mrs. Fermor, who presided in an English convent, mentioned Pope’s work with very little gratitude, rather as an insult than an honour; and she may be supposed to have inherited the opinion of her family. (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1057–​8)

24  On

the portability of anecdotes, see especially James Wood, Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019).

330   Jenny Davidson Oral tradition is particularly valuable, of course, when one doesn’t have access to the private papers that might offer independent support of the claims, and the niece’s testimony is weighted more heavily than Pope’s, given the poet’s incentive to manipulate the truth in order to present himself in the best possible light. Another favorite moment of mine comes elsewhere in the Life of Dryden when Johnson comes to discuss Dryden’s brilliant topical satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681), a poem that takes as its point of departure the fact of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and his desire to succeed (or perhaps even to replace) his father on the throne. “Of this poem, in which personal satire was applied to the support of publick principles, and in which therefore every mind was interested,” Johnson writes, “the reception was eager, and the sale so large, that my father, an old bookseller, told me, he had not known it equaled but by Sacheverel’s Trial” (vol. xxi, 405). Dr. Henry Sacheverel was a High Church Anglican clergyman who preached a rabble-​rousing sermon against Protestant Dissenters on November 13, 1709, the anniversary of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot; the sermon was printed later the same month and became a bestseller, as did the published report of the impeachment trial that followed. Johnson’s love for, and knowledge of, print are shown here as being part of a true family romance. He was brought up in the lower end of the trade and knows it as a birthright insider, with his father’s comment yet another instance of oral tradition valuably supplementing the written record. Johnson’s interest in the history of printed books and pamphlets in England comes through elsewhere in the Lives as well. The Life of Addison, for instance, tells the story of an important innovation in British print. Addison’s great contribution to literature came in the form of his collaborative papers the Tatler and the Spectator, short journalistic essays written not for study but rather for amusement (they were models for Johnson’s own Rambler): these papers are so brief and so accessible, Johnson says, that “The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience” to read them (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 613). He goes on to contextualize the longer tradition of this print innovation: “This mode of conveying cheap and easy knowledge began among us in the Civil War, when it was much the interest of either party to raise and fix the prejudices of the people.” It is not a very flattering assessment of the heritage of the pamphlet, but that partisan line of filiation is an important context for understanding what Addison (who had strong affiliations with the Whig party) hoped to achieve in this form, and offers a larger story about the history of publishing as well. Just as the Journey establishes how fragile and precarious the knowledge of past actions must be, so the Lives tend to emphasize the ease with which memorials are lost. Even the most famous writers leave little behind them of their lives as opposed to their work: Of [Dryden’s] petty habits or slight amusements, tradition has retained little. Of the only two men whom I have found to whom he was personally known, one told me that at the house which he frequented, called Will’s Coffee-​house, the appeal upon any literary dispute was made to him; and the other related, that his armed chair,

History   331 which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. This is all the intelligence which his two survivors afforded me. (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 434)

Telling but trivial—​they speak to Dryden’s verbal wit and his liking for preeminence—​ these details lead Johnson and the reader back to a more important underlying point about the ephemerality of literary success: “So slight and so scanty is the knowledge which I have been able to collect concerning the private life and domestick manners of a man, whom every English generation must mention with reverence as a critic and a poet” (vol. xxi, 435). And when we write the history of our closer contemporaries, ethical questions can intervene, as Johnson notes in the Life of Addison: “The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 637). The regret encapsulated in this refrain is one of the things that most clearly identifies Johnson as a historian, even as his humility in the face of the past’s evanescence separates him from those confident contemporaries who did choose to write narrative history.

Further Reading McDowell, Paula. The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Historicism Revisited.” In Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 365–​73. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. O’Brien, Karen. Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Roberts, Charlotte. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Vance, John A. Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Chapter 19

L aw Greg Clingham*

Johnson “had the skills of a very accomplished advocate; and he said more sensible things about the law than any lawyer who ever lived.” —​Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales1

The Profession of the Law “The books we call classics possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions.”2 One sign of Johnson’s classic status is the continuing attention paid to his writings by specialist and non-​specialist alike. As critical work in the long eighteenth century has exfoliated and morphed—​to include global, network, and transatlantic studies, orientalism, postcolonialism, (dis)abilities, queerness and sexuality,

* In this chapter I have reworked parts of two earlier publications, Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ­chapter 3, and “Hawkins, Biography, and the Law,” Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s “Life of Johnson,” ed. Martine W. Brownley (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 137–​54. I wish to acknowledge the unquantifiable but very real contribution to the formulation of ideas expressed in this chapter, by students in my “Law and Literature” seminar at Bucknell University, not least Lauren Gibbons, J.D., Dr. Elaine Wood, J.D., Dr. Lindsay Machen, Dr. Eliza Scadden, Professor Kate Parker, Professor Aaron Hanlon, John Brittain, Catherine Bryson, Melissa Ray, Kyle Winslow, and Andrew Graham, whose MA thesis, under my direction, “Johnson, Law, and Literature” (2005), is a notable work of criticism. 1  Tom Bingham, Dr Johnson and the Law and Other Essays on Johnson, foreword and intro. by Robin de Wilde (London: Inner Temple and Dr Johnson’s House Trust, 2010), 7. 2  Frank Kermode, The Classic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 41.

Law   333 thing-​theory, and new forms of historicism—​so interests in Johnson’s life and writing have, to some extent, echoed new developments, while still partaking of the established history of Johnsonian scholarship. However, one aspect of Johnson’s thought that has not been “open to accommodation” is his legal thinking. “He thought very favourably of the profession of the law” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 126). Our sense of Johnson’s knowledge of law goes back to his early biographers, especially Boswell and Hawkins, both lawyers, both willing to engage him in discussion about specific cases and to draw upon his expertise. In the twentieth century, Arnold McNair and E. L. McAdam, Jr. identify the range of Johnson’s legal interests and his knowledge not only of English common law, but also Roman (Scottish) law, international law or the law of the sea, canon law, and jurisprudence.3 Johnson had the scholarly background, the intellectual temperament, as well as the inclination to be a lawyer, but not the requisite formal training or credentials.4 The master of arts (1755) and honorary doctorate (1775) Johnson received from the University of Oxford were either too little or too late to enable him to become a practicing lawyer, but his life of writing was nevertheless saturated by law, both theoretical and practical. Johnson’s early mentors, Gilbert Walmsley and Cornelius Ford, taught him much about the law,5 and by voracious reading Johnson acquired a deep grasp of the knowledge expected of a lawyer in the eighteenth century: “classical language skills and scholastic logic or modern mathematics, a University ‘liberal education’ which included Civil law, literature, ethics, and history.”6 That reading included the work of Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, and Lord Kames. In identifying Johnson’s knowledge of the jurisprudence of Pufendorf, J. T. Scanlan suggests that “we should resist finding in Johnson’s legal work the mind of a practical eighteenth-​century lawyer,” for his legal thinking is characterized by “its remove—​its academic distance—​from the highly case-​specific, often grubby activities of eighteenth-​century legal actuality.”7 Yet Johnson’s legal advice was often sought by contemporary lawyers, including William Hamilton, Sir William Scott, Sir William Jones, Sir Robert Chambers, Lord Hailes, Sir John Hawkins, James Boswell, Arthur Murphy, Saunders Welch, Henry Ballow, and Joseph Simpson. They engaged Johnson on a very wide range of legal issues, including

3 

Sir Arnold McNair, Dr Johnson and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948); E. L. McAdam, Jr., Dr. Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1951). 4 On the educational requirements for the law in the eighteenth century, see David Lemmings, Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144. For introductory accounts of Johnson’s legal preparation and thought, see J. T. Scanlan, “Samuel Johnson’s Legal Thought,” in Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, eds., Samuel Johnson after Three Hundred Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112–​30, and “Law,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 25–​33. 5  W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 83, 139; McNair, Dr. Johnson and the Law, chap. 1. 6 Lemmings, Professors of the Law, 121–​2. 7 J. T. Scanlan, “Johnson and Pufendorf,” 1650–​ 1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 8 (2003), 46, and “Samuel Johnson’s Legal Thought,” 113.

334   Greg Clingham capital punishment, corporal punishment, vicious intromission (that is, copyright), personal injury, corruption, defamation, inheritance, wills, entails, equity, public indecency (that is, sexual harassment), fornication, political elections, fraud, road tax, church patronage, slavery, military insubordination, divorce, political representation (that is, the rights of the poor), trade embargoes, investment and dividends, and the Charter of the East India Company. In addition to this extraordinary list of topics on which Johnson was consulted, he also wrote independently on law and the history of law, most obviously in the lectures on the history of English common law that he contributed to Sir Robert Chambers’s Vinerian lectures on law given at Oxford in 1767–​73. Only recently has Johnson been fully recognized for his part in the composition of these lectures, especially the first four.8 However, there is much more: Johnson’s knowledge of English legal history is evidenced in another large, ghostwritten undertaking that has only recently become part of the canon, the Debates in Parliament (1741–​4; see Chapter 13, “Polemic”). Furthermore, he wrote extensively, polemically, and sometimes movingly about law in works that have long been part of the canon, most obviously in political writings associated with war, sovereignty, nationhood, trade, embargoes, economics, election law, and electoral rights, but also in his moral essays and sermons, in which he tackles debt, prostitution, the age of consent, enslavement, imprisonment, prison reform, capital punishment, privacy, and penal rectitude. Many of these concerns come into sharp focus in the elaborate legal appeal Johnson undertook for Rev. William Dodd when he was awaiting execution for embezzlement. In short, Johnson engaged with a broader, more challenging range of legal topics than most contemporary lawyers and most modern lawyers. Indeed, insofar as one of his great themes is justice—​religious, moral, social, political, critical, and personal—​almost all Johnson’s writing is implicitly about law, if only in the exploration of the discrepancy between law and justice. When Boswell—​who benefited from Johnson’s legal advice—​ described the qualities of Johnson’s mind and manner of thinking, he may as well have been describing Johnson the lawyer: [The] art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we so often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom. (Life, vol. iv, 427–​8)

8  See Sir Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, 1767–​1773, ed. Thomas M. Curley, 2 vols. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and Thomas M. Curley, “Johnson’s Secret Collaboration,” in John J. Burke, Jr. and Donald Kay, eds., The Unknown Samuel Johnson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 91–​112; and “Johnson, Chambers, and the Law,” in Paul J. Korshin, ed., Samuel Johnson after Two Hundred Years (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 187–​210.

Law   335

An Old Gothic Castle Why then is Johnson’s legal thought not taken seriously? One reason may be precisely because of the interconnectedness of his thought; because he who thinks rationally must think morally, Johnson’s legal deliberations invariably expand into philosophical-​ moral or critical thinking. This movement of mind is part of the practicality of Johnson’s legal thought, the application of law to everyday life. Yet one can see why this manner of writing might be thought of as non-​legal. We think of lawyers as dealing with technicalities, precedents, and minutiae, not with wisdom. In comparison to specific humanities disciplines—​literature, criticism, biography, philosophy, religion, lexicography, political science—​we think of law as partaking of quite different evidentiary and argumentative protocols. It is a profession, not one of the humanities, certainly not an art. Despite the modern cult of the celebrity lawyer, law still exists within the shadow of its ancient, authoritative, and religious origins, considered as a bureaucracy comprised of rules, statutes, and injunctions. Recently, however, law has been studied in response to the linguistic and the theoretical turn taken by the humanities and the social sciences. It has become discursive and not merely prescriptive; and both in practice and theory, law has developed provocative associations with the humanities, and is thought of as a constitutive (not merely imitative) mode of cultural production and representation. For James Boyd White, one of the founders of the critical-​legal-​studies “movement,” law is a rhetorical enterprise, “a particular set of resources made available by a culture for speech and argument on those occasions, and by those speakers, we think of as legal.”9 Similarly, Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (among others) find the rhetorical nature of law as taking the form of narrative. Law may exist within a culture of argument (rather than of fiction) and address appropriately legal scenarios—​trial, litigation, appeal, and review—​but it also partakes of the fictive nature of narrativity.10 These legal theorists appeal to a theoretical language to describe the fictive nature of legal language and the fundamental reliance of law on creative language to establish and maintain its meanings. Indeed, for Hayden White, the relationship between these terms is inextricable: “narrativity, whether of the fictional or the factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system.”11 Yet these views are by no means incommensurate with the assumptions and practices of seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century legal thinkers—​Sir Edward Coke, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Blackstone, Sir Robert Chambers—​who promote the idea

9 James

Boyd White, “Rhetoric and Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life,” Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 33. 10  Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 11  Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 13.

336   Greg Clingham of law as inseparable from, and productive of, the formation of English and British national identity. The teleology associated by Alisdair MacIntyre with Aristotle’s idea of the “good life,” as the framework within which enlightenment thought develops, is absorbed by the idea of the rule of law as the touchstone of a civil and secular society.12 For Paul Kahn, the rule of law is the triumph of reason over will, a mythic historical structure that posits the emergence of both law and nation out of a state of nature, at the beginning of modern history.13 When Blackstone, Hale, and Chambers write the history of English law, the humane reasonableness of British institutions (constitutional government and all the freedoms and restrictions it ensures) is explained and justified by the laws which enabled their emergence. The relationship between laws and their origins, however, is the subject not only of history but also of fiction, as (for example) Chambers reveals in his highly figurative vision: The laws of a civilized and flourishing people, like mature and vigorous fruit-​trees, though they afford shade, ornament, shelter and sustenance, to their proprietors, are yet rooted in obscurity, and derive their juices, life, and beauty from sources which it is toilsome to search after, and not always possible to discover. Yet such a knowledge of their origins as can be gained, every one surely must desire, who is entrusted with their culture or interested in their preservation.14

The historical point of this passage is clearly dependent on the metaphoric mode of writing, and one wonders if this might have been one of the passages written by Johnson for Chambers. In any case, it suggests how the structure of eighteenth-​century historical-​ legal narrative is paradoxically produced through repeated acts of retrospective invention: they discover the new in the old, and the old in the new, a repetitious movement that allows the community to affirm an origin by establishing a new poetically mapped teleology. In The History of the Common Law of England (written in the 1670s, published 1713), Hale describes the tradition of common law as the “binding Power and the Force of Laws by a long and immemorial Usage, and by the Strength of Custom and Reception in this Kingdom.”15 In the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–​9), Blackstone codifies and connects various social and historical principles that made up English law. In a famous passage, he embraces the law’s asymmetries and inconsistencies and asserts their logic and historical (and legal) value by appealing to their fictional nature: We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied 12 

Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985), 217. Paul W. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 15–​16, 43–​55. 14 Chambers, Course of Lectures, vol. i, 83–​4. 15  Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law in England, ed. Charles M. Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 17. 13 

Law   337 halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The inferior apartments, now converted into rooms of contrivance, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult.16

Blackstone ties together the themes of property, common law, and the English constitution, recognizing that the law’s intricate structure, however “venerable,” cannot be dismantled, because it is a figure of the past’s participation in the present; nor can it be reduced to a rule, because it represents centuries of evolved living.17 Using such figurative tropes allows Blackstone, in Michael Meehan’s words, to deploy his “central fiction,” “ ‘the Law’ as the elusive author underlying legal writing.”18 This facilitates a vision—​the legal system in a state of timeless harmony, constantly remaking itself—​that informs the diverse civic and historical tradition that includes not only the writings of Coke, Hale, Blackstone, and Chambers, but also the histories of David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, as well as Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The eighteenth-​century legal thinker’s tasks were as clearly identified with the creative uses of language as was the novelist’s or biographer’s, “familiar history” being, of course, another term for “novel” in the eighteenth century.19

That Every Man May Have His Cause Fairly Tried When Boswell discusses the ethics of legal representation with Johnson in 1768, he asks two questions common in modern law schools: does the “practice of the law . . . hurt the nice feeling of honesty”? and “What do you think of supporting a cause which you know to be bad”? Johnson’s response reveals much about how he thinks about law: Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad till the Judge determines it. I have said that you are to state facts fairly; so that your thinking, or what you call knowing, a cause to be bad, must be from reasoning, must be from your supposing your arguments to be weak and inconclusive. But, Sir, that is not enough. An argument which does not

16  Sir

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–​1769, intro. by Stanley N. Katz, A. W. Brian Simpson, John H. Langbein, and Thomas A. Green, 4 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. iii, 268. 17  See Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 166–​7. 18 Michael Meehan, “Authorship and Imagination in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Eighteenth-​Century Life 16, no. 1 (1992), 111–​23, at 122. 19  For the lawyer-​biographer, see Gordon Turnbull, “Boswell and Sympathy: The Trial and Execution of John Reid,” in New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of “The Life of Johnson,” ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 104–​15.

338   Greg Clingham convince yourself, may convince the Judge to whom you urge it: and if it does not convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong, and he is right. It is his business to judge; and you are not to be confident in your own opinion that a cause is bad, but to say all you can for your client, and then hear the judge’s opinion. (Life, vol. ii, 47)

In this conversation, Johnson draws attention to the rhetorical nature of law as a means of demarcating it from opinion, personal feeling, and conviction. What are the proper parameters of legal ethics? What constitutes legal efficacy? Since the legal system accords both litigant and defendant the right to representation, Johnson points out that the advocate’s professional obligation takes precedence over their feeling. Within the space created by tradition and the court, the judge (and the jury), are, paradoxically, both the test and the terminus of legal argument.20 “An argument which does not convince yourself, may convince the Judge to whom you urge it; and if it does convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong, and he is right.” In 1773, while in Scotland, Johnson argued similarly against Sir William Forbes’s view that “an honest lawyer should never undertake a cause which he was satisfied was not a just one”: “Sir, . . . a lawyer has no business with the justice or the injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge” (Life, vol. iv, 26). The advocate’s view is thus less important in a legal context than their skill and the judge’s assessment, for the judge (and the jury) in court determine the efficacy of the argument. Relative as it sounds, the advocate’s argument together with the judge’s determination produces the truth of the matter under consideration. This is not to abnegate responsibility—​the lawyer knows what he thinks of the “cause”; it is rather to argue legally. To Sir William Forbes, Johnson reasons: “Consider, Sir; what is the purpose of courts of justice? It is, that every man may have his cause fairly tried, by men appointed to try causes” (vol. v, 26). To Boswell’s concern that the advocate dissimulates by “affecting a warmth when you have no warmth” (Life, vol. ii, 47), Johnson emphasizes the rhetorical nature of legal advocacy. Not only is the lawyer’s rhetoric not ethically suspect, but within the formal structure of the court and its field of signification, the lawyer’s authority is also actually constituted by his argument. This is more than “refreshing common sense”;21 it is knowledge of how legal argument and courts function. Johnson introduces a formal, impersonal element to offset Boswell’s personal perspective (“what you call knowing”), recognizing that legal truth is not a given (a precedent or statute) but the property and product of argument. As Robert Weisberg notes, “Truth is not the property of an event; rather, it is the property of an account of an event.”22 Paradoxically, however, the formality of legal representation for Johnson includes a personal dimension, for the lawyer 20  See J. H. Baker, “The Changing Concept of a Court,” in The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London: Hambleton Press, 1986), 153–​69. 21 McAdam, Dr. Johnson and the English Law, 125. 22  Robert Weisberg, “Proclaiming Trials as Narratives: Premises and Pretenses,” in Law’s Stories, 68.

Law   339 does for “the client all that his client might fairly do for himself ” (vol. v, 26). It is to stand in the shoes of the client while remaining in one’s own. One feature of the critical-​legal-​studies approach to law is the flexibility with which practitioners and scholars grasp the relationship of statute to language, and precedent to practice. In the tradition of Hale, Blackstone, Chambers, and, indeed, Johnson, these terms are interrelated, changing, and imbued with life, for the focus of law is the experience of persons within society. Such a view informs Blackstone’s ability to think of English law as at once ancient and new, like an old castle renovated for present use. This tradition also underpins Justice Stephen Breyer’s approach to the U.S. Constitution as a “living” document that asks to be interpreted within the framework of the past for the purpose of addressing present social needs. The ethical content of law for Breyer lies in the consequences of its application to present circumstances, because law is always connected to life.23 This is an essentially Johnsonian position. For Johnson, language shapes law in the effort to apply it productively and justly to life under present, changing circumstances. In what follows, I discuss two of Johnson’s legal briefs—​to do with historically important issues, property and slavery—​to demonstrate how knowledgeable and effective his legal thought is, and how it lends itself to a teleology commensurate with a civil society.

A Case Compounded of Law and Justice In 1775, a dispute arose between Boswell and his father about the Auchinleck estate. Lord Auchinleck sought to entail the estate to protect its integrity from Boswell’s waywardness. Lord Auchinleck’s marriage settlement bound him to consult Boswell as heir. Although an entail might exclude Boswell’s descendants from inheritance, he nonetheless supported the idea, having what he called “a zealous partiality for heirs male, however remote” (Life, vol. ii, 414), and he urged his father to include only males in the entail. Boswell wanted to emulate the practice of David Boswell (1587–​1661, 5th laird and Lord Auchinleck’s great grand uncle), who had bypassed his four daughters in order to settle the estate on his nephew, Lord Auchinleck’s grandfather, though David Boswell had done this as an isolated act without entailing the estate away from females. Boswell wanted to include his son, Alexander (born 1775), but to bypass his daughters (Veronica, born 1773, and Euphemia, born 1774—​a third, Elizabeth, was born in 1780), and to entail the estate on the male heirs of Thomas Boswell, the founder of the estate (1504).24 23 Stephen Breyer, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), esp. 15–​34. 24  See Frank Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–​1795 (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1984), 115–​27. In 1767, Boswell was advising the sons of Sir Alexander Mackenzie of Gairloch (c.1730–​70). Sir Alexander wanted to break the entail settling his estate on his eldest son (Alexander Mackenzie), in order to provide for the children of his second wife. In his journal, Boswell wrote: “Made library [your] consulting room

340   Greg Clingham Boswell wrote to Johnson (January 2, 1776) about the dispute, seeking his “friendly opinion and advice”; Johnson replied in six letters during 1776, that of January 15, February 3, February 9, February 15, February 24, and March 5.25 Johnson’s attitude toward property was complex. Generally, he assented to Locke’s proposition that “the great and chief end . . . of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”26 He valued the principle of continuity of landed estates; when staying with Lord Erroll at Slains Castle in 1773, “he spoke well in favour of entails, to preserve lines of men whom mankind are accustomed to reverence” (Life, vol. iv, 101). At the same time, Johnson thought of property with a broader sense of justice and social purpose. Not unlike Hume, for whom justice was a concept necessitated by natural selfishness and brutality,27 Johnson’s justice is instrumental. In 1776, in talking of the plight of another Scottish estate, that of Norman Macleod (1754–​1801), Johnson said, “Entails are good, because it is good to preserve in a country, serieses of men, to whom the people are accustomed to look up as to their leaders”; but he followed up this seemingly definitive statement with an important qualification: “But I am for leaving a quantity of land in commerce, to excite industry, and keep money in the country; for if no land were to be bought in a country, there would be no encouragement to acquire wealth, because a family could not be founded there” (vol. ii, 428–​9). In the case of the Auchinleck estate, the stakes were different, and Johnson considers the entail very deliberately. First, he establishes his limited legal knowledge: one needs “more knowledge of local law, and more acquaintance with the general rules of inheritance, than I can claim” (Life, vol. ii, 416). He therefore recommends that Boswell consult someone more qualified, Lord Hailes, who is “both a Christian and a Lawyer . . . [and] above partiality, and above loquacity” (vol. ii, 415). Yet, this is a “case compounded of law and justice” and requiring a “mind versed in juridical disquisitions” (vol. ii, 415), so Johnson engages seriously with Boswell’s questions, and in doing so demonstrates significant legal knowledge. He proceeds on two tracks, one addressing specific issues of Scots law, and one addressing general issues of natural justice. He recognizes that Boswell’s desire for an entail has three, interlinked aspects: one is the legality of entailing the estate only on males; a second is the wisdom—​the justice—​of making any entail at all; and a third is Boswell’s sense of obligation to an ancestor, David Boswell, as the basis for a legal decision. Johnson makes clear distinctions between these three because he understood that

to inspire you with the noble ideas of antiquity of family while you wrote in favour of entails.” Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–​1769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-​Hill Book Company, 1956), 56. 25 

These letters are included in Life, vol. ii, 412–​23, from which I quote. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Second Treatise, section 124. 27  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​ Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 495. 26  John

Law   341 estate law shaped social arrangements (for example, the commercial possibility to acquire land and establish family) and he wanted to articulate the implications of each position. He also knew that as a legal instrument the entail was not unproblematic, that it confounded some tenets of common law. The most important development of feudal estate law was the identification of the “heritable fee” as the unit of real estate. Blackstone notes that “the Tenant in fee simple . . . is he that hath lands, tenements, or hereditaments, to hold to him and his heirs for ever; generally, absolutely, and simply; without mentioning what heirs, but referring that to his own pleasure, or to the disposition of the law” (Commentaries, vol. ii, 104). Ownership implied the capacity to give away what one owned (alienability); alienability was one’s freedom to violate biological, historical, or legal imperatives of succession, if one chose to; the “fee simple” could thus descend to both males and females at the donor’s discretion, privileging his (or her) agency and intentionality in each successive heritable instance. “Fee simple” was thus a challenge to primogeniture.28 Entails, though not equated with the law of primogeniture, were developed in the thirteenth century in order to address the fragmentation of ownership by “restricting categories of heirs in ways not possible at common law” (Commentaries, vol. ii, 112).29 Although entails were used socially to shape and aggrandize families, especially commercially enriched Whigs, Blackstone saw “estates tail” as creating “mischiefs unknown to the common law; and almost universally considered as the common grievance of the realm” (Commentaries, vol. ii, 116). Adam Smith, later in the century, thought entails worked against liberty, because they are “founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.”30 When Johnson asks Boswell to consider his ancestor’s “motives” and “intention” in excluding his daughters from the inheritance of Auchinleck, he draws attention to the limits of what we can know as to David Boswell’s legal determination: you enquire, very properly, what were his motives, and what was his intention; for you certainly are not bound by his act more than he intended to bind you . . . Intentions must be gathered from acts. When he left the estate to his nephew, by excluding his daughters, was it, or was it not, in his power to have perpetuated the succession to the males? If he could have done it, he seems to have shewn, by omitting it, that he did not desire it to be done; and, upon your own principles, you

28 

J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 2nd ed. (London: Butterworths, 1979), 223. For the history of the entail, see Sandra Macpherson, “Rent to Own; or, What’s Entailed in Pride and Prejudice,” Representations 82, no. 1 (2003), 1–​23; see also Baker, Introduction to English Legal History, 232. 30  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and R. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), vol. i, 385. 29 

342   Greg Clingham will not easily prove your right to destroy that capacity of succession which your ancestors have left. (Life, vol. ii, 417)

Because David Boswell chose not to entail the estate on males when he had the power to do so—​he only bypassed the daughters but preserved the alienability of the fee for future donees—​B oswell is under no obligation to institute such a measure. Nor is he legally bound to do so, for “the rules of succession are, in a great part, purely legal . . . no man can be supposed to bequeath any thing, but upon legal terms.” There is no clear legal ground for “limit[ing] that succession which descended to you unlimited” (vol. ii, 418, 417). This emphasis on the formal nature of the legal decision is strategic. Boswell “apprehended that we were under an implied obligation, in honour and good faith, to transmit the estate by the same tenure which we held it, which was as heirs male, excluding nearer females” (vol. ii, 415). Yet Johnson points out the limited (not universal) nature of David Boswell’s will, and notes, “Providence is not counteracted by any means which Providence puts into our power.” Emphasizing the formal nature of the will, Johnson attempts to address Boswell’s fascination with an arbitrary course of action, “the supposed necessity of a rigorous entail” (Life, vol. ii, 421). Johnson then links the legal argument to social and historical considerations. Because (following Locke and Blackstone) “natural right” is meaningless without “the protection of law,” and because “the primary notion of law is restraint in the exercise of natural right,” in exercising one’s legal rights, “regard is to be paid to moral obligations” (vol. ii, 416). For Johnson, moral obligations imply considerations not only of personal pleasure or conviction, but also an understanding of temporality, of the relation of the present moment to past and future. “Laws are formed by the manners and exigences of particular times, and it is but accidental that they last longer than their causes” (Life, vol. ii, 416). The warlike nature of feudal societies, and the “obligation to attend his chief in war” (vol. ii, 417), justified the limitation of the fee to men; but “as manners make laws, manners likewise repeal them” (vol. ii, 419). In the cosmopolitan, civilized, commercial world of the eighteenth century, the restrictions associated with primogeniture or feudal entails are no longer necessary. This leads the conscientious, deliberate Johnson to make an extraordinary deduction: because “times and opinions are always changing, I know not whether it be not usurpation to prescribe rules to posterity, by presuming to judge of what we cannot know” (vol. ii, 417). In Johnson’s Dictionary, usurpation is “forcible, unjust, illegal seizure or possession.” We learn that Boswell did indeed consult Lord Hailes, and that his view, that “the succession of heirs general was the succession, by the law of Scotland, from the throne to the cottage” (Life, vol. ii, 418), coincided with Johnson’s. But just as Johnson resists Boswell’s superstitious obligation to antiquity, so he questions Hailes’s extreme aversion to entails. With characteristic clarity Johnson notes, “Providence is not counteracted by any means which Providence puts into our power” (vol. ii, 421). Concerning entails, both necessity (Boswell) and aversion (Hailes) are extremes (“scruples”) to be avoided.

Law   343 However, Johnson’s analysis goes further: not only is male inheritance unnecessary in modern times, but also any attempt to “limit that succession which descended to you unlimited” (vol. ii, 417) violates common law and “moral obligations.” These obligations vindicate the rights of women, which Blackstone recorded, and Johnson echoed: “women have natural and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are not to be capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed” (vol. ii, 419). Dismissive as Johnson occasionally was of women, there is little doubt that he sought to understand their social and familial plight; he also advocated for women’s equity, not least by arguing for the liberal education of girls.31 But in challenging Boswell’s patriarchalism, Johnson takes the equitable claims of women even further: [It] may be extended to all hereditary privileges and all permanent institutions . . . I do not see why it may not be extended to any provision but for the present hour, since all care about futurity proceeds upon a supposition, that we know at least in some degree what will be future. Of the future we certainly know nothing. (vol. ii, 420)

This is a radical proposition within the context of eighteenth-​century British culture, yet in keeping with Johnson’s philosophizing it moves from a specificity that could have material consequences, to a general teleology. It aligns itself more with the “law” than with the “precedents” that Johnson distinguishes from each other in a conversation with Sir Alexander Macdonald in 1772: “the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law; that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles” (vol. ii, 158). The radical content of Johnson’s proposition is thus absorbed into a narrative about temporality and memory, which echoes Rambler 41, in which the human mind finds meaning in the present moment by playing it off past and future.32 In discussing Auchinleck, Johnson addresses questions of ownership, inheritance, and justice in a manner he describes as “immethodical and deliberative” (Life, vol. ii, 418). Deliberate he defines in the Dictionary as “circumspect; wary; advised; discreet”; and immethodical as “without proceeding in due or just order.” These are unusual stylistic features to enlist in the production of a narrative of legal temporality. Yet, when combined, they produce “some glimmering of evidence” (vol. ii, 418), as Johnson probes precedents, motives, fantasies, fears, and confused obligations. By applying an understanding of legal precedents, Johnson posits an alternative concept of inheritance within a narrative that associates the efficacy of common law with the power of personal agency 31  For

Johnson on the legal status of girls in society and the family, see Greg Clingham, “Playing Rough: Johnson and Children,” in Anthony W. Lee, ed., New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2018), 145–​82, esp. 172–​4. Apropos Johnson’s condemnation of Lady Diana Beauclerk for adultery, the criminality of which lay in the “confusion of progeny” (Life, vol. ii, 55–​6) and hence of property, Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer argues that Johnson applies ecclesiastical rather than civil law. See “A Neutral Being Between the Sexes”: Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998), 32–​7. 32  See Clingham, Johnson, Writing, and Memory, 24–​6.

344   Greg Clingham in the present. Not unlike Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Johnson grasps the intimate relationship between rule-​governance and concrete-​contextual interpretation: In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is the essential tension between the text set down—​of the law or of the proclamation—​on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by its application in the particular moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching.33

In developing this version of the legal mythos, Johnson exemplifies Lord Kames’s idea of equity: “To determine every particular case according to what is just, equal, and salutary, taking in all circumstances, is undoubtedly the idea of a court of equity in its perfection.”34

No Man Is By Nature the Property of Another In discussing the Auchinleck entail, Johnson asks: “Is land to be treated with more reverence than liberty?”—​and the link between property and liberty pertained not only to women, but also to Blacks and slaves. In the matter of his own estate, Johnson attracted strong opposition from friends, especially Sir John Hawkins, for making Francis Barber, the former Jamaican slave, his residual legatee.35 Notwithstanding his disapproval, Hawkins, who attested the will (and its codicil) along with William Strahan, honored Johnson’s intention.36 He knew Johnson understood the law. For Johnson, no less than for Locke, the “Natural Liberty of Man” and the “Liberty of Man, in Society” were inextricably linked to property, including the property invested in the fruits of one’s labor.37 For the slave Joseph Knight, there was no such liberty.38 He had been purchased in Jamaica by Sir John Wedderburn of Ballendean and had been brought to Scotland in 1769. When Knight became aware of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s ruling in favor of 33  Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (Westport, CT: Continuum, 1975), 275. 34   Henry Home, Lord Kames, Principles of Equity, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1800), 15. See Sarah Winter, “Scottish Enlightenment Concepts of Equity in the Nineteenth-​Century British Novel,” in Ralph McLean, Ronnie Young, and Kenneth Simpson, eds., The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 245–​68, esp. 245–​7. 35  For the legal context of Barber’s inheritance, see Clingham, “Hawkins, Biography, and the Law,” 137–​54. 36  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 356–​62. 37 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 283. 38  For Johnson and the case of Joseph Knight, see Nicholas Hudson, “Johnson, Race, and Slavery,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Law   345 the enfranchisement of the slave James Somerset (1772), a landmark decision that effectively outlawed slavery in Britain, Knight commenced suit against Wedderburn in 1774. In September 1777, Wedderburn appealed to the Scottish Court of Session, arguing that Knight owed him perpetual service, and the court heard the case with a panel of twelve judges, including Lord Kames. Boswell was not officially involved but, knowing that Johnson “had always been very zealous against slavery in every form” (Life, vol. iii, 200), discussed it with him. On the 23d of September, Johnson dictated a brief in favor of Knight that Boswell inserted in the Life (vol. iii, 202–​3). Johnson’s moral opposition to slavery—​tendentiously referred to by Boswell as “a zeal without knowledge” (vol. iii, 200)—​underpins his legal arguments. Indeed, while Johnson develops a legal argument, he does not—​nor cannot—​separate moral and economic considerations from legal ones. He begins with natural law and moves on to economic and moral considerations. Although slavery has existed in many societies, “it must be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man,” because “men in their original state were equal” (vol. iii, 202, 203). This is a remarkable proposition for the skeptical, conservative Johnson. While his politics were pragmatic and instrumental, and generally (as Donald Greene notes) eschewed the ideology of natural rights,39 Johnson here appeals to a tradition of natural law on which to base the moral assessment of slavery. This was an idea articulated by Pufendorf, Hale, Blackstone, and Chambers, that had underpinned English common law from medieval times. In Hale’s words, natural law “is the Law of Almighty God given by him to Man with his Nature discovering the morall good and moral evill of Moral Actions”; common law “cannot forbid what the Law of Nature injoins, nor Command what the Law of Nature prohibits.”40 As Blackstone and Chambers also acknowledge, natural law was antecedent, preparatory, and also subsequent to civil government, positing a paradoxical relationship between natural and civil law whereby the former is not only the origin but also the outcome of the application of reason. Certainly, for Johnson, “All government is ultimately and essentially absolute,” in that the rule of law, on which government depends, must be enforced: “In sovereignty there are no gradations . . . There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal.”41 Yet civil order cannot countenance slavery, just as it does not justify the rapacious behavior of the American colonists that Johnson critiques in Taxation No Tyranny. To enforce this idea legally in the case of Knight, Johnson turns to reason, and argues as follows. One may forfeit one’s liberty by criminal activity, but one cannot “by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.” Likewise, one may be captured and enslaved by a conquering army, but one cannot “entail that servitude on his descendants; for no man can stipulate without commission for another” (vol. iii, 202). Even if it could be 39 

Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 169–​70. 40  Sir Matthew Hale, Of the Law of Nature, ed. David S. Sytsma (written 1668–​70; Grand Rapids, MI: CLP Academic, 2015), 41, 194. 41  Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, in Yale Works, vol. x, 422, 423.

346   Greg Clingham admitted that there are circumstances that “make slavery necessary and just,” it cannot be proved that Joseph Knight was subject to them (vol. iii, 202). Indeed, Johnson asserts, Knight is “subject by no law,” only to Wedderburn’s violence, whose claim is economic, for he “bought [Knight] from a merchant of slaves”; yet their right to sell Knight “never was examined” (vol. iii, 202). Johnson was aware that Knight had to contend with a nexus of economic and social ideas that subordinated Africans to Europeans and that associated slavery with Providence, as Boswell does in his poem, No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal Empire of Love (1791), published as Wilberforce introduced the Abolition Bill in Parliament. In the Life, Boswell registers a “solemn protest” against what he calls the “wild and dangerous attempt” to undermine slavery, by emphasizing its economic benefits. Slavery, we are told, is a “very important and necessary . . . branch of commercial interest” (vol. iii, 203); “To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-​ subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages” (vol. iii, 204). However, against Boswell’s economic sentimentality and stadial fantasization, shared by many at the time, Johnson emphasizes the legality of Knight’s cause. In Jamaica, where “the rights of mankind” are considered as “merely positive” (i.e., theoretical not actual), Knight’s enslavement might be considered legal, for an African, whose “colour is considered as a sufficient testimony against him,” has “no redress” (vol. iii, 203). But this view is “apparently injurious to the rights of mankind, because whoever is exposed to sale is condemned to slavery without appeal” (vol. iii, 202–​3). How can a policy “without appeal” be legal—​or true? Furthermore, the social and human consequences of the policy are to be considered; “in the present case there is apparent right on one side, and no convenience on the other.” Why so? Because in Britain, law, custom, and values are different from the Caribbean: “Inhabitants of this island can neither gain riches nor power by taking away the liberty of any part of the human species” (vol. iii, 203). Not only is this situation illegal, it is also immoral. Johnson sums up his brief by returning to the logic of common law as underpinned by natural law: “No man is by nature the property of another: The defendant is, therefore, by nature free. The rights of nature must be some way forfeited before they can be justly taken away: That the defendant has by any act forfeited the rights of nature we require to be proved: and if no proof of such forfeiture can be given, we doubt not but the justice of the court will declare him free” (vol. iii, 203). On January 15, 1778 the Court of Sessions voted by 8 to 4 to allow Joseph Knight to leave domestic service, declaring, “the dominion assumed over this Negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country to any extent: That, therefore, the defender [Wedderburn] had no right to the Negro’s service for any space of time, nor to send him out of the country against his consent: That the Negro was likewise protected under the act 1701, c. 6. from being sent out of the country against his consent.”42 42  National

Records of Scotland, https://​web​arch​ive.nrs​cotl​and.gov.uk/​201​7010​6025​723/​http://​www. nas.gov.uk/​about/​071​022.asp.

Law   347

Manners Make Laws Though no radical, Johnson’s legal thinking has politically and socially liberal implications, gainsaying the stereotype of the amateurish conservative often associated with his writing. In both the Auchinleck and the Knight cases, Johnson’s arguments are rooted in jurisprudence and common law, while he reinterprets legal language to change perspectives that were once deemed to be absolute. “As manners make laws, manners likewise repeal them.” Johnson’s grasp of the relation of past to future in legal thinking is highly nuanced. He brings a critical and informed legal-​historical understanding to bear on precedent, tradition, and assumed realities, including the specifics of constitutional language that modern-​day originalists erect into a shibboleth. Such literalism as Boswell seeks to apply to ancient estate law will not withstand the fresh air of contemporary experience. Johnson asks, what are the social and political consequences of a law? How are people in the present world to live by law? The English common law may, as Johnson says to Hester Thrale, be “the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public,”43 but, equally, “Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth” (Life, vol. i, 454). It is also the test of law, challenging us to bring law into alignment with life, and life with law. This liberal-​revisionist orientation of Johnson’s legal thinking anticipates the humane jurisprudence of Stephen Breyer. Bringing law and life into alignment with each other in turn informs Johnson’s broader imaginative project in cultural memory and historical consciousness, the account of which requires consideration of his moral essays, political writings, fiction, and the Lives of the Poets. For unlike policy formation, legal decision-​making begins from sources that always already have authority in the community—​law and nation emerging together as part of the same act of historical imagination—​while constantly seeking to be re-​examined and renewed. Johnson’s substantial body of legal discourse, only a part of which I have discussed, belongs to the long tradition of civil, historical, and legal thought in Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its contribution to that tradition deserves to be more fully appreciated.

Further Reading Chambers, Sir Robert. A Course of Lectures on the English Law, 1767–​1773, edited by Thomas M. Curley. 2 vols. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Clingham, Greg. Johnson, Writing, and Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Clingham, Greg. “Hawkins, Biography, and the Law.” In Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s “Life of Johnson,” edited by Martine W. Brownley, 137–​ 54. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012.

43 

Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 223.

348   Greg Clingham Curley, Thomas M. “Johnson’s Secret Collaboration.” In The Unknown Samuel Johnson, edited by John J. Burke, Jr. and Donald Kay, 91–​112. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Curley, Thomas M. “Johnson, Chambers, and the Law.” In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 187–​210. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Kahn, Paul W. The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. McNair, Sir Arnold. Dr. Johnson and the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. Scanlan, J. T. “Samuel Johnson’s Legal Thought.” In Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, edited by Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, 112–​30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Chapter 20

P oliti c s Thomas Kaminski

In 1781, Boswell coaxed from Johnson a distinction between Whig and Tory. Boswell coyly set the scene by declaring himself “a zealous Tory”; then he asked Johnson’s help in understanding what such a declaration might actually mean. Johnson responded with the following comparison: Of Tory and Whig A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different. A high Tory makes government unintelligible: it is lost in the clouds. A violent Whig makes it impracticable: he is for allowing so much liberty to every man, that there is not power enough to govern any man. The prejudice of the Tory is for establishment; the prejudice of the Whig is for innovation. A Tory does not wish to give more real power to Government; but that Government should have more reverence. Then they differ as to the Church. The Tory is not for giving more legal power to the Clergy, but wishes they should have a considerable influence, founded on the opinion of mankind; the Whig is for limiting and watching them with a narrow jealousy. (Life, vol. iv, 117–​18)

Johnson’s initial assertion—​that all wise men share the same principles and therefore agree—​calls to mind Rasselas or the Rambler, works in which politics can hardly find a foothold. All wise men, Johnson implies, respect properly constituted authority; all know that liberty is different from license; and so forth. But once we turn our attention to specific questions, agreement is harder to come by. What is the appropriate balance between liberty and civil order? How do we know when authority

350   Thomas Kaminski is “properly” constituted? As to the Church, is that a single, established church? or a variety of creeds? Only ordained clergy? or any person with an inward light? These were in fact real questions that exercised Johnson and his contemporaries, and Whigs and Tories, however wise they might have been, found little firm ground for agreement. Johnson’s statement, dictated to Boswell in a moment of tranquility, sketches out several useful characteristics—​the Whig’s love of liberty and inclination toward innovation; the Tory’s favoring establishment, including the established Church—​but we rarely encounter the political Johnson in this reasonable, dispassionate mood. Whether in the reports of his conversations or in his political writings themselves, he is generally a man of party. We know he was a Tory, but what precisely did that mean? Was the Tory Johnson also Jacobite Johnson, a political outsider who refused allegiance to Hanoverian usurpers? And how had his political commitments changed by the 1760s, when he received his pension? or by the 1770s, when he wrote pamphlets defending various Whig governments of George III? These are the main concerns of this chapter. For a general overview of Johnson’s political opinions, we can start with the concise account that Hester Thrale committed to her diary in December 1777: I must here have a Stroke at his Political Opinions, though God knows he has not left them dubious till now. He is a Tory in what he calls the truest sense of the Word; and is strongly attached to the notion of Divine & Hereditary Right inherent in Kings: he was therefore a Jacobite while Jacob existed, or any of his Progeny was likely to sit on the Throne: he is now however firmly attached to the present Royal Family; not from change of Principles, but difference of Situations, and he is as zealous that this King should maintain his Prerogatives, as if he belonged to the exiled Family: his Aversion to a Presbyterian is great, to a consistent, Whig as he often calls a Deist, ’tis still greater.1

In these remarks, we find many of the ideas that contribute to the popular understanding of Johnson’s politics: his proudly proclaimed Toryism, his Jacobitism, his subsequent acceptance of the Hanoverian dynasty in the person of George III, and his hatred of both Whigs and religious Dissenters. But the passage itself is not without difficulties. Hester Thrale ties Johnson’s Jacobitism to a belief in the “divine and hereditary right” of kings; but two other sources, James Boswell and Thomas Cooper, averred that Johnson did not believe in divine right. Also, on what basis did Johnson accept George III as king? Would he have been willing to take the oath abjuring the Stuart claimant to the throne? The key to answering these questions lies in our understanding of what it meant to be a Tory in “the truest sense of the word.”

1  Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–​1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. i, 192.

Politics   351

What Was a Tory? The original Tories were the supporters of Charles II during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–​81, when a parliamentary party, recently labeled the Whigs,2 had attempted to exclude the king’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession. Along with their allies in the Church, the Tories upheld two primary political doctrines: the indefeasible hereditary right of the king, and passive obedience to kingly authority. Although Protestants themselves, the Tories were willing to accept a Catholic king on the basis of his hereditary right. Once he became king, of course, James would quickly alienate even these most devoted subjects by placing Catholics in positions of trust and attempting to nullify laws that penalized both Catholics and Dissenting Protestants. With the Revolution of 1688, the Tories found themselves in an impossible situation. The Convention Parliament had demonstrated its power to dismiss hereditary right and to set the Crown where it pleased; and resistance had proved superior to obedience in matters of public policy. Many Tories, swept up in the events of the day, grudgingly accepted William and Mary as joint monarchs, but even then, often only as de facto rulers. Others refused their assent altogether. About 400 clergymen, including nine bishops, refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new king and queen: they had sworn an oath in favor of James II, and nothing that Parliament had done, they believed, could release them from that bond. These Nonjurors, as they were known, claimed to represent the authentic tradition of the Church of England, continuing to preach the old doctrines of hereditary right and nonresistance.3 The Tories muddled on until William’s death. Under Anne, some deluded themselves into believing that their former principles had been vindicated: James II had died in exile in 1701, and his Protestant daughter was now on the throne. But those who still clung to the notion of indefeasible hereditary right knew that this too was all imposture. The “true” king was James’s son, born just months before the Revolution, Anne’s half-​ brother living in France as the putative James III. A Tory who upheld the old principles could hardly fail to be a Jacobite. With the death of Anne and the accession of George I, the Tories would be deprived of any meaningful role in government for nearly half a century. The first two Georges were determined to rule only with Whigs, and they had little difficulty in doing so. The nation had grown comfortable with the Revolution and had welcomed the Act of Settlement (1701), which set the Protestant succession firmly in the male line of the House of Hanover. Before long the Tories were reduced to a small minority in the Commons, 2  Both labels were originally intended as slurs. A Tory was an Irish papist outlaw; a Whig, a Scottish Covenanter rebel. 3  For the Tory response to the Revolution, see W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 94–​110; and J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–​1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 5–​34. See also Robert D. Cornwall, “Nonjuring Bishops,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

352   Thomas Kaminski where they acted in permanent and ineffective opposition. There was, of course, no little irony here. The party that had been founded to support royal authority now proved suspicious of all political power: its members opposed a standing army, complained of assaults on individual liberty, and railed at political corruption. Malcontent Whigs, that is, ambitious men who were “out” and desired to be “in,” often joined the Tory rump in opposition, hoping to bring down Sir Robert Walpole or some other great man, but such coalitions proved little more than political theater. Over time some Tories acknowledged the futility of their opposition, accepted the Revolution, and reconciled themselves to the ruling family; others kept to the old paths, but always with a pebble in their shoe, the constant irritation of knowing that the society in which they lived violated their fundamental beliefs.

Johnson the Tory In this context, we can now examine what Johnson’s friends and biographers said of his Tory politics.4 Sir John Hawkins, a good Whig who had known Johnson since the 1740s, clearly disapproved of his political notions and wrote of them with great exasperation: The truth is, that Johnson’s political prejudices were a mist that the eye of his judgment could not penetrate: in all the measures of government he could see nothing right; nor could he be convinced, in his invectives against a standing army, as the Jacobites affected to call it, that the peasantry of a country was not an adequate defence against invasion of it by an armed force. He almost asserted in terms, that the succession to the crown had been illegally interrupted, and that from whig-​politics none of the benefits of government could be expected . . . At other times, and in the heat of his resentment, I have heard him assert, that, since the death of Queen Anne, it had been the policy of the administration to promote to ecclesiastical dignities none but the most worthless and undeserving men: nor would he then exclude from this bigotted censure those illustrious divines, Wake, Gibson, Sherlock, Butler, Herring, Pearce, and least of all Hoadly; in competition with whom he would set Hickes, Brett, Leslie, and others of the nonjurors, whose names are scarcely now remembered.5

With strong distaste Hawkins depicts Johnson as a man who shamelessly asserts traditional Tory opinions: he opposes a standing army, attacks the Revolution, laments its consequences, and exalts nonjuring theologians while showing contempt for time-​ serving Whig divines. Hawkins hints at Jacobitism—​he had earlier mentioned that

4  The

arguments given here are developed at greater length in my essay “The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism,” in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-​ Hill, eds., The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 9–​56. 5  Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 51.

Politics   353 Johnson’s father had been a Jacobite—​but he seems unwilling to attribute so gross a failing to Johnson outright, perhaps attempting to preserve the posthumous reputation of his friend. Boswell fills out the picture of Johnson’s Toryism by recording numerous comments on the importance of the hereditary right of the king, which had been interrupted at the Revolution. He preserves a long, vehement argument on the subject between Johnson and his Whig friend John Taylor (September 17, 1777): Johnson: Sir, the state of the country is this: the people knowing it to be agreed on all hands that this King has not the hereditary right to the crown, and there being no hope that he who has it can be restored, have grown cold and indifferent upon the subject of loyalty, and to have no warm attachment to any King . . . For, Sir, you are to consider, that all those who think a King has a right to his crown, as a man has to his estate, which is the just opinion, would be for restoring the King who certainly has the hereditary right . . . And you must also consider, Sir, that there is nothing on the other side to oppose to this; for it is not alledged by any one that the present family has any inherent right: so that the Whigs could not have a contest between two rights. (Life, vol. iii, 156)

For Johnson, as for most true Tories, heredity provided the king an “inherent right” to govern that could not be transferred to another claimant by the decrees of Parliament. We find similar sentiments in a conversation of March 22, 1783 with General Oglethorpe, an old Tory of Johnson’s stripe whose family had included prominent Jacobites: Oglethorpe. “The House of Commons has usurped the power of the nation’s money, and used it tyrannically. Government is now carried on by corrupt influence, instead of the inherent right in the King.” Johnson. “Sir, the want of inherent right in the King occasions all this disturbance. What we did at the Revolution was necessary: but it broke our constitution.” (vol. iv, 170–​1)

For Johnson the Revolution had disrupted a natural relation that existed between the king and his subjects. It was necessary to remove James II, he tells us, but the way in which it was done “broke our constitution.”6 Parliament might alter the succession, but the true right of kingship inhered in the disabled claimant. It is worth noting that both of these conversations took place long after Johnson had supposedly been reconciled to George III and the Hanoverian succession. But in matters of principle, Johnson had never changed. The Revolution had undermined the nation’s fundamental law and destroyed the true source of kingly power.

6  This was a reasonable Tory position. At the Convention Parliament, many Tories had supported a regency; a motion in the Lords on this matter lost by only three votes, 51 to 48: see Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries, 99–​100.

354   Thomas Kaminski The king’s indefeasible hereditary right, of course, had been one of the fundamental elements of Tory political theory. Nowhere does Johnson embrace all the aspects of that theory—​that is, he never argues explicitly for the patriarchal foundations of government or the divine right of kings—​but he seems to accept the theory’s broad implications: men must be bound together by something more than expediency or contract. The gravest flaw of the Revolution and of Whig politics generally was the presumption that all law was of human contriving and that legislatures could meddle in whatever matters they chose. For these reasons Johnson disapproved of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which declared null and void the marriage of any descendant of George II who married without the king’s permission. “I would not have the people think,” he told Boswell, “that the validity of marriage depends on the will of man, or that the right of a King depends on the will of man” (Life, vol. ii, 152). Marriage rested on the vows made by husband and wife before God; a decree of the legislature could not invalidate those acts.7 The right of the king was similar: the son inherited the right to rule from his father. The Convention Parliament could not change that simple fact. Some things are beyond the reach of politics.

Toryism and the Church In the Dictionary, Johnson defines a Tory as “one who adheres to the antient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig.” This definition is more tendentious than most modern readers will recognize. In his reference to the “ancient constitution,” Johnson certainly intended the structure of the state before the Revolution: as we have seen, he believed that the Revolution had broken the constitution. Many Whigs reading this definition must in fact have found it perverse: their party, they might sputter, had saved the constitution from the assaults of an absolutist monarch. This, for instance, was Burke’s opinion.8 But Johnson is distinguishing Tory from Whig: if the Tory adheres to one principle, the Whig must follow another. Johnson’s decision to commit his Tory to the “apostolical hierarchy” of the Church is similarly contentious. The apostolic succession—​the belief that the Church’s bishops had been consecrated one by another and their authority transmitted in an unbroken chain from the apostles to the present day—​was an important element of High-​Church ecclesiology. Many of the fundamental practices of the Church were 7 

Johnson added that although one could not invalidate such marriages, they might be punished: “I should not have been against making the marriage of any of the royal family, without the approbation of King and Parliament, highly criminal.” 8  See J. G. A. Pocock, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution,” The Historical Journal 3 (1960), 127–​9. Whigs, in fact, were divided over this question. Some argued that the Revolution had saved the ancient constitution, but during the 1730s others began to claim openly that the Revolution had brought in a modern constitution that was superior to the ancient: see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 130–​1.

Politics   355 seen to depend on it, especially the efficacy of the sacraments. Johnson’s Tory, then, like Johnson himself, was a High Churchman,9 one who considered the church a sacralized institution capable of imparting grace through its sacraments and whose bishops derive their authority not from the civil magistrate but from Christ himself.10 But Johnson’s singling out the apostolic hierarchy would have had other political resonances as well, for many latitudinarian clergy thought the apostolic succession unimportant or even doubtful, while Dissenters dismissed episcopal authority. The validity of that authority had come under attack shortly after the accession of George I. In 1716, the Nonjuror bishop George Hickes had written that the church itself was God’s kingdom on earth, that “Christ is the king of this kingdom, and the bishops his chief ministers and vicegerents in it, to whom in their respective jurisdictions he requires obedience from all his subjects.”11 Benjamin Hoadly, the latitudinarian Bishop of Bangor, took it upon himself to confute the arguments of Hickes and other high-​flyers. In March 1717, he preached a sermon before the king directly contradicting Hickes’s thesis: Christ himself was the Church’s “sole law-​giver”; he had left behind “no visible, humane authority, no vicegerents” to act in his stead. The bishops, according to Hoadly, possessed no divine commission; the apostolical hierarchy was an empty claim.12 The sermon had even deeper political undertones: if the church was not an apostolic institution, what justification could there be for exclusionary rules like the Test Act? It should not be surprising that in his contempt for Whig bishops, as Hawkins tells us, Johnson reserved his worst abuse for Hoadly. The true “Tory” of his definition stands with the Nonjuror Hickes and other High Churchmen against latitudinarian divines who would strip the church of its sacred character. Johnson’s dislike of Dissenters and his willingness to have them excluded from positions of public trust also arises from something more than a mere desire for social conformity. As Arthur Murphy tells us, Johnson frequently said that the religion of the English Dissenters was “too worldly, too political, too restless and ambitious.”13 Near the end of The False Alarm (1770) Johnson made the charge explicit: Wilkes, he tells us, has been supported by “the sectaries, the natural fomenters of sedition, and confederates of the rabble, of whose religion little now remains but hatred of establishments” (Yale Works, vol. x, 344). In the Dissenters’ creed, he finds all the worst aspects of Whig

9   Hawkins attests that Johnson always professed himself a “high-​churchman” (Hawkins, Life, 152). Similarly, Boswell describes Johnson as “a sincere and zealous Christian, of high Church-​of-​England and monarchical principles” (Life, vol. iv, 426; vol. v, 17). 10  See Robert D. Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-​Juror Thought (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 64–​6, 82–​5. 11  George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church, and the Nature and Consequences of Schism (London, 1716), 24. 12  Benjamin Hoadly, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ: A Sermon (London, 1717), 11. In an earlier work, A Preservative against the Principles of the Nonjurors (London, 1716), Hoadly had dismissed the apostolic succession as unimportant and unlikely to be true (78–​9). 13  Arthur Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,” in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), vol. i, 429.

356   Thomas Kaminski politics. But this should hardly be surprising. For Johnson, religion and politics were intertwined. He would not have found it easy to disentangle his professed high churchmanship from his own Tory politics. They were two expressions of the same sense of the world.

Was Johnson a Jacobite? There can be little doubt that Johnson had for many years been a Jacobite, that is, one who believed that James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of James II, living in exile in Italy, was the rightful king of Great Britain. As we have already seen, Hester Thrale, writing eleven years after the death of the putative James III, confided as much to her diary. But she was not alone, for Johnson had never kept his political opinions secret. Hawkins tells us that in the years following the Forty-​five, the members of the Ivy Lane Club had to refrain from insulting the defeated Jacobite rebels, some of whose heads were prominently displayed on Temple Bar, or risk Johnson’s wrath. In 1762, John Wilkes, in the North Briton, archly noted that “Dictionary” Johnson had been generously rewarded by a Hanoverian prince, adding, with a touch of annoyance, that Johnson “has much to unwrite, more to unsay, before he will be forgiven by the true friends of the present illustrious family, for what he has been writing and saying for many years.” And in The Ghost, Charles Churchill, recalling Johnson’s attack on pensioners in the Dictionary, sneered at him as Pomposo, who “damns the Pension which he takes, | And loves the Stuart he forsakes.”14 Even Boswell, who often plays down Johnson’s Jacobitism in his published writings, was more direct in his journals, where he recorded the following remark to Topham Beauclerk (April 7, 1773): “I said Mr. Johnson’s accepting a pension from a prince whom he had called an usurper was a circumstance which it was difficult to justify with perfect clearness.”15 Only a Jacobite would call George III a usurper. Nevertheless, the precise nature of Johnson’s beliefs is harder to determine. Elsewhere in his journals, for instance, Boswell had indulged in a bit of chop-​logic: “Mr. Johnson is not properly a Jacobite. He does not hold the jus divinum of kings.”16 Hester Thrale, on the other hand, had noted Johnson’s strong attachment to “Divine & Hereditary Right inherent in Kings.” The two positions, however, may not be wholly irreconcilable. Hester Thrale’s language echoes in part other authentic pronouncements of Johnson’s—​the importance of “hereditary right” and the present king’s lack of any “inherent right.” These, we may assume, were Johnson’s typical formulations. And Boswell’s direct assertion that

14 Hawkins, Life, 151; Wilkes, North Briton 11 (August 14, 1762); Charles Churchill, The Ghost, 3.819–​20, in Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 127. 15  W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and F. A. Pottle, eds., Boswell for the Defence, 1769–​1774 (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1959), 166. 16  F. A. Pottle and C. H. Bennett, eds., Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (New York: Viking, 1936), 162.

Politics   357 Johnson did not believe in divine right suggests that he may have questioned Johnson on the subject. Nevertheless, Johnson clearly founded the king’s authority on some form of inherent right based, at least in part, on heredity. It was apparently difficult, even in Johnson’s day, to distinguish his sense of the king’s inherent right from the full Stuart notion of divine right; Hester Thrale could not tell them apart. But this much is certain: in Johnson’s view, the king’s right depended on something more than the mere will of the people. As to the intensity of Johnson’s feelings, Boswell left this well-​known account: “I have heard him declare, that if holding up his right hand would have secured victory at Culloden to Prince Charles’s army, he was not sure he would have held it up; so little confidence had he in the right claimed by the house of Stuart, and so fearful was he of the consequences of another revolution on the throne of Great Britain” (Life, vol. i, 430). This, according to Boswell, made Johnson a “moderate” Jacobite, which seems a reasonable conclusion overall.17 Over time, of course, it had become clear that Jacobitism was a vain pursuit. James the Old Pretender, as he was styled, would die in 1766, leaving a dissolute and unreliable heir in his son Charles. There would be no second Stuart restoration. And in April 1773, Johnson conceded that possession itself could give the ruling family a right to the throne: Talking of the family of Stuart, he said, “It should seem that the family at present on the throne has now established as good a right as the former family, by the long consent of the people; and that to disturb this right might be considered as culpable. At the same time I own, that it is a very difficult question, when considered with respect to the house of Stuart. To oblige people to take oaths as to the disputed right, is wrong. I know not whether I could take them: but I do not blame those who do.” (Life, vol. ii, 220)

This concession, though, is limited and hedged around: nearly sixty years of rule had merely provided the current family “as good a right” as the Stuarts, and even then Johnson was unsure whether he could take the oaths. His moral and intellectual predicament is expressed in an anecdote from 1779 told of him by William Burke: “I remember about two years agoe that Leviathan Jacobite, saying in company ‘No Madam, we have not relinquished our principles, we think the right to be, where we always thought it; various circumstances induce us to an acquiescence in what is, without abandoning our opinions of what ought to be.’ ”18 However much he may have been willing to yield to the times, in principle Johnson remained a Jacobite.

17 

Boswell recorded this anecdote in three versions: in the Life as given here; in his journals for April 7, 1773 (Boswell for the Defence, 166); and again in his journal of the Highland tour, September 13, 1773 (Boswell’s Journal of a Tour, 163). In the version of April 7, Boswell states that Johnson “would not have” held up his hand to secure victory for Prince Charles’s army; it is also there that he calls Johnson a “moderate” Jacobite. 18  William Burke to the Duke of Portland, July 26, 1779, in Portland Papers, University of Nottingham Library, Pw F 2149.

358   Thomas Kaminski

Was Johnson a Nonjuror? In Johnson’s day, the term nonjuror had two possible meanings: it could indicate either a member of the nonjuring sect of the Church of England or anyone unwilling to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration in favor of the ruling monarch. As noted above, the Nonjurors came into existence as a sect shortly after the Revolution, when a substantial number of clergy, including nine bishops, refused the oaths to William and Mary. When subsequently deprived of their livings, these clergy and their followers separated from the main body of the Church. In the decades that followed, Nonjuror controversialists defended many doctrines of the pre-​Revolution church, including the king’s indefeasible hereditary right and the apostolic succession. While the pull of contemporary politics led to the appointment of numerous Whig or latitudinarian bishops, the Nonjurors stood out as the theologians of the old Toryism. Johnson clearly felt a strong affinity for these polemical writers, praising, as we have seen, George Hickes, Thomas Brett, and Charles Leslie to an exasperated Sir John Hawkins. But Johnson’s contacts with the Nonjurors went even further. At Oxford he had encountered William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which first turned his mind seriously to religion. During the early 1740s, he became friendly with Archibald Campbell, a Scottish Nonjuring bishop, from whom he developed the practice of saying prayers for the dead, a practice that to many Protestants marked him out as a crypto-​Catholic. When revising the Dictionary in the early 1770s, he appears to have carefully added quotations from Laudian and Nonjuring writers.19 And yet, despite the strong pull of Nonjuror doctrine, Johnson never joined the nonjuring church itself; he told Boswell that he had never even entered a nonjuring meeting house (Life, vol. iv, 288). We do not know why he should have distanced himself from a body whose writers he championed and whose religious practices he admitted; perhaps he refused to condone schism. It is less certain whether Johnson would have been willing to take the oaths. We know that he disliked requiring oaths generally. A man’s interest will often get the better of his principles, and so he will swear falsely: “surely nothing has more tendency to make bad subjects than irreligion,’ he observes in his “Remarks on the Militia Bill” (1756), “and nothing will sooner make men irreligious, than the frequency of oaths” (Yale Works, vol. x, 158). But this tells us nothing of his own readiness to comply. At Oxford he would

19  For

complete background on Johnson and the Nonjurors, see Matthew M. Davis, “ ‘Ask for the Old Paths’: Johnson and the Nonjurors,” in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-​Hill, eds., The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 112–​67. On the addition of Nonjuror writers to the Dictionary, see Allen Reddick, “Johnson beyond Jacobitism: Signs of Polemic in the Dictionary and the Life of Milton,” ELH 64 (1997), 983–​1005. Hawkins defends Johnson at length from the charge that he believed in Purgatory, concluding the passage with the following note: “Johnson in his early years associated with this sect of nonjurors, and from them, probably, imbibed many of his religious and political principles” (Hawkins, Life, 272 n).

Politics   359 have been required to take the oaths upon graduation, but he left without a degree. He appears to have avoided taking the oaths in his few abortive attempts at teaching school, and none of his later activities seems to have required them.20 But one of Johnson’s friends, Thomas Tyers, noted that at the time of his pension Johnson was “one of the few non-​jurors that were left,”21 an assertion that is supported by the anonymous letter to Lord Bute recommending Johnson for that award.22 These witnesses suggest, at least at that time, a refusal to swear. Johnson’s reluctance may have turned on the wording of the oaths themselves. After the death of the Old Pretender in 1766, Johnson may have been willing to take the oath of allegiance to George III, for it demanded only that he swear to “be faithful, and bear true allegiance” to the king. But the oath of abjuration was more difficult; it required that one declare before God that the Pretender “hath not any right or title whatsoever to the crown.”23 We know from various conversations—​with John Taylor, with General Oglethorpe, and with others—​that Johnson, up to the last years of his life, believed that the Stuart claimant retained the hereditary right, although this might now be overborne by the long possession of the Hanoverians. We would do best to trust Johnson’s own statement from 1773, quoted above, which shows his uncertainties even at that late date: “I own, that it is a very difficult question, when considered with respect to the house of Stuart. To oblige people to take oaths as to the disputed right, is wrong. I know not whether I could take them: but I do not blame those who do.”

Political Writings, 1739–​4 4 The most significant of Johnson’s political writings fall into two periods, from 1739 to 1744 and from 1770 to 1775. The first of these followed Johnson’s move to London, where he hoped to make a name for himself as an author; the second reflected his response to a series of political crises resulting from a new, more popular form of Whiggism that he despised.

20   For the circumstances under which Johnson might have been expected to take the oaths, see J. C. D. Clark, “Religion and Political Identity: Samuel Johnson as a Nonjuror,” in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-​Hill, eds., Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 87–​113. 21  Tyers, “Biographical Sketch,” in O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 74. 22  The writer noted that Johnson’s “political principles make him incapable of being in any place of trust, by incapacitating him from qualifying himself for any such office. But a pension my Lord requires no such performances.” The oaths were the means by which a man “qualified” himself for office. For the letter to Bute, see Marshall Waingrow, ed., The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the “Life of Johnson” (London: Heinemann, 1969), 514. 23  For the full texts of the oaths, see J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98.

360   Thomas Kaminski Johnson settled in London toward the end of 1737. After failing to find a producer for his tragedy Irene and achieving only moderate (and anonymous) success with his poetic satire London, he turned to imitating Swift. During the late 1730s, the opposition in Parliament—​a combination of refractory Tories and malcontent Whigs—​kept up persistent attacks on the Walpole administration over two primary issues: that it maintained its power through political corruption and that it had pursued a cowardly foreign policy toward Spain, whose coastguard privateers preyed on English shipping in the West Indies without retaliation. In London, Johnson had already signaled his sympathy with the “Patriots” (as the members of the opposition called themselves), delivering some glancing blows on both of these topics; but his main satiric targets were broader, more general than the immediate political situation. In 1739, however, he would write two Swiftian political pamphlets, each using an ironic narrator to ridicule the current state of affairs. Marmor Norfolciense (“The Norfolk Marble”) makes use of an old satiric form, the political prophecy. The marmor itself is an old stone bearing a Latin inscription in “monkish rhyme” recently discovered in Sir Robert Walpole’s home county of Norfolk. The Latin tells of a future time of woe, when red serpents will devour the produce of the land, the lion turn cowardly and watch his sons trampled, and the horse suck the lion’s blood. The satire develops as a bumbling commentator attempts to interpret these obscure portents. To the supporters of the opposition, of course, the meanings were clear: the red serpents were the standing army, the lion the British nation, cowering before Spanish aggression. The horse, though, was the heraldic symbol of the House of Hanover, and its sucking the lion’s blood went well beyond common Patriot propaganda. The imagery showed contempt for the current royal family. The commentator’s remarks had their own surprises: he notes, for instance, “how common it is for intruders of yesterday, to pretend the same title with the ancient proprietors, and having just received an estate by voluntary grant, to erect a claim of ‘hereditary right’ ” (Yale Works, vol. x, 28). Few could miss the political implications: the entire piece stank of Jacobitism. Indeed, in 1775 the enemies of the North ministry had Marmor reprinted in order to embarrass both Johnson and the government he then supported. One reviewer called it “a bloody Jacobitical pamphlet, on the most avowed anti-​revolutional principles,”24 a judgment that one can hardly quibble with. Johnson’s second pamphlet of 1739, A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, arose from a particular event, the government’s suppression of Henry Brooke’s play Gustavus Vasa. The Lord Chamberlain had long had the power to regulate public spectacles, which included the theater, but Walpole, provoked by Henry Fielding’s recent theatrical lampoons, chose to put that power on a more formal footing with the Stage Licensing Act of 1737. Brooke’s play, which featured a corrupt royal counselor as a parallel to Walpole and reveled in the Patriot rhetoric of liberty, was the first to be denied a license. Brooke quickly became the darling of the Opposition. Johnson responded with

24 

Quoted in Clark, Samuel Johnson, 165.

Politics   361 another ironic attack on the administration, this time adopting the persona of a self-​ important political insider who dismisses all criticism of the government and sneers at the idealistic notions of the Patriots. The persona marvels at the folly of men who have “rejected all offers of places and preferments” and “appear in every step to consult not so much their own advantage as that of posterity” (Yale Works, vol. x, 56, 57). A true politician, of course, considers only his own immediate interest. The Patriots, we are told, believe that all true superiority is founded upon merit, which notion the speaker pompously rejects as incompatible with “that system of subordination and dependence to which we are indebted for the present tranquillity of the nation” (vol. x, 60). At this point a seasoned reader of Johnson will be brought up short: is Samuel Johnson, the great champion of subordination in society,25 here dismissing it as a flimsy excuse employed by the comfortable and privileged? Yes. At the time he appears to have been dazzled by the Patriot rhetoric of selfless devotion to liberty. Before long, we know, he would be disabused of such notions, and no word was more likely than Patriot to raise his bile. But as a young man he was carried along with the political tide, and he championed ideals that some years later he would treat with contempt. Johnson’s most extensive body of political writing is in fact journalistic rather than polemical (see Chapter 6, “Journalism,” and Chapter 13, “Polemic”). From July 1741 through March 1744, he wrote the parliamentary debates that appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. At that time Parliament prohibited the reporting of its debates, but strong popular interest drove Edward Cave, the magazine’s publisher, to risk prosecution and bring out accounts of its proceedings. Cave would attend the debates with friends, adjourn to a tavern afterwards, and compile notes recounting who had spoken and what had been said. These notes, often sketchy, sometimes inaccurate, were subsequently given to Johnson, who turned them into speeches. As a result, the debates stand as doubtful reconstructions of what had taken place in Parliament, based loosely on authentic materials, but elaborated in various ways by Johnson’s need to fill pages of the magazine.26 But the debates tell us little about Johnson’s politics. Their arguments are remarkably balanced, and even though Johnson once told a gathering of friends that he “took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it,”27 an open-​minded reader finds little evidence of bias in the texts (see Chapter 13, “Polemic”). Johnson’s brusque claim of partisanship is also complicated by the fact that the actual debates in Parliament were largely carried on by warring factions of Whigs. We hear Tory voices now and then, but the most persistent attacks on the government come from Whig “outs” who want to get “in.” In addition, by this time Johnson appears already to have become disillusioned with the Patriots. In any case, he allowed every faction to have its say. Sir Robert Walpole 25  See,

for instance, Johnson’s exchange with George Dempster (1763) on merit versus subordination: Life, vol. i, 442. 26  For full background on the debates, see the introduction to Johnson’s Debates in Parliament, in Yale Works, vol. xi, pp. xv–​lviii. 27  For the anecdote, recounted by Arthur Murphy, see the introduction, Yale Works, vol. xi, pp. xv–​xvi.

362   Thomas Kaminski himself is permitted to expound his policies without the disfiguring taint of caricature.28 In the debates, Johnson demonstrated remarkable skill in political argument, but we get little sense of what he himself thought. He seems to have treated them as a rhetorical exercise rather than an opportunity to express his personal beliefs.

Political Writings, 1770–​1775 Between 1770 and 1775, Johnson wrote four political pamphlets in support of the policies of the Grafton and North governments: The False Alarm (1770), a defense of the Commons’ expulsion of John Wilkes from his seat in the House; Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771), a vindication of the North administration’s conduct in defusing a potential crisis with Spain; The Patriot (1774), an electioneering pamphlet disparaging the current Opposition; and Taxation No Tyranny (1775), as its subtitle explains, “an answer to the resolutions and address of the American Congress.” Although each was prompted by a particular occasion, all four works tend to return to a narrow set of issues that appear to have dominated Johnson’s political thinking at this time, especially the rise of popular resistance to governmental authority, and the willingness of politicians to exploit civil discord for personal gain. Both, of course, were natural consequences of what Johnson termed “Whig politics.” The popular unrest arising from the Wilkes affair had clearly disturbed Johnson, and his distress is never far from the surface in The False Alarm. Wilkes’s story is well known: his conviction for seditious libel in 1764; his flight to France; his return to London in 1768, deeply in debt; his determination to escape both his creditors and his political enemies by winning a seat in Parliament; and his repeated victories in the Middlesex elections of that year, all subsequently declared invalid by the House—​with many of these events played out before unruly crowds crying out for “Wilkes and liberty!” The bulk of the pamphlet defends the right of the Commons to declare Wilkes ineligible for a seat: the House, Johnson argues, had always retained the right to determine electoral disputes, and in rejecting a man convicted of both libel and obscenity, it has done little more than had been done before. But this long-​established power of the Commons has come under attack, and as the pamphlet progresses, one can sense Johnson’s growing contempt for Wilkes and his supporters. With blatant sarcasm he describes the progress of a petition, as a combination of the ignorant and the wicked seek to instruct their governors in the proper conduct of the nation’s business. He then turns to direct insult, sneering at Wilkes’s mob: “As we once had a rebellion of the clowns, we have now an opposition of the pedlars,” whose actions are prompted by “the natural malignity of the mean against the great” (Yale Works, vol. x, 341). And as we have already seen, he

28  For

a full discussion of bias in the debates, see Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 132–​9.

Politics   363 scorned “the sectaries, the natural fomenters of sedition, and confederates of the rabble” (vol. x, 344). He had long disdained the Whig clamor for liberty, but he was perhaps even more distressed now, for it had escaped the preserves of the old Whig establishment and was bawling its complaints among tradesmen, mechanics, and idlers. Its earlier effects had been to deprive government of its natural respect; it was now threatening the social order itself. Johnson’s next two pamphlets—​his reflections on the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770 and his delineation of the character of a “Patriot”—​focus primarily on a single issue, the unprincipled exploitation of faction by those in opposition to the government. In the first of these, Johnson narrates the events that led to the crisis—​dubious claims to the islands on the part of both England and Spain, the eviction of a small British garrison by a much larger Spanish force, and the subsequent demands at home to avenge British honor. He then praises the North administration for attaining a diplomatic settlement rather than going to war over a small group of useless and barren islands. The pamphlet reminds us of Johnson’s inveterate detestation of war, but its most effective blows are aimed at those who exploit the crisis for political gain. The opponents of the government, he tells us, “wish for war, but not for conquest; victory would defeat their purposes equally with peace, because prosperity would naturally continue trust in those hands which had used it fortunately” (Yale Works, vol. x, 374). As for the Patriots, “Their hope is malevolence, and their good is evil” (vol. x, 375). This last phrase, of course, echoes Milton’s Satan:29 the first Whig, we must never forget, was the devil (Life, vol. iii, 326). In September 1774, the king unexpectedly dissolved Parliament, with new elections called for the next month. To the hubbub of the campaign Johnson contributed The Patriot, which renewed his attacks upon the parliamentary opposition. As we have seen, members of the opposition had long styled themselves “patriots,” lovers of their country, while characterizing those in power as slavish flatterers or corrupt tools of the king. In his pamphlet, Johnson seeks to reveal the sordid reality that underlies the idealistic rhetoric of modern patriotism. Opposition itself, he tells us, is no true sign of a Patriot, for “A man may hate his king, yet not love his country.” Men like these—​republicans and levelers—​oppose merely through malice. “But the greater, far the greater number of those who rave and rail, and enquire and accuse, neither suspect, nor fear, nor care for the public; but hope to force their way to riches by virulence and invective, and are vehement and clamorous, only that they may be sooner hired to be silent.” Such patriotism is a mask covering cynical self-​interest. But in this piece, too, the Wilkite mobs of The False Alarm are always murmuring around the edges of Johnson’s imagination: “He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errors, and few faults of government can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion” (Yale Works, vol. x, 391). The rabble are, for Johnson, the natural supporters of these

29 

“Evil be thou my Good,” Paradise Lost, 4.110.

364   Thomas Kaminski so-​called “Patriots,” who, careless of the broader effects of their pursuit of wealth and power, knowingly or not, incite popular unrest and undermine the established order. In Taxation No Tyranny, written at the request of Lord North’s ministry, Johnson attempted to refute American claims that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies. In the pamphlet itself, Johnson bases his argument on three broad propositions. First, in every polity there must be a sovereign power that is the ultimate source of law and from which there is no appeal.30 In Britain, that irresistible authority lay in the King-​ in-​Parliament. Second, the American colonists claim that even though they have left England, they maintain the rights of Englishmen. Johnson acknowledges this but develops the implications of that statement: they possess those rights because the colonies were chartered by the Crown, and through their charters they remain subject to the nation’s sovereign power. As Johnson puts it, “if they had a right to English privileges, they were accountable to English laws,” and “They who are subject to laws, are liable to taxes” (Yale Works, vol. x, 429, 433). Finally, the slogan “no taxation without representation” lacks validity on any number of grounds. In England, he tells us, there is an “innumerable multitude that have no vote,” yet they remain subject to taxation. “The colonists are the descendants of men, who either had no votes in elections, or who voluntarily resigned them for something, in their opinion, of more estimation.” And yet even this is not the entire story: the Americans “are represented by the same virtual representation as the greater part of Englishmen” (vol. x, 430, 431, 436). That is, Parliament does not consider the interests only of those who have a vote, but of all the king’s subjects; elections merely ensure that a variety of voices will be heard in the public counsels. No one is deprived of the legislature’s proper consideration by the lack of a vote. Within the constraints of his argument, Johnson can hardly be answered. There were, nevertheless, matters that he failed to consider: What of privileges and immunities that have been gained by prescription? Did the colonies’ long-​standing freedom from taxation by the mother country constitute such a privilege? Can Parliament invalidate such rights? Even if it can, would it be just to do so? Such questions were debated at the time. William Pitt the Elder, for instance, believed that parliamentary sovereignty was limited: there were things that Parliament could not do.31 Johnson’s aim, though, was polemical rather than theoretical, and he chose not to probe the subtleties of the issues. And yet, as in the other pamphlets, it is often Johnson’s tone, his deep hostility toward the Americans, that we remember most vividly: his sarcasm—​“These lords of themselves, these kings of Me” (Yale Works, vol. x, 429)—​and his contempt—​“how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (vol. x, 454). North America, he tells us, “contains three millions, not of men merely, but of Whigs, of Whigs fierce for liberty, and disdainful of dominion” (vol. x, 414). Johnson clearly despises these 30  This

principle had largely become a commonplace in the political theory of Johnson’s day. One finds it asserted by Addison in Freeholder 16, and by Blackstone in his Commentaries, vol. i, 49: see Yale Works, vol. x, 422 n. 8. 31  See John Derry, “Government Policy and the American Crisis 1760–​1776,” in H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (London: Longman, 1998), 54.

Politics   365 men who care nothing for the nation that had fought a war on their behalf and allowed them to prosper. One hardly knows what to make of his self-​described “wild” proposals for disciplining the Americans: the English could restore Canada to the French or arm the Indians. “Security and leisure are the parents of sedition” (vol. x, 451): the Americans must be taught again to fear.

The Late Pamphlets and Johnson’s Toryism By the 1770s, Johnson had clearly become concerned with the rise of democratic politics and the government’s timid or inept responses to Wilkite mobs and rebellious colonists. In 1772, when a new acquaintance suggested that “it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown,” Johnson erupted: “Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.—​Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough.” And again in April 1775, just a month after the publication of Taxation No Tyranny, he told Boswell, “Sir, the great misfortune now is, that government has too little power,” adding, with unmistakable regret, “Our several ministries in this reign have outbid each other in concessions to the people” (Life, vol. ii, 170, 352, 353). Even legitimate authority had found itself unable to outface the demands of a refractory populace. It is in the context of these political and social upheavals that we should understand Johnson’s ultimate acceptance of the kingship of George III. By the 1760s, the Tories had ceased to be a unified party in Parliament; the members, now mostly “country gentlemen,” prided themselves on their independence.32 Some, especially those who felt ill-​used by the determination of the first two Georges to govern only with Whigs, found their natural home in opposition. Others had grown more conciliatory toward the government and the king, especially after the death of George II: the present regime was firmly settled, and many a Tory, recalling the party’s ancient principles, thought it necessary to yield to established authority. The new king himself had encouraged reconciliation by seeking to rise above party. The mobs supporting Wilkes, the cynical attacks on North’s ministry, and the clamor for liberty on both sides of the Atlantic had undoubtedly driven Johnson into the arms of the government.33 He had been vexed by those in his own party who, “being long accustomed to signalize their principles by opposition to the court,” had sided with Wilkes against order and decency.34 In society at 32  The still indispensable essay on this subject is Sir Lewis Namier, “Country Gentlemen in Parliament 1750–​84,” in Personalities and Powers (London: H. Hamilton, 1955), 59–​77. 33 David Hume shared Johnson’s concern over the breakdown of governmental authority: see Kaminski, “Nature of Johnson’s Toryism,” 14–​15. 34 Yale Works, vol. x, 344. The Tories had been divided over Wilkes (see Namier, “Country Gentlemen,” 73–​4), and Johnson was dismayed by what he called their “frigid neutrality.”

366   Thomas Kaminski large, Johnson found none of the reverence for government that he craved; defiance had established itself as the new principle of political action. All of these ills, of course, could still be traced back to their ultimate source: Whig politics arising from the Revolution. On March 21, 1783 Boswell visited Johnson: He talked with regret and indignation of the factious opposition to Government at this time, and imputed it, in a great measure, to the Revolution. “Sir, (said he, in a low voice, having come nearer to me, while his old prejudices seemed to be fermenting in his mind,) this Hanoverian family is isolée here. They have no friends. Now the Stuarts had friends who stuck by them so late as 1745. When the right of the King is not reverenced, there will not be reverence for those appointed by the king.” (Life, vol. iv, 164–​5)

These are the fruits of Whig politics. Men set up kings (and take them down) as they choose. Those in power possess no inherent right to govern. Few men see themselves as part of a social order that extends beyond their immediate interests. Johnson the Tory deplored such a world; Johnson the man of sense was willing to acquiesce in whatever form of government offered the greatest likelihood of peace, order, and stability.

Further Reading Clark, J. C. D. Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Erskine-​Hill, Howard. Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Greene, Donald J. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. 2nd ed. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Kaminski, Thomas. “The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism.” In The Politics of Samuel Johnson, edited by Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-​Hill, 9–​56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Weinbrot, Howard D. Aspects of Samuel Johnson. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

Chapter 21

War Melinda ALLIKER Rabb

Missing in Action “Send for books for Hist. of War.” Samuel Johnson made this resolution on his birthday, September 18, 1760 (Yale Works, vol. i, 73). England was in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, a global grab of territory and colonial dominion of which he disapproved. The decisive establishment of British imperialism during what historians call the “first world war” capped a hundred years of international fighting in European and colonial venues in a series of hostilities after the 1660 Restoration, which itself capped two prior decades of internal national strife (see Chapter 22, “Commerce”).1 By the time of his last birthday in 1784, more military aggressions had drawn troops across the Atlantic where the Americans fought for and won their independence. Johnson never wrote a general history of war (although he did write about specific wars) but, like other resolutions not fully kept—​to rise early, to read more, to redeem time, to go to church, to avoid idleness and “depraved . . . vain imaginations”—​the intent and desire behind this unrealized project are revealing. What Johnson did not do can shed light on what he did successfully achieve.2 He did not serve as a soldier, fight in a battle, or even, as a civilian, witness an altercation first-​hand. Yet the concept of war—​“the extremity of evil”—​weaves through his work like a connective thread that at times appears visibly on the surface and at other times more subtly underlies the fabric of his thinking and expression (Yale Works, vol. x, 370). If the idea 1  The

restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 ended decades of civil war and commonwealth experiment that began in 1640 and concluded with the Succession Settlement and the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian rule. Foreign conflicts include the Anglo–​Dutch Wars (1652–​74) and the Wars of Spanish Succession (1701–​14) and Austrian Succession (1740–​8). 2  The editors of the Yale Works agree that Johnson’s resolution “was to be a history of war in general” and not, as Boswell surmised, an account only of the Seven Years’ War, which was ongoing and would not yet have generated an extensive series of books to “Send for.” “At any rate,” the editors conclude, “it remained only a project” (Yale Works, vol. i, 72).

368   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb of war is pervasive, however, the actual body of the warrior is rare. One additional and noteworthy thing that Johnson did not do is to represent the embattled flesh and bone of those who did the fighting and suffered its consequences. This dichotomy—​confront the idea of war but avoid war-​torn bodies—​will be central to the argument that follows. “The main purpose and outcome of war,” Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain, “is injuring . . . to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves.”3 If we listen to the chorus of voices that have reflected in recent years on the role of the corporeal in responding to traumatic violence—​as we will in the course of this chapter—​we can discover new perspectives on Johnson and his eschewal of the body at war. His political journalism provides a starting point for his interest in war, from Marmor Norfolciense in the 1730s on hostilities with Spain, to Taxation No Tyranny in the 1770s on rebellious colonials (see Chapter 6, “Journalism,” and Chapter 13, “Polemic”). Arguably the matter of war is implicit even in the early unsuccessful play Irene (begun 1726; performed 1749)—​whose title (and heroine’s name) alludes with tragic irony to peace, while the dramatic action is situated within violent struggles for “conquest” and “dominion”—​and even in more apparently neutral and successful accomplishments like the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), in which the word war occurs over 360 times, that is, 130 times more often than the word peace. At times Johnson’s choices of passages about war (from Shakespeare, Milton, Clarendon, Swift, and others) in order to illustrate usage is apt, as in words like alliance, ammunition, blast, calamity, cavalry, cicatrice, commander, depopulate, march, massacre, munition, offensive, plunder, privateer, provocation, rebellion, roar, and sanguinary. But in other instances, a word’s meaning and usage could be clear without placing it in the context of war. In these cases, the choice of illustrative quotation seems arbitrary if not surprising, and in some cases even ironic—​for example, agriculture, amity, apt, bead, bookman, boyish, brush, cheerly, cloud, lady, lascivious, life, looker, magical, matadore, medley, nestle, nourish, pickle, pure, rearmouse, and sabbath.4 These and many more instances convey the sense of how thoroughly, for Johnson, the English language is suffused with war in order for words to have meaning. The extent of this suffusion goes beyond his claim in the Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language that “the terms of war and navigation should be inserted so far as they can be required by readers of travels, and of history” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 33).5 3  Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 63–​4. 4 For instance, the example for agriculture is a citation from Pope’s notes to the Odyssey: “The disposition of Ulysses inclined him to war, rather than the more lucrative, but more secure method of life by agriculture.” Cloud is contextualized in a quotation from Addison: “How can I see the brave and young | Fall in the cloud of war, and fall unsung.” The entry for pure draws on a fable by L’Estrange: “There happened a bloody civil war among the hawks, when the peaceable pigeons, in pure pity . . . send their mediators.” Nourish comes from a passage in 2 Mac. 10:14: “Gorgias hired soldiers, and nourished war continually with the Jews.” 5  Mary A. Favret remarks upon Johnson’s play, in the Plan of a Dictionary, on the role of lexicographer as a warrior of words who will fight for the glory of English in order to protect it from foreign

War   369 The first volume alone includes approximately 480 references to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion.6 Johnson shares familiarity with this text with Swift, who reread and annotated extensively in its margins, for reasons that will become clear.

Civil versus Foreign War Intense familiarity with the History of the Rebellion (how well must one know a text in order to cite it over 480 times?) is symptomatic of a more general problem that motivates the argument of this chapter: the impact of civil versus foreign war. All of the eighteenth century’s far-​f lung battles—​v ictories and defeats from Canada to South America—​contrasted with, yet in crucial ways were inseparably connected to, an earlier conflict that took place close by: the disastrous English Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s. As Johnson observed of the relationship between internecine and international violence: “But who does not know that a foreign war has often put a stop to civil discords? It withdraws the attention of the publick from domestic grievances, and affords opportunities of dismissing the turbulent and restless to distant employments” (Yale Works, vol. x, 372). This discussion ties the thread of distant combat in Johnson’s work back to a critical conflict that was remote not in place but in time. “The turbulent and restless” remain a present and formative idea. Historians agree that the horrors of the Civil Wars were an unprecedented national disaster of death, destruction, and political upheaval—​and that the end of this devastating conflict created a population of damaged survivors, as well as a legacy of traumatic memories.7 The burden of these memories was displaced onto, or inherited by, succeeding generations, as often happens with cultural (and personal) trauma when the original participants find it too immediate, too painful, or too difficult to satisfactorily represent. Paul Fussell describes how “war detaches itself from its invaders: War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 181. 6   W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 71. In the Dictionary, Johnson drew copiously from other books featuring war: around 200 quotations from Raleigh’s History of the World and around 240 from Knolles’s History of the Turks. 7  Among the relevant histories of the Civil Wars are Trevor Royle, The British Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638–​1660 (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Peter Gaunt, The English Civil War: A Military History (London: I. B. Taurus, 2017); Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–​ 1651 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (New York: Basic Books, 2006); John S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York: Longman, 1993); and Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin, 2009).

370   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb normal location in chronology” to become an “essential condition of consciousness” for those “too young to have experienced it directly”: “these writers have derived their myth the way [Roger] Frye noted most critics derive their principles, not from their predecessors but from their predecessors’ predecessors . . . [in] a general tendency . . . to return to some of the standards of the modal grandfather.”8 Johnson acknowledges this phenomenon of transgenerational transmission on more than one occasion. “The heart burnings of the civil war are not yet extinguished,” insists Euphelia in Rambler 46: “the same families inhabit the same houses from age to age, they transmit and recount the faults of a whole succession . . . the malignity is continued without end, and it is common for old maids to fall out about some election, in which their grandfathers were competitors” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 250–​1). He observes again of the lineage of war-​memory: “Our grandfathers knew the picture from life; we judge of the life by contemplating the picture” (Lives, vol. ii, 8). “Picture” is an apt metaphor because it connotes a degree of separation and distance, and emphasizes the tension between experience and representations of experience. Other eighteenth-​century writers endorse this claim of generational deferral. As recent trauma theorists point out, “Trauma . . . is defined in part by its belated effects . . . not just an individual matter . . . it may under certain circumstances, be transmitted to generations born after the war.”9 In Jonathan Swift’s autobiographical fragment, the most vivid episode is not actually about Swift but about the adventures (including the infliction of physical harm) of his Royalist grandfather against Roundhead enemies. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby makes model armaments using leather from boots his grandfather wore in the battle of Marston Moor—​and this same transformed boot also is complicit in the wound dealt to great-​grandson Tristram when he is nine years old.10 These generation-​skipping stories, artifacts, and “pictures” demonstrate that coming to terms with displaced historical trauma can be crucial to coming to terms with one’s own life, of seeking self-​knowledge and finding one’s “identical spot,” as Sterne puns.11 One of the most horrific realities of the Civil Wars was the physical damage sustained by soldiers who were exploded by gunpowder, penetrated by pikes, stripped, starved, frozen, bestialized, and stricken by disease. Plundered corpses lay unburied, alongside severed toes and fingers; captured troops were forced to march naked and corralled like animals; disabled veterans with missing limbs returned home; fewer fathers were available to perpetuate families and to reinvigorate the social order when peace was restored. Acts of violence and death were witnessed in English cities, manor houses, towns,

8 

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, 2000), 321. Henry Raczymow, “Memory Shot Through with Holes,” in Nel Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 407. 10  Uncle Toby, while building his model battlefield, combines leather from the grandfather’s boot with a piece of the window mechanism that allows the sash to fall and crush Tristram’s penis. 11  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, edited by Melvyn and Joan New, 3 vols. (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1978), vol. i, 96. 9 

War   371 and fields; gruesome accounts of battles and sieges circulated widely in newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and memoirs, thanks to the newly effective technology of print culture. If we focus on this traumatic assault on the ultimate symbol of patriarchal power—​the intact male body—​we can begin to appreciate the extent to which eighteenth-​century writers reacted and responded to the Civil Wars by reworking and reimagining this disturbing corporeal violation. Vivid examples of injured men occur prominently and with noteworthy frequency in works by postwar authors including John Milton, Samuel Butler, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Delarivier Manley, Thomas Shadwell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Tobias Smollett.12 Johnson, however, seems a special case. Probably the most explicit example from his work, Idler 22, does not directly represent men “destroying one another.” Instead, a “picture” is embedded within multiple layers: the essay paints a scene of an animal fable which contains a story about a mother vulture who describes another scene to her young about memories of “the ground smoking with blood and covered with carcasses, of which many are dismembered and mangled.” And significantly the essay was removed when Johnson published the Idler in book form. Numerous explanations for the withdrawal of this fable have been offered, but we can and should re-​ask the question—​ why?13 Jonathan Shay, in analyzing what he terms “combat trauma and the undoing of character,” notes that “Trauma narrative confronts the normal adult with the fragility of the human body . . . the feelings this arouses are almost always unpleasant.”14 Johnson does not deny the body but he does face the problem articulated by trauma theorists who discuss the paradoxical status of corporeal representation: By establishing a relationship between bodies violently erased in historical trauma and the bodies of those that [literature] compels us to remember, [writers] have faced the challenging task of writing what has frequently been called “the unspeakable” . . . Writers of trauma . . . offer counter-​narratives that seek to recover in representation precisely that which is normally absent within representation: the vulnerable, material, violated, fragmented, suffering body that they acknowledge as their primary source.15

12   See Melinda Rabb, “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-​Century Displacements of the Male Body at War,” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011), 103–​35. 13  It is customary to attribute the removal of Idler 22 to its anti-​war, Swiftian, and potentially libelous qualities. Idler 8 also contains a satirical story about the vulnerability of the human body in battle; here the action of the story is transposed into a fable of two mastiffs and a dragon. However, we do not see, even indirectly, actual human carnage. The essay remained in the book version of the periodical. 14  Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Athenaeum Press, 1994), 193. 15 Laura Di Prete, “Foreign Bodies”: Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3; Elisabeth Bronfen, “The Body and Its Discontents,” in Avril Horner and Angela Keane, eds., Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 111.

372   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb

Johnson and the Civil Wars The Civil Wars were no less important to Johnson than to the “long” eighteenth-​century writers cited above. The wars’ significance during his formative years has substantial acknowledgment, starting with his earliest biographers and critics. Arthur Murray remarked in 1793 on Johnson’s fear of a recurrence of the “doctrine of cashiering kings, and erecting on the ruins of the constitutions a new form of government . . . a wild democracy [and] . . . fanatics . . . [who] had taken possession of all the livings and all the parishes in the kingdom. That those scenes of horror might never be renewed was the ardent wish of Dr. Johnson.”16 On similar grounds, James Boswell dismisses Johnson’s Jacobitism, so fearful he was of the consequences of another revolution on the throne of Great Britain (Life, vol. i, 176). Modern scholars agree that Johnson’s childhood years and early manhood were steeped in lasting remembrance of the seventeenth-​century conflict: “Growing up in Lichfield meant growing up surrounded by reminders of the Civil Wars and the city’s loyalty to the Stuarts. A Royalist stronghold . . . the cathedral close was occupied by the Puritans in 1643, who damaged the interior, smashed the stained-​glass windows, and desecrated Anglican ritual by baptizing a calf at the altar.”17 A local landmark, St. Rupert’s Mound, memorialized the expulsion of the Puritans. The city “had been profoundly divided in the 1640s: local families had been engaged on both sides as combatants . . . memorials of the miseries of the Civil War lay around everyone who grew up in Lichfield” (Clark, Samuel Johnson, 105). The “blows of civil strife” dealt by Puritan commanders had lasting physical consequences on local bodies: a fornicator could be “set upon a great gun, his back scourged by the garrison,” and a swearer could be “bored through the tongue and casheared.” Damage to property, hostility of neighbor against neighbor, occupation by enemy troops, disabled survivors, and loss of life were an enduring legacy: The years of the Great Rebellion were not quickly forgotten in Staffordshire. No other part of England suffered longer or more intensely the violence of the contending armies and the regime of repression that followed . . . To grow up in Lichfield in the early years of the eighteenth century would be a little like growing up, to use an American analogy, in Atlanta during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Certainly it would have been a much less alert and curious youth than Samuel Johnson whose political sensibilities would not have been awakened and stimulated by such a heritage of memory and tradition.18

16  Arthur Murray, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.; cited in J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 107. 17  Nicholas Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 9. 18  Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, rev. ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 26.

War   373 Donald Greene observes: “At the bottom of Johnson’s political thinking, then, there would always have been a vivid awareness of the events of 1640 to 1660.”19 That vivid awareness extends significantly beyond the political and certainly beyond a facile Whig historiography. Considering the importance of the Civil Wars to Johnson’s life, and in light of recent theories about war trauma and its cultural aftermath, this discussion focuses on language and the body to argue for a rethinking of one of the most typical characteristics of Johnson’s writing. “We have often been told of the generality and abstraction of Johnson’s style,” W. K. Wimsatt wrote in 1948, a claim that reaches back to Boswell and has achieved the status of an unquestioned assumption (and even served as a source of parody). Stylistic generality and abstraction have promoted the view of Johnson as a detached philosopher and wise moralist, one who eschews the numbering of tulip-​ streaks while traveling on the elevated road to truth: “Everyone who has read either the Rambler or Idler essays will confirm that there is a persistent tendency away from particularity towards abstractness, universality, and generality.” And even his overtly political essays have seemed to approach “his subject from a lofty perspective . . . exempt from all anxieties . . . evoking a mood of composure for which one seeks in vain in other pamphlets of the time.”20 Nicholas Hudson recently has cautioned against this popular reputation as an immortal sage lifted above the fray and speaking for all times and places: “Although Boswell encouraged the impression that ‘Dr. Johnson’ uttered continual nuggets of timeless wisdom, he was in fact usually responding strongly to a dialogue informed by an immediate context of events. Even his evidently ‘timeless’ works, like The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas, respond to very specific contexts.” 21 This chapter argues that the specific context of the Civil Wars and its traumatic legacy is crucial for a full understanding of a fundamental literary paradigm: Johnson’s habitual retreat away from corporeal representation and into incorporeal abstraction.22

Words and Bodies Even his most impassioned and vivid condemnation of massive loss of life during the Seven Years’ War de-​emphasizes the destruction of men’s bodies by the weapons of other men. There is a lot of dying but not a lot of active battlefield killing, with its loud noises, frantic commotion, and sudden injury: “Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the

19 Greene, Politics, 27, 20 

Paul-​Gabriel Boucé, Guerres et paix: La Grande-​Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle, tome II (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996), 330–​1. Among other scholars who have supported the “above the fray” universalist Johnson are Walter Jackson Bate and Donald Greene. 21 Hudson, Political Biography, 5. 22  See Wimsatt, Philosophic Words, 110.

374   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb stroke of an enemy.” Instead, the majority “languished in tents and ships,” while “damps and putrefaction” and “incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations” cause “fleets” and “armies” to be “silently dispeopled and . . . sluggishly melted away.” It does not lessen the pathos of this famous account of corpses “whelmed in pits” or “heaved into the ocean” to notice that the word choices like dispeopled and melted away sidestep violence, or that silently and sluggishly are eerily quiet and slow, or that euphemisms like incommodious and unwholesome avoid the kinds of bodily detail found in other writers. Here we might recall Elaine Scarry’s stark definition: “The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring . . . to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue.” She identifies “paths” through which “the centrality of the issue of injuring in war may disappear,” including omission, re-​description, and metaphor, three paths that Johnson travels. 23 This discussion, then, tests the relationship between language and the body, in light of the challenges of representing what the mind recoils from: the physical suffering human beings are capable of both enduring and perpetrating—​and of what we would call its psychological, emotional, and moral aftereffects. Johnson’s generality and abstraction, then, are not the mark of a man free from anxiety for whom war is only a linguistic event or “an activity of mind,” as critics have asserted,24 but a means of sorting powerful anxieties, a mechanism of demurral or displacement of the vulnerable body. Although the cumulative measure of blood and treasure expended during all of the aggressions he lived through or remembered has not been calculated precisely, the body count certainly was high. Yet the most powerful actors in Johnson’s depictions of war are figures of speech rather than bodies. His choice of a visual metaphor for deferred trauma—​“Our grandfathers knew the picture from life; we judge of the life by contemplating the picture”—​acquires some irony, since the effect of his abstractions about the wars—​like “the tumult of absurdity” or the “clamour of contradiction”—​is precisely that they make it difficult for us to see or “image” when we read statements like: “It is scarcely possible, in the regularity and composure of the present time, to image the tumult of absurdity and clamour of contradiction which perplexed doctrine” (Yale Works, vol. x, 372). What do absurdity and perplexed doctrine look like? Where are the human actors in this tumult? Corporeal details are used effectively by other writers, including Swift, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Smollett—​of armed soldiers spilling blood, of gunpowder sending arms, legs, brains, and guts flying through the air, of diseased lungs, empty bellies, and rotting flesh sabotaging a warrior’s strength and determining the outcome of battles. But these details are absent in Johnson. Instead “the pride of power has destroyed armies” with “a reciprocation of injuries and fluctuation of incroachments.” Disembodied “struggles for dominion . . . have filled the world with war, bloodshed, and desolation, and have torn in pieces almost all states and kingdoms of the earth” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 252). Despite aggression and destruction, this “torn in pieces” landscape is remarkably

23 Scarry, Body in Pain, 63–​4.

24 Favret, War at a Distance, 180.

War   375 corpse-​free. Although he rightly objected in Rambler 19 to heroics that celebrate the individual and ignore the “heaps of slaughter” around him, Johnson does not examine those heaps closely (vol. iii, 104). “Among casualties of war,” he specifies in Idler 30, is “diminution of the love of truth” (vol. ii, 95). But what about the fallen warriors? The worst of civil conflict—​neighbors killing neighbors, both Cromwell’s New Model soldiers and Royalist troops refusing to grant quarter, regicides severing a royal neck—​ all are summarized in Johnson’s Sermon 23, composed for the anniversary of Charles I’s beheading on January 30: “The power of the faction, commenced by clamour, was promoted by rebellion, and established by murder” (vol. xiv, 246–​7). “Faction,” “clamour,” “rebellion,” and “murder” are active and performative in the absence of human agents. Elsewhere Johnson discreetly describes the same events as “Our own troubles,” “our commotions,’ and “the confusions’ that took place “while the inhabitants of this island were embroiled among themselves.” This trend continues throughout Johnson’s implicit and explicit discussions of other wars. According to the synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor of The Vanity of Human Wishes, the field of battle is where “the refuse of the sword” (more like fallen wheat than fallen men) may be “glean[ed]” by “statutes” (line 31). “Gold” and “standard[s]‌” are “massacre[d]” and “ravished” (lines 22, 176). “Famine” and “winter,” not human sentinels, “guar[d]” and “barricad[e]” (lines 207, 208). Xerxes “starves exhausted regions,” not bellies (line 228). “The encumber’d oar,” not a human rower, is blocked by the floating dead (lines 239–​40) (Yale Works, vol. vi, 91–​109). In Rambler 79, war’s “laws” may be vacated by “hostility” in order to “destroy kindness” and “fill the world” with “suspicion . . . [and] malevolence” rather than with suffering combatants (vol. iv, 54–​5). In Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands, “wantonness . . . [has] desolated the world,” and “unsatisfactory answers” and “dilatory debates” produce “armament” (vol. x, 383) in the absence of identifiable speakers. “The howl of plebeian patriotism” is heard instead of the cries of men. When specific corporeal references occur, they usually are metaphors: neither a diseased arm nor an amputated leg requires treatment, but rather “a gangrene in collective life” must be excised by the “remedies” of “fire and the sword.” At Cartagena, “dews” cripple, “doubt” terrifies, and “hours” sweep battalions away. A sense that bodily war has been oddly equated with a clash between words accompanies a statement like this one from Idler 30: “I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 94–​5). Even presuming the possibility that plundering soldiers and lying scribblers could be comparable alternatives requires remarkable detachment of physical threat from feelings of “dread.” In Rambler 19, Johnson ridicules the character Polyphilus who, mistaking language (books on “the art of war”) for war, “studied all the military writers both antient and modern” in order to become “versed in the principles of tacticks or fortification,” who “entrenched armies upon paper . . . and modelled in clay many impregnable fortresses,” but eventually “found that study alone would not make a soldier” (vol. iii, 104–​8). But when crippling terror at the thought of actual death in battle “loaded him with shackles [rather] than furnished him with arms,” the shackles

376   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb are only a figure of speech. We learn that he survives one campaign unharmed, although “utterly unable to support another,” and he returns to a life of language by taking up the bookish study of other “arts.” Ironically, a man who “stands as a mark to . . . arrows . . . and receives, in the tumult of hostility, from distant and from nameless hands, wounds not always easy to be cured” is not a soldier at all but a peacetime citizen seeking public eminence and enduring verbal abuse. In Idler 20, keeping in mind that the essay was written during and about the Seven Years’ War, atrocities committed on soldiers’ bodies disappear into a statement like “There is no crime more infamous than the violation of Truth” (vol. ii, 62). Hudson points out that the Universal Chronicle in which the Idler appeared was in contrast filled with “reports on the war, details of troop movements and battles, and lists of casualties. The deceptively leisurely and detached Idler presented a striking and ironic contrast with the frenetic and murderous activity of global war reported in the rest of the paper.” 25 But what exactly constitutes an ironic perspective on frenetic murder? During the trial, court martial, and eventual execution by firing squad of Admiral John Byng (who infamously lost Minorca to the French in 1756 by “not doing his utmost”), effigies of him were hanged, defiled, and burned. Reportedly, a mob of thousands armed with pitchforks and clubs threatened him. This public display acted out abuse of the body and physical pain, inflicted symbolically but indicative of the impulse driving humans to maim human flesh.26 Johnson’s remark that there is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth becomes problematic in the face of such aggressive possibility. Further public display of damaged men took shape in the living embodiment of the veteran: “The military veteran was a recurrent figure in mid-​century culture, and a familiar spectacle in London streets, for the maimed and infirm who did not receive pensions were allowed to beg in public as a reward for their sacrifice to king and country. Such begging often involved the display of appalling campaign injuries.” Popular ballads record: The Soldier disbanded, and forc’d to beg, May talk of his Wars, and his Suff ’rings so hard; But tho’ seamed o’er with Scars, and with never a Leg, His wants we neglect.27

Or as recent writers on trauma express it: “What is remembered in the body is well-​ remembered: the bodies of massive numbers of participants are deeply altered; those new alterations are carried forward into peace . . . The physical signs . . . survive the physical activity that produced them by ten years, forty years, sixty years.” 28 Donald Green

25 Hudson, Political Biography, 102.

26  Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Culture, Politics, and Imperialism in England, 1715–​1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 180. 27  Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 67. 28 Scarry, Body in Pain, 113.

War   377 claims that “it is to the task of stripping off the splendid ideological clothing with which the Seven Years’ War was invested by the rhetoric of Pitt . . . that Johnson dedicates himself in his writing for the Literary Magazine” (Yale Works, vol. x, 127). But the paradox is that Johnson does the stripping without disclosing flesh. Of course, we know that Johnson had a keen awareness, in other contexts, of the body and its sufferings, particularly his own. “The mind is very seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the fear of pain,” he wrote (Yale Works, vol. ii, 57). Readers have long noted “the joint influence of these two primeval causes, his intellectual excellence and his corporeal defects”; “it seems relevant to say that the morally introspective bent of Samuel Johnson, no less than the hypochondriac, was highly compatible with the kind of medical, chemical, and mechanical philosophy from which he drew images characteristic of his prose style.”29 His Prayers and Meditations reveal constant awareness of his own body’s various sensations, appetites, vulnerabilities, and discomforts. Between 1756 and 1780 he writes of sluggishness, purges, lumbago, rheumatism in the loins, stomach spasms, blindness, weight gain, blisters, cold, asthma, convulsions, flatulence, difficulty seeing, breathing, and walking. He takes opium for pain relief and undergoes purges and extensive bloodletting. Boswell, another source of information about Johnson’s “horrible hypochondria,” quotes him in a letter: “My health has been, from my twentieth year, such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 147–​8). On more than one occasion, Johnson speaks of amputated limbs, but as a metaphor about himself, not with reference to war or soldiers. Boswell finds him “sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking”: in 1757, aged fifty-​five, “He then used this emphatical expression of the misery which he felt: ‘I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.’ ” Boswell later quotes Johnson “three or four days only before his death . . . ‘I would give one of these legs for a year more of life, I mean of comfortable life, not such as that which I now suffer’ ” (Life, vol. i, 483; vol. iv, 409). He had the vocabulary for corporeal dismemberment but chose, for reasons worthy of critical speculation, to avoid it in the context of war.

The Common Soldier We gain perspective on the challenge of bringing language to bear on war and the body by comparing Johnson’s Bravery of the English Common Soldiers with the treatment of those figures by his contemporaries Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett.30 All three represent mid-​eighteenth-​century soldiers, and all three, in doing so, invoke the grandfather’s generation and the Civil Wars. (Goldsmith and Smollett accomplished 29  Frances Reynolds, Recollections of Doctor Johnson, in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. ii, 299; Wimsatt, Philosophic Words, 102. 30  Goldsmith and Smollett notably wrote extensive histories of England and conflicts, something Johnson did not do, as noted above.

378   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb what Johnson contemplated: they wrote formal histories of the wars.) For each author, the Civil Wars were the unforgettable trauma against which all later loss of life and limb must be judged. All three harken back, at some level, to the experiences and memories of generations that preceded them. Johnson looks back in The False Alarm: “One part of the nation has never before contended with the other, but for some weighty and apparent interest. If the means were violent, the end was great. The civil war was fought for what each army called and believed the best religion and the best government” (Yale Works, vol. x, 343). In light of this now-​justified debacle, subsequent grounds for fighting have decreasing legitimacy, even misguided pettiness, so that English people are “now disputing, with almost equal animosity, whether Middlesex shall be represented or not by a criminal from a jail.” Elsewhere he called foreign war “only a quarrel between two robbers for the spoils of a passenger” (vol. x, 188). In the case of Smollett, when a French soldier advises Roderick Random “to correct the rebellious principles [he] had imbibed among the English,” he too recalls and rationalizes the Civil Wars by arguing that “every man has a natural right to liberty; that allegiance and protection are reciprocal; that when the mutual tie is broken by the tyranny of the king, he is accountable to the people for his breach of contract, and subject to the penalty of the law; and that those insurrections of the English, which are branded with the name of rebellion, by the slaves of arbitrary power, were no other than glorious efforts to rescue that independence which was their birthright, from the ravenous claws of usurping ambition.”31 Goldsmith’s History of England claims that the Civil Wars were “ultimately productive of domestic happiness and security; the laws became more precise, the monarchy’s privileges better ascertained, and the subject’s duty better delineated; all became more peaceable, as if a previous fermentation in the constitution was necessary for its ultimate refinement.” If nothing else, all three authors acknowledge the Civil Wars (and the generation that endured them) as crucial phenomena. But the three practice different ways of representing trauma to the soldier’s body in war—​displaced by abstraction (Johnson), exposed in order to arouse sentiment (Goldsmith), or exhibited in all its shocking bloody dismemberment (Smollett). Despite “manifold, complex and protean ways in which war was apprehended,” and despite “double standards, inconsistencies and confusions among pro-​and anti-​war commentators and agitators,” when differences of opinion found public expression, “Nowhere is this cultural ambiguity more apparent than in the image of the principal agents of war—​the common soldier or seaman.”32 Johnson was no advocate of a professional or standing army. In The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers, he writes slightingly of trained military discipline, dehumanized in terms of machines and animals, as it is practiced by his contemporaries: “Regularity may, in time, produce a kind of mechanical obedience to signals and commands, like that which the perverse Cartesians 31  Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 164. 32  John Bonehill and Geoff Quilley, eds., Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, 1700–​1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3.

War   379 impute to animals” (Yale Works, vol. x, 281). In fact, the last time men fought for an ideal like human liberty was the Civil Wars of “more than a century” ago: The English soldier seldom has his head very full of the constitution; nor has there been, for more than a century, any war that put the property or liberty of a single Englishman in danger . . . Whence then is the courage of the English vulgar? It proceeds, in my opinion, from that dissolution of dependence which obliges every man to regard his own character. (vol. x, 283)

Johnson’s refusal of easy admiration or cheap emotion about the risks taken when fighting for one’s nation is understandable, even admirable, although his assessment of what it means for an Englishman abroad to be “in danger” seems dispassionately blunt. Carl von Clausewitz would caution against objectification of the soldier: “War is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but passive and yielding.”33 Where do Goldsmith and Smollett stand on the animate “matter” of the soldier? Goldsmith’s essay, The Distresses of a Common Soldier, quickly focuses on physical injuries and personalizes the narrative of a destitute “disabled soldier . . . leaning on his crutch”: “It is inconceivable what difficulties the meanest of our common soldiers and sailors indure . . . I have been led into these reflections from accidently meeting, some days ago, a poor fellow, whom I knew when a boy, dressed in a sailor’s jacket, and begging at one of the outlets of the town, with a wooden leg.”34 The soldier-​sailor-​beggar philosophizes about his lost limb as he recalls compatriots: “there is Bill Tibbs, of our regiment, he has lost both his legs, and an eye to boot; but, thank heaven, it is not so bad with me yet.” But, of course, things are pretty bad in the history he narrates, and we learn before “he limped off ” about extensive damage to his body: I served two campaigns in Flanders, was at the battles of Val and Fontenoy, and received but one wound, through the breast here; . . . I was wounded in two places; I lost four fingers of the left hand, and my leg was shot off. If I had had the good fortune to have lost my leg and use of my hand on board a king’s ship, and not aboard a privateer, I should have been entitled to cloathing and maintenance during the rest of my life; but that was not my chance.35

Goldsmith’s opposition to war is no greater than Johnson’s, although at first, he seems more inclined to dignify what Johnson calls “the vulgar” and to encourage readers to 33 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), book 2, chap. 3, 149. 34 Oliver Goldsmith, “The Distresses of a Common Soldier,” British Magazine (June 1760), and revised in The Citizen of the World as “On the Distresses of the Poor, Exemplified in the Life of a Private Centinel,” reprinted in Essays: By Mr. Goldsmith (London: W. Griffin, 1765), 216–​23. 35 Goldsmith, Essays, 223.

380   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb visualize the soldier, to think about the social consequences of a population of maimed, unemployable men who now no longer can claim what Johnson called “that dissolution of dependence.” Further grounds for comparison are possible if we turn to another of Goldsmith’s portrayals of a soldier—​George Primrose, the son of the Vicar of Wakefield: Our young soldier was early prepared for his departure, and seemed the only person among us that was not affected by it. Neither the fatigues and dangers he was going to encounter . . . any way damped his spirits . . . “And now, my boy,” cried I, “thou art going to fight for thy country, remember how thy brave grandfather fought for his sacred king, when loyalty among Britons was a virtue. Go, my boy, and imitate him in all but his misfortunes, if it was a misfortune to die with Lord Falkland.”36

Here we find, once again, the invocation of the grandparents’ generation. The reference is quite specific. Grandfather Primrose fought and died with Lucius Cary, 2nd viscount of Falkland, a real historical figure who became Charles I’s secretary of state. According to Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, Falkland grew despondent over the prolonged violence and lack of resolution between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and perished with a sense of despair in the battle of Newbury in 1643. The Vicar’s unquestioning pride in his ancestor raises the persistent critical problem in reading Goldsmith: are we to understand as simple sentiment the father’s earnest injunction to his son to “imitate” the seventeenth-​century combatant by dying for his country? The Vicar’s farewell ends with the vision of his son as an anonymous, abandoned rotting corpse in an alien land: “Go, my boy, and if you fall, tho’ distant, exposed and unwept . . . the most precious tears are those with which heaven bedews the unburied head of a soldier.” Yet when son George reappears “all bloody” “wounded,” his injuries are not the consequence of war; his “regiment is countermanded and is not to leave the kingdom.”37 Foreign battle is replaced by a domestic duel over a sibling’s honor. No “precious tears” can enrich the sensibilities of mourners. False report has placed him in America but merely as an impediment to romance. Ultimately, he is pictured “brave and generous . . . handsomely drest in his regimentals,” “an honest young soldier” who is fully “rewarded” (vol. iv, 175–​6). Goldsmith’s seemingly opposing depictions of the soldier’s body, one irreparably damaged and forsaken abroad, the other rescued and rewarded at home, does not escape into abstraction as in Johnson, but into a fantasy of comic resilience and happy endings. Characters bounce back; their soldierly sufferings unable to crush them. Goldsmith’s Royalist politics, anti-​imperialism, and opposition to grasping commercialism have been called a “vigorous rebuttal” of the Whig interpretation of history.38

36 Oliver

Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), vol. iv, 123–​4. 37 Goldsmith, Collected Works IV: 124, 158, 157. 38 Donald Davie, “Notes on Goldsmith’s Politics,” in Andrew Swarbrick, ed., The Art of Oliver Goldsmith (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 83; Donald Greene, Politics, 185.

War   381 But the same characteristics have elicited the opposing view: Patrick Parrinder cites Goldsmith as the exemplary Whig historian who views the miseries of domestic national conflict as “a necessary bloodletting prior to an age of prosperity, political civility, and overseas expansion.”39 His soldiers preserve this unresolved tension. The disabled veteran of foreign war, however sentimentalized, is not supported by his country and survives only to meet neglect of his physical needs. The able-​bodied enlistee who never leaves home has inherited displaced miseries of civil war: for his family, religious dispute triggers animosity; they face hunger and sickness, house burning, threats to women, loss of fortune, and danger of death for the soldier. The Vicar of Wakefield, however its sentimentality may cloy readers today, keeps its Job-​like protagonist in a country that has not solved its problems, except in the consolations of fiction.40 Smollett, in whose work “bodies are bethumped, knocked around, damaged, mutilated,” actually served in the military, and he insists that readers see in detail that war consists of violent injuring.41 Lieutenant Lismahago in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is the most familiar example of a wounded military man, but Smollett is more explicit about scenes of war elsewhere. Ferdinand Count Fathom’s mother scavenges the corpses of mortally wounded soldiers “who lay bleeding on the plain.”42 Johnson’s poignant but abstract phrase about soldiers’ bodies “heaved into the ocean,” contrasts with the corporeal detail in Roderick Random’s account of the same scene: “the naked bodies of . . . fellow-​soldiers and comrades floating up and down the harbor, affording prey to the carrion crows and sharks, which tore them to pieces without interruption.”43 Roderick’s experience as a soldier is an unremitting series of physical desecrations. These desecrations far exceed the conventions of the picaresque, a narrative tradition sometimes invoked to explain the cruel torment inflicted on men in Smollett’s scenes of war. Roderick’s own body suffers: I was loaded with irons, and stapled to the deck . . . being exposed to this miserable condition to the scorching heat of the sun by day, and the unwholesome damps by

39 Patrick

Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 85–​6. Parrinder views the Civil Wars in Goldsmith and others not as lasting trauma but rather as comparable to an “adolescent” stage that the nation had to go through to reach maturity, a “national rite of passage.” 40   James H. Lehmann, “The Vicar of Wakefield: Goldsmith’s Sublime, Oriental Job,” ELH 46, no. 1 (Spring 1979), 97–​121. 41 Angus Ross, “The ‘Show of Violence’ in Smollett’s Novels,” Review of English Studies 2 (1972), 128. Prior discussions of violence in Smollett’s work include Louis J. Martz, The Later Career of Tobias Smollett (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942); David McNeill on Ferdinand Count Fathom in The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 84–​112; and Richard Squibbs, “Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom: The Purpose of Picaresque,” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 30, no. 4 (June 2018), 519–​37. 42  Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 14. 43  Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 164.

382   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb night . . . Lying in this helpless situation, amidst the terrors of a sea-​fight; expecting every moment to be cut asunder, or dashed in pieces by the enemy’s shot! . . . loss of blood, vexation and want of food, contributed, with the noisome stench of the place, to throw me into a swoon . . . I received a large wound on the head, and another on my left cheek . . . I complained . . . that unless my hurts were dressed, I should bleed to death . . . he lent me a blow in the face, which I verily thought had demolished my cheekbone . . . I was so much chafed with the neat and motion of my limbs, that . . . the inside of my thighs and legs were deprived of skin.44

Roderick (a military doctor like Smollett) witnesses even greater physical destruction to other men and describes unblinkingly “the carnage in which I wallowed”:45 the head of the officer of the marines, who stood near me, being shot off, bounced from the deck athwart my face, leaving me well-​nigh blinded by brains . . . [A drummer] asked if I was wounded? And before I could answer, received a great shot in his belly, which tore out his entrails, and he fell flat on my breast . . . I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches . . . breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded . . . Their wounds and stumps being neglected, contracted filth and putrefaction, and millions of maggots were hatched amid the corruption of their sores.46

Various men suffer from “a monstrous ascites or dropsy that invaded his chest” or suffocate from “a deluge of blood that issued from his lungs” or are dismembered by “a splinter of the shin-​bone thrust by the violence of the fall through the skin.” Mortal decay is intimate and imminent: Roderick diagnoses “the fracture and the wound, and concluding from a livid colour itself upon the limb that a mortification would ensure . . . resolved to amputate the leg immediately.” Another wounded man “discovered the remains of one hand which had been shattered to pieces with grape shot [and then] endured the amputation of his left hand without shrinking.” Roderick describes himself as vexed, nauseated, agitated, his “hands dyed in blood. ”47 Smollett was not exaggerating but merely displacing into fiction the bodily trauma his eyewitness accounts of Cartagena confirm. Johnson told Goldsmith that “Employment, Sir, and hardships, prevent melancholy. I suppose in all our army in America there was not one man who went mad.” But among the injured in Roderick Random is a “maniac” driven insane by war and “lashed to his hammock by the direction of the doctor’s mate” who “begged for the love of God, that 44 Smollett, Roderick Random, 148-​9, 128, 155, 222.

45 Smollett, Roderick Random, 168. Smollett served as a surgeon’s second mate on board the Chichester, which joined the forces at Cartagena. He wrote about the disastrous attack and siege in the “Account of the Expedition against Carthagena” in The Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (1756) and his Complete History of England (1757–​8). 46 Smollett, Roderick Random, 149, 135, 163. 47 Smollett, Roderick Random, 146, 159, 160.

War   383 they would at least keep his arms pinioned . . . to prevent his doing mischief.” The maniac attempts to strangle the ship’s mate and “pummel[s the captain] without mercy” before committing suicide (Random, 142–​3). In Smollett, the ordinary enlistee or conscript embodies both physical violence and mental despair inflicted on the common soldier. At the onset of the Civil Wars, one of the popular military manuals described the standard body of the common soldier: “Let the young man that shall bee a soldier . . . bee straight-​necked, broad breasted, let his shoulders be well fleshed, let him have strong fingers and long armes, a gaunt bellie, slender legges, the calfe and the feet not too full of flesh, but knit fast with hard and strong sinews.”48 This strong intact physique did not, in every possible way, hold together in battle. Other images of the body replace it in the process of coming to terms with war. If comparison of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Smollett reveals that they share the sense of writing in the aftermath or under the shadow of their grandfathers’ struggles, they diverge on the manner of representing those struggles. We can attribute the difference, at least in part, to the fact that Smollett witnessed fighting first-​hand, whereas Johnson and Goldsmith remained at a distance. Smollett’s perspective, unlike that of the roguish picaro who lives by his wits, is that of the survivor of horrors from which there can be no full recovery, of the one who remains and is compelled to tell of sickening grotesque memories. Goldsmith’s readers see soldiers who may be damaged or threatened with death, but who have returned to, or remained at, home. His essentially comic vision mitigates pain and allows for a certain anesthesia of the heart or camouflaging mystification of sentiment. Both, however, offer fictions in which monarchist politics and narrative resolution allow for the promise of physical continuity and restoration of the social order. Both never completely destroy the sexualized male body driven by desire, by including plots of marriage or seduction in their narratives. Johnson’s disembodied abstractions, neither visceral nor pathetic nor romantic, seem to evade the demands of representing the realities of war. Some critics would place Johnson’s incorporeality within a general framework of eighteenth-​century removal from battles waged on distant shores: for the majority conflict was primarily envisaged, encountered and mediated through a variety of cultural forms . . . This was particularly true in Britain, where the internecine conflict of the Jacobite rebellions gave way to an uninterrupted era free from internal land-​based conflict, that was in marked contrast to continental Europe . . . the inhabitants of Britain profited from, and glorified in, war waged at a safe distance . . . developed an appetite for iconic and theatrical representations of wars they could only imagine. 49

Visual representations by eighteenth-​century British artists have been described as out of touch with reality: “Throughout the eighteenth century, the armies of Britain had engaged in war somewhere around the globe, but the population at home went on 48  49 

Edward Cooke, The Perspective Glasse of Warre (London, 1628), sig. B2r. Bonehill and Quigley, Conflicting Visions, 18–​20.

384   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb with their business as usual in the safe knowledge that the army or navy would protect the shores.”50 In many paintings, “when a battle is represented it is a puff of smoke on the horizon.” Instead, “Books and articles were clearly the most important armaments in the battles for public recognition that followed acts of war” but, whether authored by proponents or protestors, these accounts are not by eyewitnesses.51 What the visual avoids, the verbal displaces. Mary Favret contends that in literature, representation of warfare persists but adapts in the eighteenth century; it “has moved . . . not only into distant places and times, but also and thereby into the realms of literature, the province of the man of letters . . . When Great Britain was consolidating its military preeminence in the Seven Years’ War, war was moving into the language of elsewhere and other days.”52 According to her analysis, Johnson’s avoidance of corporeal detail and his reliance on abstractions are symptomatic of general intellectualizing—​detachment of attitude rather than detachment of body parts—​that fundamentally changes the meaning of war: “Displaced temporally and geographically, and into the realm of literature, the meaning of war would require only one more twist to become a function of mind, rather than of bodies and weapons.” She concludes that “war has become the highest operation of the intellect” rather than the source of “confusion and perplexity.” The “parasite” that once invaded “that whole which is the globe and that whole which is the human body, has been left forgotten by history.”53 But the body cannot be completely vacated or discounted by language, and a different explanation must be sought for the process of forgetting and remembering war in Johnson’s work.

Trauma and Re-​membering In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin (thinking of another devastating war and its aftermath) describes an unreal and diminished sense of embodied human life that is a consequence of violence: “For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare.” He looks back at a “generation that . . . stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing had changed but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, human body.”54 What is the relationship between trauma, the body, memory, and representation in the face of “destructive torrents and explosions”? To remember, or to re-​member, acquires multiple meanings: to recall and to reassemble

50  Peter Harrington, British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700–​ 1914 (London: Greenhill Books; Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1993), 7. 51  Bonehill and Quigley, Conflicting Visions, 43. 52 Favret, War at a Distance, 181. 53 Favret, War at a Distance, 181, 184. 54  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 84.

War   385 details from the past, to put shattered limbs back together through the power of language and representation, to seek the nexus between actual figures and figures of speech. Johnson’s writing on war offers a powerful endorsement of the claim that the vulnerable body is that “which haunts our cultural existence, even when it recedes from any direct representation.”55 For some readers, his habitual reliance on abstractions can be (dare one say it?) frustrating when the subject matter cries out for the fleshiness of embodiment. Yet careful scrutiny of the text reveals human shapes beneath the prose. Philosophers, psychologists, cultural historians, and literary scholars have remarked on the powerful contradiction of truth-​telling and disavowal that makes the representation of trauma often fragmented, highly charged, and displaced in ways that both reveal and conceal. “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness . . . Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried . . . Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites . . . for the restoration of the social order,” even if the process requires deflection and dissociation.56 Of course, the eighteenth century lacked terms like shell shock or post-​traumatic stress disorder or survivor guilt to give names to complex experiences that press against the limits of representation. But it did not lack the need to, or the means of, negotiating between memory and oblivion. A recurrent dilemma is that those who have experienced trauma directly often cannot, or do not wish to, discuss it, despite its continuing impact on the individual, family and friends, community, and society, leaving later generations to fill the silence. And later generations must fill that silence with indirect and imagined representations, with anxious speculation about the past. “Belatedness,” as Shoshana Feldman argues, reveals a “peculiar paradox: that in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it.”57 What is too sensitive for the grandparents to touch, the grandchildren may handle again and again. Marianne Hirsch has coined the term postmemory to refer to the way that “individuals may be haunted by events that they never experienced, but which have been passed down, often in attenuated or even ‘unconscious’ forms, by parents and grandparents.”58 While debate currently is ongoing with respect to the transgenerational transmission of trauma, there is little doubt that the phenomenon exists in a transhistorical way and that it has affected populations in the aftermath of various catastrophes including war, slavery, and genocide. The debate is largely about the form of that transmission. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth articulates, on the one hand, an inescapable dynamic between language and the body: “In its privileged relation to the traumatic core that, not accessible to cognition, cannot find

55 

Bronfen in Horner and Keane, Body Matters, 16. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 1. 57  Shoshana Feldman, “The Return of the Voice,” in Levi and Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust, 195. 58  Studies of the aftereffects of twentieth-​century trauma, such as the Holocaust, also demonstrate the important role of the grandchildren’s generation: “the grandchildren were the ones who opened the windows into . . . the burden of the past.” Hadas Wiseman and Jacques P. Barber, eds., Echoes of the Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xii. 56 

386   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb verbal expression, the body rises to a central figure within narratives of trauma . . . Any theoretical reflection on the ways of narrating trauma . . . cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures in this telling.”59 But she goes on to observe, on the other hand, that when later generations try to “weav[e]‌the known and the unknown in a complicated knot,” the body is “frequently portrayed as a fluid, transforming, and metamorphic entity, in the effort to include within representation the nonverbal dimension of the experience.” In a similar vein, Dominick La Capra, in Writing History/​ Writing Trauma, distinguishes a debate over the adequacy of literal versus figurative language, that is, between merely reproducing or mimicking trauma and working through it: “Essential are performative, figurative, aesthetic, rhetorical . . . factors that project or ‘construct’ structures. . . . from which referential statements derive all their significance.” 60 These insights go some way to explaining or rethinking Johnson’s transforming and metamorphic tropes by which persons become personifications, and men at war are absorbed into abstract nouns—​as when “winter” barricades a town and “clamour” engages in battle. In place of the fantasies of integrated strength and unity, such as the idealized physique of the seventeenth-​century soldier described above, narratives about trauma struggle to appropriate the culturally wholesome and to exorcise the fear of injury. Elisabeth Bronfen points out the paradoxical status of the body’s contradictory functions: it marks the locus of stable hegemonic values; it also marks the limits of language for conveying “what traumatic crises erase . . . and subsequently doom as absent: the material body in its fragility, fallibility, and vulnerability.” As a “site of culturation” the body can signify “more than its phenomenological corporeality,” so that “it articulates both the absence of the real body and its transformation into a cultural value which the depicted body merely stands for” (“The Body and Its Discontents,” 115, 111). In sum, numerous possibilities exist for dissociative, restorative, and creative responses to disaster to find their way into literature. As Michelle Balaev cautions, “A single conceptualization of trauma will likely never fit the multiple and often contradictory depictions of trauma in literature because texts cultivate a wide variety of values that reveal individual and cultural understandings of the self, memory and society.”61 If war and the trauma of war cannot really be contemplated without awareness, at some level, of the body, then the body must accommodate multiple meanings because all wars are not alike. And here we must return to the difference between civil and foreign war. For Johnson the problem of the body, as physical entity and as cultural sign, is ultimately a moral problem. It is a moral problem because war suspends the fundamental moral restriction at the core of Western civilization about how bodies may be

59 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 10. 60  Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,2001), 196. 61  Michelle Balaev, “Literary Trauma and Literary Theory Reconsidered,” in Michelle Balaev, ed., Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 8.

War   387 treated. The commandment “thou shalt not kill” is abandoned and replaced with the injunction: thou shalt both kill and be killed. Perhaps the starkest truth about the corporeality of war, Scarry has argued, is not only that men are asked to become vulnerable and die for their country but that they are also asked to become aggressive and kill for their country. What does it mean to ask men to perpetrate death and injury? For Johnson, the horror of neighbors fighting neighbors in civil war, the grandfathers’ legacy, is made tolerable by the belief that atrocities were mitigated by the disembodied right and good: “If the means were violent, the end was great. The civil war was fought for what each army called and believed the best religion and the best government.” The memory of fallen residents of Lichfield, however disturbingly exploded, starved, or cashiered, are placed in another moral universe than the accounts of mutilated foreign warriors that he would have read in the British Magazine during the Seven Years’ War.62 England’s foreign wars, as Johnson viewed them, had no moral justification, only greed and a false sense of entitlement. His indictments of these foreign conflicts are well known: a drain into which the waste of an exuberant nation might be thrown . . . a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of slaves . . . new modes of usurpation, but new instances of cruelty and treachery . . . princes, whose enmity cannot hurt nor friendship help us, who set their subjects to sale like sheep or oxen without any enquiry after the intentions of the buyer, and will withdraw the troops with which they have supplied us, whenever a higher bidder shall be found . . . obstinacy or ambition add another year to devastation and slaughter . . . He may be justly hunted down as the enemy of mankind, that can chuse to snatch by violence and bloodshed, what gentler means can equally obtain. (Yale Works, vol. x, 135, 137, 180, 375)

He condemns the repose of civilians who send soldiers to faraway shores: “Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game; a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph.” Human bodies metaphorically shrink into chess pieces or toy soldiers, a source of curiosity and satisfaction rather than pain. Under these circumstances, “Such is the contest that no honest man can heartily wish success to either party.” So careless of human life does foreign war render the English that writers will “slaughter armies without battles, and conquer countries without invasions.” In foreign war, neither party can really win when the struggle is amoral, and “Neither can show any other right than that of power.” It is only, in Johnson’s words, a matter of robbing, stealing, lying, defrauding, and avarice. In civil war, neither party can really lose when “honest men” on both sides believe they are fighting for “the best.” If neighbor against neighbor is the worst kind of fighting, if their war-​torn bodies defy the power of language and test the 62 

The British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Gentlemen & Ladies 1 (1762), 352–​3, 538; 2 (1763), 184. Cited in Martz, Later Career, 178.

388   Melinda ALLIKER Rabb limits of representation, their grandchildren (later generations) find ways to remember and reconfigure them, to create what trauma theorists call an absent presence or deep memory that preserves a sense of right and wrong. But perhaps one further step must be taken in analyzing Johnson’s writing on war as reflective of both a collective problem and a highly idiosyncratic response. The body at war is equally vulnerable, whether or not the cause of the fighting is just. And it may be a fuller reading of Johnson to conclude that fear of the pointlessness of all massive killing is ever present, that there may not, in the final analysis, be sufficient justification for the corporeal devastation that the English inflicted on the English. This possibility of meaninglessness and waste, Johnson displaces onto foreign combat—​because it is unthinkable that the bloodletting at home was unjustified. We gain perspective by briefly recalling Swift (among others equally obsessed with the Civil Wars) in whose work physical suffering is relentlessly encountered (in stark contrast to Johnson)—​and the body’s anatomical parts, needs, sensations, and functions, including scatological ones, are shoved in readers’ faces. Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that confronting the grotesque open body in literature (with its permeable orifices, ingestions, and emissions) that eats, procreates, evacuates, and bleeds serves as a way of coping with fear of inevitable human death and decay. Bakhtin poses as an alternative the closed or heroic body, the intact ideal body that once punctured, cannot survive. 63 Johnson’s alternative is the absent body, the corporeal figure that has been transmuted—​or perhaps has escaped—​ into figures of speech.

Further Reading Balaev, Michelle, ed. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Horner, Avril, and Angela Keane, eds. Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rabb, Melinda Alliker. “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-​Century Representations of the Male Body at War.” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011): 103–​35. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948. Wiseman, Hadas, and Jacques P. Barber, eds. Echoes of the Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

63 

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 315–​19.

Chapter 22

C omm e rc e Frans De Bruyn

As the table of contents of this Handbook attests, Samuel Johnson was a man of polymathic curiosity who not only read widely on an impressive range of intellectual and cultural subjects but also wrote in an equally broad variety of literary genres. The views he expresses on trade and commerce, which appear in a diverse range of generic contexts, are a case in point: they indicate his knowledgeable grasp of the subject as it was then understood and, more significantly, his awareness of how poorly it was understood and how much it required elucidation. In a preface Johnson wrote for Robert Dodsley’s Preceptor (1748), a two-​volume work designed as a “General Course of Education,” he remarks approvingly on the inclusion of a chapter on “Trade and Commerce” alongside such subjects as astronomy, geography, geometry, history, logic, and rhetoric. Everyone, he declares, should “understand at least the general Principles” of those economic activities whose fluctuations powerfully affect society at all levels. “The Theory of Trade,” he laments, “is yet but little understood, and therefore the Practice is often without real Advantage to the Publick.” If the mechanisms of commerce were better known, it could be carried on with “more general success.”1 A conversation in James Boswell’s Life occasioned by the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 shows Johnson even more emphatic on this point. When Boswell queried Smith’s qualifications as a writer on economics, Johnson defended Smith’s lack of practical experience as an advantage, for “A merchant seldom thinks but of his own particular trade. To write a good book upon it, a man must have extensive views. It is not necessary to have practised, to write well upon a subject.” Johnson reiterates the need he had previously expressed for a systematic theoretical study of the subject: “there is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does.” It may strike us, then, as ironic that the brief theoretical remarks on economics with which Johnson illustrates his point should echo the received mercantilist orthodoxies of his time and not the innovative outlook pioneered by Smith. “As to

1 

Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Preceptor (1748), in Yale Works, vol. xx, 189.

390   Frans De Bruyn mere wealth, that is to say, money,” he remarks to Boswell, “it is clear that one nation or one individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer: but trade procures what is more valuable, the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries” (Life, vol. ii, 430). This exchange makes clear that for Johnson commerce was a matter of national importance, but it equally shows that we must not look to him for original or systematic views on the subject. What then is the value of his remarks on the creation and circulation of wealth, and his reflections on economic activity more broadly? John H. Middendorf, who published an informative series of essays in the 1960s on Johnson’s economic thought, has a ready answer to this question. Whenever Johnson touches in his writings on economic matters, broadly defined, we are made aware “of the importance of wealth—​its influence on individual psychology and morality, on social relationships, and on national and international political decisions.”2 Johnson recognizes that any discussion of economics principles, no matter how dispassionate and descriptive, resonates with moral and political import, and his most insightful responses to the commercial realities of his day are characterized by a sharp moral focus and a determination to take nothing for granted. Middendorf ’s essays capture the broad range of Johnson’s thought on questions of wealth and commerce, but the present-​day reader will nonetheless be struck by Middendorf ’s lack of emphasis on two key dimensions of eighteenth-​century European commerce: empire and slavery. Here twenty-​first-​century scholarship has scope to build on the foundations laid by Middendorf ’s generation.3 It is, in fact, when Johnson considers commerce in the context of empire and the slave trade that his authorial voice speaks out most strongly in moral indignation. Some of the most eloquent, forceful, and scathing statements of this most quotable of writers are prompted by his loathing of slavery and his sense of the questionable legality of European colonial claims. Though there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Johnson’s indignation, it does not always square with the implications of the positions he takes on economic questions or the political allegiances he expresses. This inconsistency can be explained in a number of ways. Johnson’s remarks on commerce are widely scattered in his writings, and they were often written, as Nicholas Hudson cautions, “in reaction to immediate events.” In such circumstances, Hudson suggests, he thought and wrote as a journalist. “Thinking of Johnson as a journalist helps to make sense of the apparent contradictions and provocations that bedevil assessments of his thought. Johnson usually wrote, as he spoke, not just for ‘truth’ but for impact.”4 Johnson also wrote, as the title of the Yale

2 John

H. Middendorf, “Johnson on Wealth and Commerce,” in Johnson, Boswell, and Their Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 47. See the select bibliography at the end of this chapter for Middendorf ’s other essays on Johnson and commerce. 3  See, for example, the essays by Clive Dankert and Earl Miner in the select bibliography below, as well as the introductions and notes by Donald J. Greene in vol. x of the Yale Works. 4 Nicholas Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 5–​6.

Commerce   391 volume devoted to his occasional pieces puts it, “on Demand,” supplying prefaces and introductions to works written by others, for example, or writing pamphlets and essays for political or purely pecuniary reasons.5 Most tellingly, perhaps, he does not always articulate fully the consequences of the economic orthodoxies of his time for the project of colonization, or the rationale these orthodoxies supplied to legitimize the slave trade and other forms of human exploitation. To a considerable extent the tensions observable in Johnson’s writing between moral reflection, on the one hand, and a more pragmatic outlook on the ongoing commercial transformation of British society, on the other, are a function of moral assumptions inherited from traditional Christian thought and classical theories of virtue, which deplored the evils of acquisitiveness, wealth, and luxury. Jesus’s admonition in the Gospels was (and remains) proverbial: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). Where these opposing outlooks clashed—​as they notoriously did, for instance, in Bernard Mandeville’s claim that private vices, including luxury, produced public benefits—​they occasioned some of Johnson’s most imaginative and at times unpredictable insights into the social and moral effects of wealth and commerce.

Definitions and Contexts It will be useful to begin by clarifying some key terms Johnson habitually uses—​ trade, traffick, commerce—​and some that he does not—​economics, mercantilism. His Dictionary of the English Language defines the first triad of terms in a rather circular and interchangeable fashion. Commerce is most broadly “intercourse,” or social communication and mutual dealings, but more specifically it is the “exchange of one thing for another; interchange of any thing; trade; traffick.” Trade, meanwhile, is defined as “Traffick, commerce; exchange of goods for other goods, or for money.” Here Johnson clarifies that “Formerly trade was used of domestick, and traffick of foreign commerce,” a distinction he in fact continued to make in his own writing. Traffick, finally, is defined as “Commerce, merchandising, large trade, exchange of commodities.” Of the three terms, trade has several further meanings, among which the most important in the present context is, “Occupation, particular employment, whether manual or mercantile, distinguished from the liberal arts or learned professions.” Closer attention to the quotations Johnson uses to illustrate these definitions reveals finer distinctions in his usage. He is more apt to illustrate the term commerce positively than trade, as with Ulysses’s speech on “degree” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,

5 

Samuel Johnson: Johnson on Demand is the title of vol. xx of the Yale Works.

392   Frans De Bruyn 1.3, which commends “Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,” or John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667), in which the poet writes, “Instructed ships shall sail to quick commerce, | By which remotest regions are allied; | Which makes one city of the universe” (stanza 163). The illustrations of trade convey a more negative valence—​not so much when the term is used interchangeably with commerce as when it denotes a particular occupation or way of life. To be trained in a trade is to narrow the mind and foreclose a general, comprehensive understanding, whether of economics, politics, or society. This is what Johnson has in mind when in the Life of Dyer he dismisses the subject of John Dyer’s georgic poem The Fleece (1757) as unsuitable for poetry. Dyer’s poem, which takes the wool industry as its focus, sinks under the “meanness” of his subject and “the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture” (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1339). One of Johnson’s illustrative quotations for trade as a verb, meaning “To sell or exchange in commerce,” is, not uncharacteristically, a sermon in miniature. It exemplifies the productive tension that results when he applies a moral yardstick to economic activity, in this instance, the exceedingly profitable branch of commerce concerned with the slave trade. Like a sermon text, the quotation is from the biblical book of the prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 26, the prophet records God’s judgment against the ancient Phoenician trading city of Tyre because it had gloated over the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians (in the sixth century bce). The Tyrians, it would appear, had been anticipating greater trading opportunities for themselves with the elimination of their Israelite rivals. In the chapter that follows, Ezekiel voices a formal lamentation for the impending fate of Tyre, in which he inventories the city’s power and wealth: “Tyrus, O thou . . . which art a merchant of the people for many isles . . . Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men, and vessels of brass in thy markets” (Ezek. 27:3, 13; Johnson’s Dictionary citation is in italics). Tyre was a byword in the ancient world for commercial wealth and success, just as Venice and the Dutch Republic were in early modern times, yet that success, as underscored by Johnson’s Dictionary quotation (the italicized passage above), was based on a trade in “the persons of men,” who are reduced by their juxtaposition with “vessels of brass” to mere commodities and manufactures. Johnson seemingly invites the reader to infer that Tyre’s downfall is bound up with the trade it enabled in “the persons of men.” Two distinct moral registers are discernible in Johnson’s Dictionary entries for commerce, trade, and traffick. One of these, as exemplified in the previous paragraph, is biblical and religious. Christian morality, as Johnson notes in a sermon on the sin of fraud (sermon 18), enjoins us as moral agents to regulate our “concupiscible . . . passions of desire” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 193). Our desire for happiness and freedom from pain “are the vital principles of action, that fill ports with ships, shops with manufacturers [sic], and fields with husbandmen, that keep the statesman diligent in attendance, and the trader active in his business” (vol. xiv, 195). But the fulfillment of these desires by the accumulation of wealth all too easily tips over into corrupt practices, to which a trader or merchant is especially susceptible: “The whole practice of buying and selling is indeed replete with temptation, which even a virtuous mind finds it difficult to resist.

Commerce   393 ‘A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong, and an huckster shall not be freed from sin’ ” (vol. xiv, 197).6 A second moral framework comes into view in Johnson’s distinction between trade defined as an occupation or particular employment, that is, a narrowly focused, practical art of doing, and “the liberal arts or learned professions,” which are held to foster more wide-​ranging and synthesizing habits of mind. In a conversation with Boswell during their tour of Scotland, Johnson conceded that “A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind; but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind” (Boswell, Life, vol. v, 328). There is a hint here of the intellectual’s prejudice about the world of practical affairs, but more fundamentally at issue is an ideal of civic virtue inherited from ancient Rome that urged the necessity of vesting political power in individuals with a capacity for public disinterestedness and breadth of outlook. Such impartiality was thought to reside with the landowning classes, who were deemed to have a permanent, immovable stake in their country and to possess the consequent motivation to promote the national interest and public good. They also enjoyed the leisure and means to acquire a liberal education, in contrast with the narrow perspective thought to typify men of commerce, whose pursuit of monetary profit, a volatile and portable form of wealth, made them politically unreliable and prone to self-​interested rather than public-​spirited action. Johnson invokes this idea in Taxation No Tyranny, a polemical political pamphlet written in 1775 on behalf of the Lord North administration to counter the grievances drawn up by the American Continental Congress against the British government (see Chapter 13, “Polemic”). Rejecting calls from English merchants for Parliament to pursue conciliation with the American colonies, Johnson argues that commercial interests are not qualified to deliberate on important political questions: “A merchant’s desire is not of glory, but of gain; not of publick wealth, but of private emolument; he is therefore rarely to be consulted about war and peace, or any designs of wide extent and distant consequence.” Johnson argues that the trader’s concern with profits precludes the exercise of public virtue: “A commercial people, however magnanimous, shrinks at the thought of declining traffick” (Yale Works, vol. x, 414–​ 15). The statesman and the general should be actuated by magnanimity and the desire for glory, classical public virtues at odds with commercial prudence. To what extent Johnson’s contrast in this passage between heroic virtue and commercial pusillanimity represents his settled opinion is a problematic question, given his fiercely polemical and politically partisan stance in Taxation No Tyranny. The question of his politics also colors his exchange with Boswell in Scotland, in which he dismisses the laudatory portrayal of the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport in Addison and Steele’s Spectator as a Whiggish fiction, no more real than the existence of “a philosophical day-​labourer” (Life, vol. v, 328).7

6  7 

Johnson quotes Ecclesiasticus 26:29. The description of Sir Andrew Freeport in Spectator 2 is by Steele, rather than Addison.

394   Frans De Bruyn Elsewhere Johnson is more positive about the social and political value of commerce. By way of comparison, perhaps the period’s most optimistic view of the benefits commerce bestows is that expressed in the political theory of Montesquieu. Trade, he argues, promotes peace and reciprocal dependence among nations. “Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and . . . everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores.”8 Montesquieu’s well-​known formulation of what has come to be known as the “doux commerce” or “gentle commerce” thesis contains an ambivalent corollary, however, for if commerce unites nations through mutual interest and softens social interaction, it also corrupts the “pure mores” of the individual, by which Montesquieu means the selfless, austere public virtue of the classical republic, personified for the eighteenth century in the figure of the Roman senator Cato the Younger. Yet the republican spirit is fierce and warlike, not social and amiable. In commercial societies (here he cites the example of the Netherlands), “there is traffic in all . . . moral virtues; the smallest things, those required by humanity, are done or given for money.”9 Montesquieu sees an inevitable moral trade-​off in the embrace of a commercial economy; this same conundrum, as will appear, greatly interested Johnson, especially in his account of the Scottish Highlanders. Finally, it must be borne in mind that, although Johnson’s remarks on wealth and commerce are today understood to be the subject matter of a science of economics, the study of the creation and circulation of wealth existed then only in embryonic form, as a proto-​discipline. Johnson himself recognized that commerce was only one facet of a more comprehensive, though as yet unnamed, intellectual discipline, but the term economics was not applied to this branch of knowledge until the nineteenth century. Instead of economics, Johnson’s Dictionary records only the words economy and economic, which, like their Greek root, οἰκονομία (oikonomia), refer primarily to “the management of a family; the government of a household.” To consider the full scope of economic activity in Johnson’s day meant, for instance, looking beyond commerce to take account of the prime importance of agriculture, which Johnson unequivocally declares, in “Further Thoughts on Agriculture” (1756), to be the only source of a country’s wealth and security, “the only riches which we can call our own, and of which we need not fear either deprivation or diminution” (Yale Works, vol. x, 121).10 Commerce, as the ruins of the Hanseatic cities attest, is a plaything of fortune, but agriculture ensures a nation’s independence and security. “By agriculture only,” he concludes, “can commerce be perpetuated; and by agriculture alone can we live in plenty without intercourse with other nations. This, therefore, is the great art,

8  Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 20, chap. 1–​2, 338 . 9  Montesquieu, 338–​9. 10  Johnson contributed this essay to Christopher Smart and Richard Rolt’s Universal Visiter 3 (March 1756), 111–​15. See Yale Works, vol. x, 121–​6.

Commerce   395 which every government ought to protect” (vol. x, 125). Only agriculture can guarantee self-​sufficiency. The underlying assumptions of Johnson’s essay on agriculture, as its concluding statement illustrates, are those of what has come to be called “mercantilism,” though this, too, is a term of nineteenth-​century origin that Johnson did not use. Defined retrospectively as a set of doctrines, mercantilism is an idealized abstraction that no single nation or economic theorist in the early modern period fully held or expressed. Nor can Johnson’s views on commerce and economics be adequately characterized by this term.11 But whether defined as a set of ideas or more historically as a range of policies and regulations pursued by governments and interest groups in the period, mercantile thought was characterized by several recurrent concerns. Central was the preoccupation with maximizing the nation’s exports, especially manufactured goods, and minimizing imports, all with a view to amassing as much gold and silver as possible and minimizing the outflow of specie and precious metals. A nation’s possession of money translated, it was thought, into political power, especially the nation’s capacity to finance and wage war. Expressed another way, the purpose behind mercantilist thought and policy was to maximize the political and economic power of the state, especially in relation to rival states. Economic policies and practices—​from trade regulation and colonization to monopolies and low-​wage labor—​were designed to promote this end. By the eighteenth century, writers on economics often advanced more liberal, flexible views than those traditionally associated with prescriptive definitions of mercantilism. A case in point is Charles Davenant, one of the writers on commerce recommended by Johnson in his preface to The Preceptor. Johnson’s acquaintance with Davenant’s writings is attested by the more than fifty citations from Davenant’s Discourse upon Grants and Resumptions (1700) in the 1773 edition of the Dictionary.12 Davenant argued against restrictive mercantilist practices in favor of freer trade, pointing out that England possessed natural advantages in commodities and geographical situation that could be profitably exploited within a more liberal external trade regime. Johnson appears to echo this view when he remarks to Boswell in the course of their exchange about Adam Smith that trade permits “the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 430).

11  See Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. and Robert F. Hébert, A History of Economic Theory and Method, 6th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013), 47–​8. Aaron Stavisky argues against any simple categorization of Johnson’s thought as mercantilist: “Samuel Johnson and the Market Economy,” The Age of Johnson 13 (2002), 74–​5. See also John Middendorf, “Dr. Johnson and Mercantilism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, no. 1 (1960), 66–​83. 12 In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Sources (https://​www.sjdi​ctio​nary​sour​ces.org/​, accessed December 22, 2020), Brian Grimes lists fifty-​six citations by Davenant, mostly in vol. 2 of the Dictionary. He also lists twenty-​eight by Josiah Childs, another economic writer Johnson recommended in the preface to The Preceptor.

396   Frans De Bruyn

Labor, Poverty, Wealth, Luxury Though Johnson’s remarks on economic matters are, by and large, mercantilist in their underlying assumptions, he can be seen to question such orthodoxies in his more reflective moments. One of these is the mercantile doctrine that the ranks of unskilled laborers needs to be as numerous as possible, that their wages should be low, and that the prices of necessities should be kept high. Suppressing wage levels was rationalized as a moral imperative to protect the laborer from the evils of indolence. Thomas Mun, another of the mercantilist writers referenced by Johnson in the preface to The Preceptor, declared in 1664 that “penury and want do make a people wise and industrious,”—​as the example of the formerly impoverished “Provinces of the Low Countreys” has demonstrated.13 Johnson himself is recorded by Boswell as stating that “Raising the wages of day-​labourers is wrong; for it does not make them live better, but only makes them idler, and idleness is a very bad thing for human nature” (Life, vol. iv, 176–​ 7). Beneath this veneer of concern for the moral well-​being of the laborer was a hard-​ headed economic principle that economic historian Edgar Furniss terms “the utility of poverty.” Low wages were necessary to keep the prices of exports low, maintaining a favorable balance of trade and an inflow of specie. The pursuit of national supremacy in the competition of nations required “a numerous population of unskilled laborers, driven by the very competition of numbers to a life of constant industry at minimum wages.”14 Noted by Boswell without any context, Johnson’s remark about the danger of raising the wages of day-​laborers is difficult to evaluate. It is one of several miscellaneous remarks “inserted” in the Life without “the formality of dates,” having, as Boswell puts it, “no reference to any particular time or place.” Elsewhere Johnson’s thoughts on the subject appear more nuanced and considered. In an exchange Boswell recorded in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), Johnson views the necessity of low wages in a more problematic light. Raising laborers’ wages will inflate the price of provisions and make them less affordable, with damaging social consequences, yet keeping down the earnings of “those who procure the immediate necessaries of life” is intrinsically unfair: “It is not reasonable that the most useful body of men should be the worst paid; yet it does not appear how it can be ordered otherwise.” Though Johnson does not see a way out of the dilemma (which implies that he accepts the mercantilist premise), he hopes that one can be found, and in the meantime he advocates charitable relief for laborers as a temporary expedient when the prices of necessities are high (Life, vol. v, 263–​4).

13  Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade; or, The Ballance of Our Forraign Trade Is the Rule of Our Treasure (London, 1664), 181–​2. 14  Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study of the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 117, 150.

Commerce   397 In Rambler 57, some two decades earlier (1750), Johnson had in fact proposed a thought experiment to imagine a society in which no member of the community would suffer from want, “which I do not remember that any political calculator has attempted.” Though a society in which all are wealthy is an impossibility, he wonders whether it is equally impossible to exempt the lower classes of mankind from poverty . . . I do not see any coactive necessity that many should be without the indispensable conveniencies of life; but am sometimes inclined to imagine, that, casual calamities excepted, there might, by universal prudence, be procured an universal exemption from want; and that he who should happen to have least, might notwithstanding have enough. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 307)

As a moralist, Johnson’s motivation to envisage such a scenario is his recognition, as he points outs in the same essay, that poverty is an enemy of virtue. Poverty enforces dependence, invites corruption, exposes us to temptation, and, in the extreme, necessitates crime. At its most desperate, poverty entails physical consequences that eclipse its moral effects: “hunger and nakedness . . . wants which nature cannot sustain” (Rambler 53, in Works, vol. iii, 284). This moralist perspective prompts Johnson to re-​ evaluate the traditional classical and Christian strictures against the pursuit of wealth. He describes vividly the powerful human impulse that impels the “noise of trade”—​not greed so much as fear and insecurity: The streets [are] thronged with numberless multitudes, whose faces are clouded with anxiety, and whose steps are hurried by precipitation, from no other motive than the hope of gain, and the whole world is put in motion, by the desire of that wealth which is chiefly to be valued as it secures us from poverty; for it is more useful for defence than acquisition, and is not so much able to procure good as to exclude evil. (Rambler 53, in Works, vol. iii, 285)

Wealth does not promote active virtue, but it shields the possessor from desperate circumstances that make virtuous action an unaffordable luxury. Understanding wealth in this way as instrumental to morality leads Johnson to recommend the prudential virtue of personal frugality. He is aware, as economist Clyde Dankert points out, that frugality is as much an economic as a moral principle. To recommend frugality, Johnson writes in Rambler 57, is to adopt “a position replete with mercantile wisdom, A penny saved is two-​pence got” (vol. iii, 308).15 But his focus in Rambler 53 is on frugality as a moral good, both personally and socially, rather than on its beneficial economic effects. An economic evaluation of frugality, by contrast, is supplied by Smith, who emphasizes 15 Clyde

(1970), 65.

E. Dankert, “Samuel Johnson’s Economic Ideas,” Papers on Language and Literature 6

398   Frans De Bruyn its indispensability repeatedly in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s analysis “Of the Accumulation of Capital” (book 2, ­chapter 3), updates the mercantile wisdom cited by Johnson with a new adage for a capitalist age: “frugality increases, and prodigality diminishes the public capital.”16 For Smith, the economic utility of frugality is no longer the accumulation of specie but the enlargement of capital. Having discovered a moral potential in the possession of at least a modicum of wealth, Johnson equally takes exception to the conventional moral wisdom of his time regarding frugality’s obverse, prodigality. Debate on the effects of commercial wealth in the period centered upon the morally loaded term luxury, deemed the root of all manner of ills, from a loss of martial spirit to physical and moral degeneracy. But Johnson dismisses “the cry against the evil of luxury” as cant: “the truth,” he affirms, “is, that luxury produces much good.” The “consequence of luxury” is “general productive exertion,” since thousands are gainfully employed in satisfying the consumer demand for luxuries. Arguments that money spent on luxuries could be better dedicated to relieve the poor strike him as wrong-​headed: “You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompence of their labour, than when you give money merely in charity.” In the former case, you are supporting the “industrious poor,” in the latter, the “idle poor” (Life, vol. iii, 56). It would be a mistake, as Earl Miner reminds us, to view Johnson’s position here as Mandevillean.17 Johnson himself pointed out that Mandeville’s moral paradox of “private vices, public benefits” depends on an extreme, rigorist notion of virtue as monastic self-​denial that stigmatizes any pleasure as vice (Life, vol. iii, 291–​2). But many pleasures are harmless, and luxuries are not necessarily evils in themselves. Johnson gives the example of a commodious building in London: “Does it not produce real advantage in the conveniency and elegance of accommodation, and this all from the exertion of industry?” The shelter thus afforded greatly exceeds what is necessary for our survival, as he notes in Adventurer 67 when he describes how indigenous Americans supply themselves self-​sufficiently with the “necessaries of life,” yet the mutual interdependence of London, its “concurrence of endeavours” by which the specialized contributions of many supply all imaginable human wants, unlocks a vast human potential. “As one of a large community performing only his share of the common business, [the individual] gains leisure for intellectual pleasures, and enjoys the happiness of reason and reflection” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 389). Johnson’s analysis of wealth is particularly astute when it combines moral with psychological insight. The interplay of wealth and desire intrigued him; though he recognized that wealth could itself be an object of desire, he was more interested in how it served as a means by which other desires might be fed and momentarily satisfied. The latter perspective links his views on commerce with the moral outlook of Rasselas (1759), 16  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Chapman, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. i, 346. 17  Earl Miner, “Dr. Johnson, Mandeville, and ‘Publick Benefits,’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1958), 159–​66.

Commerce   399 The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), and the periodical essays, which is perhaps best summed up by Imlac’s memorable diagnosis, in Rasselas, of the “hunger of imagination” that impelled the Egyptian pharaohs to build the pyramids. Desire is insatiable; those “who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 118). But what is presented as a moral problem in Rasselas is also, as Johnson clearly recognized, the psychological motor that drives a commercial consumer economy: as wants [in a commercial city] are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created: every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniences, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us. (Adventurer 67, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 387).

In a subsistence economy, our wishes or desires are a “consequence of our wants” or needs, and are therefore natural, but an economy of “artificial plenty” (vol. ii, 387) creates artificial desires, so that “we begin to feel wants in consequence of our wishes.” We “persuade ourselves to set a value upon things which are of no use, but because we have agreed to value them” (Rambler 49, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 264). Johnson also recognized, as Peter J. Law notes, the relativity of artificial desire in a consumer economy. Law cites Rambler 52, in which Johnson observes that our perceptions of our wealth or poverty are comparative: “We know that very little of the pain, or pleasure, which does not begin and end in our senses, is otherwise than relative; we are rich or poor, great or little, in proportion to the number that excel us, or fall beneath us, in any of these respects” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 282). In Law’s view, Johnson grasped key aspects of what modern economists refer to as “positional goods”—​objects, qualifications, and social relationships that through demand, scarcity, or cost are valued as markers of status.18 The “positionality” of such goods is caused, in Johnson’s words, by “the desire of many for that which only few can possess. Every man would be rich, powerful, and famous; yet fame, power, and riches, are only the names of relative conditions, which imply the obscurity, dependance, and poverty of greater numbers” (Rambler 183, in Yale Works, vol. v, 196–​7). This relativity explains the futility of surrendering to an economy of desire, for there will always be others wealthier than ourselves to be overtaken, and new desires to be fulfilled: “We fill our houses with useless ornaments, only to shew that we can buy them; we cover our coaches with gold, and employ artists in the discovery of new fashions of expence; and yet it cannot be found that riches produce happiness (Idler 73, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 227–​8). It is no accident that Johnson’s recognition of the value of desire as the driving force of a commercial economy should be expressed 18  See

Peter J. Law, “Samuel Johnson on Consumer Demand, Status, and Positional Goods,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11, no. 2 (2004), 183–​207.

400   Frans De Bruyn most forcibly in his moral writings, for that is where he most searchingly explored the psychology of desire and its relation to that quintessentially eighteenth-​century moral question: the pursuit of happiness (see Chapter 34, “Happiness”).

Going Commercial: Social Subordination and Economic Mobility Nowhere does Johnson remark with such apparent approval on commercial society as when he marvels in Adventurer 67 at the means by which “plenty is maintained” in London’s markets, and the city’s “inhabitants are regularly supplied with the necessaries of life” (vol. ii, 384). Striking an atypically enthusiastic note, he admires “the secret concatenation of society, that links together the great and the mean” in a grand collective labor that contributes “to the happiness of life” (vol. ii, 386). More characteristic, however, than this beneficent vision of a community that provides “sustenance” and “protection” to its productive members are reflections on the deleterious effects of commerce on social cohesion. Johnson’s response to the breakdown of order in London during the Gordon Riots of early June 1780, which he attributed in part to “the Cowardice of a commercial place” (Letters, vol. ii, 368), is a case in point. Hudson juxtaposes this instance with Johnson’s account of social change in the Scottish Hebrides: in both cases the growing social impact of commerce has resulted in an increasing “indifference to one’s own locale and the general good.”19 A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Johnson’s account of his Scottish tour with Boswell in 1773, is a case study of a society in transition from a state of semi-​ feudal reciprocity to commercial exchange. Johnson came to the Highlands hoping to observe a social system that had long since died out in England, but he found that his visit was belated. “We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 57). Whatever his expectations, Johnson’s assessment of what he actually saw balances gains against losses: expressions of regret alternate with affirmations of the advantages commercial modernization has brought. To understand this double perspective, it bears reminding that though Johnson greatly valued subordination as a principle of social order, he did not regard it as an indefeasible or immutable principle. The reciprocity of the traditional Highland social order was something valuable: the laird’s customary power over his followers was maintained “by the kindness of consanguinity, and the reverence of patriarchal authority. The laird was the father of the clan, and his tenants commonly bore his name” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 85). Yet Johnson’s account of this “system of insular subordination” is devoid of nostalgia or sentimentality. “The inhabitants were for a long time perhaps 19 Hudson, Political Biography, 181.

Commerce   401 not unhappy; but their content was a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance, an indifference for pleasures which they did not know, a blind veneration for their chiefs, and a strong conviction of their own importance” (vol. ix, 89). He remarks on the fact that inequality in traditional Highland society was a fixed condition, a state of affairs that exacted a significant price when considered from the perspective of the individual: In pastoral countries the condition of the lowest rank of people is sufficiently wretched. Among manufacturers, men that have no property may have art and industry, which make them necessary, and therefore valuable. But where flocks and corn are the only wealth, there are always more hands than work, and of that work there is little in which skill and dexterity can be much distinguished. He therefore who is born poor never can be rich . . . and life knows nothing of progression or advancement. (vol. ix, 101)

Though Johnson regarded inequality as an inevitable condition of social hierarchy and of existing economic circumstances, immobility violated his sense of natural justice. In this respect, as he notes here, societies based in trade and manufactures are more just because they make room for “art and industry,” a supplement to property that allows individuals to improve their material and social destiny. In Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), the same argument, passionately articulated, becomes a moral endorsement of economic mobility.20 Johnson writes, “To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is in itself cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence” (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 409–​10). Alluding to his own life experience, Johnson, in the sentence immediately following, argues (contra Jenyns) that educating “the son of a poor man” is not to deprive the youth of what Jenyns calls the “opiate of ignorance” but to arm him for “the necessity of deriving a better fortune” than his parents (vol. xvii, 409–​10). In endorsing the “rotation of property” that commercial society permits, Johnson looks forward to Smith and distances himself from those who argue for a “utility of poverty” in the domestic economy. In Kevin Hart’s reading of the Journey, Johnson seeks a way to reconcile “reverence for property, by which the order of civil life is preserved” and a Christian sense of natural right. Commercial society opens up an avenue to social mobility without violence to the existing political order, for commerce in Britain is a “legally sanctioned force” that allows “those without property to secure natural rights.”21 The violence of the traditional Highland way of life, which posed a perennial threat to property, illustrates Johnson’s argument: “Mountaineers are thievish, because they are poor, and having neither 20  21 

Kevin Hart, “Economic Acts: Johnson in Scotland,” Eighteenth-​Century Life 16, no. 1 (1992), 102. Hart, “Economic Acts,” 102.

402   Frans De Bruyn manufactures nor commerce, can grow richer only by robbery” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 45). In an echo of the “gentle commerce” thesis, he reaffirms that “Men are softened by intercourse mutually profitable,” as Julius Caesar remarked of the coastal inhabitants of Britain, who were “made less barbarous by their commerce with the Gauls.” By contrast, in remote regions like the Highlands, the absence of a medium of exchange and tradable products perpetuates their isolation: “The inhabitants having neither commodities for sale, nor money for purchase, seldom visit more polished places, or if they do visit them, seldom return” (vol. ix, 44). Yet the introduction of money to the Highlands has exceeded its promise as a facilitator of social and economic relations. Deprived of their erstwhile feudal power and status, the chiefs or lairds have embraced the power of wealth instead, and “patriarchal rulers” have at length become “rapacious landlords” (vol. ix, 89). In Johnson’s view, justice demands that social subordination should be supplemented by money, but not supplanted by it. “The commodiousness of money is indeed great; but there are some advantages which money cannot buy, and which therefore no wise man will by the love of money be tempted to forego” (vol. ix, 86). This assertion appears in his defense of the tacksman, an intermediary between the laird, from whom the tacksman leased a “tack” or tract of land, and tenants, to whom he sublet smaller plots for farming. Against observers who argued that tacksmen were no longer needed in an economy where the relationship of landlord to tenant had become a cash transaction, Johnson defends their economic utility as middlemen or wholesalers, but his chief concern is the social damage their demise would cause. “If the tacksmen be taken away, the Hebrides must in their present state be given up to grossness and ignorance; the tenant, for want of instruction, will be unskilful, and for want of admonition will be negligent” (vol. ix, 88). The larger consequence of the social fracturing caused by rapid economic change in the Highlands was a marked rise in emigration, with a concomitant depopulation of the country and a decline in local communities. Johnson’s assessment is that after the suppression of the 1745 Jacobite uprising, “when the clans were newly disunited from their chiefs, and exasperated by unprecedented exactions,” tales of “fortunate islands, and happy regions” abroad “where every man may have land of his own,” must have proved powerfully alluring (vol. ix, 95). The advent of a cash economy contributed to a loss of the communal solidarity that had characterized feudal Scotland, and a gathering process of evictions or Highland clearances dissolved attachments to home communities previously consolidated by fealty to the chieftain. The transition to a money economy caused dislocation in other respects as well. Crofters accustomed to fluctuations in the value of crops and livestock now preferred to remit their rent in cash rather than commodities, not understanding that the value of money also fluctuates, and erodes with inflation. This, Johnson notes, illustrates the deleterious effects of economic change in a population “not . . . yet arrived at the philosophy of commerce” (Yale Works, vol. ix, 129). If the Journey can be read, to some extent, as an exploration of the “gentle commerce” argument, it is equally a demonstration of the limits of commerce as an ameliorative force.

Commerce   403

Commerce, Colonization, Empire, Slavery The problem of migration from the Highlands introduces a vastly broader, trans-​Atlantic vista upon which eighteenth-​century commerce cast an ever-​darkening shadow. The destination for most Highland emigrants was Britain’s North American colonies, settlements whose de facto existence had to be reckoned with but whose origins and legitimacy Johnson regarded as murky at best. In Taxation No Tyranny (1775), his political polemic against the American rebellion written shortly after the publication of A Journey to the Western Islands, Johnson broadens the perspective on colonial migration broached in the Journey with a consideration of its historical origins and legality. Before the emergence of a regulated system of nation states in Europe, migrations of peoples and tribes were ceaseless across Eurasia, and Johnson imagines what the impact on the Americas would have been had the Europeans reached the New World centuries earlier: Had the western continent been discovered between the fourth and tenth century, when all the northern world was in motion . . . Huns and Vandals, instead of fighting their way to the south of Europe, would have gone by thousands and by myriads under their several chiefs to take possession of regions smiling with pleasure and waving with fertility, from which the naked inhabitants were unable to repel them. (Yale Works, vol. x, 420)

In those “days of laxity,” independent states and fiefdoms would have spread like mushrooms across the continent “from Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific Ocean” (vol. x, 420). With the advent of “established government and regular subordination” in early modern Europe, adventurers were no longer permitted to settle or plunder distant coasts with impunity, but the fact that the permission of an acknowledged sovereign was now needed, though it threw a cloak of specious legality over the process of colonization, served only to heighten the fundamental immorality of the enterprise. Unlike the Vikings, Columbus “was under the necessity of travelling from court to court, scorned and repulsed as a wild projector,” but the backing he received from the Spanish crown did nothing to legitimize his activities in the New World, “nor has any part of the world yet had reason to rejoice that he found at last reception and employment” (Yale Works, vol. x, 421). The introduction Johnson wrote for The World Display’d; or, A Curious Collection of Voyages and Travels (1759) is an even more sweeping indictment of colonization that implicates trade as an accessory to illegality. Remarking on the Portuguese exploration of the West African coast, he writes, “The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast, but to gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practise cruelty without incentive. Happy had it then been for the oppressed, if the designs of Henry [the Navigator] had slept in his bosom, and surely more happy for the

404   Frans De Bruyn oppressors” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 444). If the ancient motive to empire, glory for the conqueror, was a perversion of virtue, modern empires were built on an even worse foundation, the venality of merchants and traders, which spawned in West Africa the most iniquitous trade of all, in enslaved persons. Despite Johnson’s undoubted contempt for the motives of those who planted colonies, he did not see how these colonies, after a considerable time, could simply be disbanded.22 His political writings of the late 1750s (including The World Display’d), composed in the context of the Seven Years’ War, expose the power structure of international rivalry that drove imperialism, but the deeper economic determinism of mercantilism escapes searching critique. The zero-​sum logic of mercantilism encouraged the acquisition of colonies, since trade with colonies, as Johnson explains in “An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain” (1756), is “in reality, only an intercourse between distant provinces of the same empire, from which intruders are easily excluded” (Yale Works, vol. x, 141). The mercantilist drive to acquire specie and, by extension, power through a favorable balance of trade was always vulnerable to the countering policies of rival nations, but colonies, which supplied raw materials, as well as a ready market for finished goods, constituted an extended domestic market and preserved economic strength internally. “A country, once discovered and planted, must always find employment for shipping, more certainly than any foreign commerce, which, depending on casualties, may be sometimes more and sometimes less, and which other nations may contract or suppress” (vol. x, 141). The consequence of this economic dynamic, Johnson acknowledges, is that all maritime nations “have fixed colonies in remote parts of the world” (Yale Works, vol. x, 142). Despite their often-​suspect origins, colonies are deemed a distinct advantage economically. “We seem to have snatched them into our hands upon no very just principles of policy, only because every state, according to a prejudice of long continuance, concludes itself more powerful as its territories become larger” (vol. x, 130). In the face of a harsh reality of great-​power rivalry, Johnson stops short of advocating the dismantlement of Britain’s colonies, though he entertains a fantasy that the indigenous nations of North America may learn from the interlopers, and “when [the French and British] shall be weakened with mutual slaughter . . . rush down upon them, force their remains to take shelter in their ships, and reign once more” in America unmolested (Idler 81, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 254). Instead of proposing to undo the past, however, he advocates responsible stewardship of colonial possessions. In the preface to Richard Rolt’s New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756), he counsels the English merchant to survey diligently the “state of our Colonies . . . that no advantage may be lost which they can afford, and that every opportunity may be improved of increasing their wealth and power, or of making them useful to their mother country” (vol. xx, 251). Whether this constitutes his settled opinion on the matter depends on how one interprets a preface Johnson wrote at the

22  Nicholas

Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207.

Commerce   405 request of the book’s publishers, for, as he subsequently told Boswell, “I knew very well what such a Dictionary should be, and I wrote a Preface accordingly” (Life, vol. i, 359). The same preface also advises the commercial reader to study with care the composition of Britain’s trade, particularly in areas of commercial activity that may be unlawful. Some avenues of commerce run counter to the mercantile interests of the nation (such as the exporting of silver or the importation of “French commodities”) and are thereby declared illegal by the mother country. Beyond the proscriptions of positive law, however, some forms of commerce must be recognized as intrinsically unlawful (see Chapter 19, “Law”). Here Johnson tellingly singles out “the traffick for Negroes,” a trade, as he later pointed out in a legal brief he wrote for Boswell, that violates the rights of nature (Yale Works, vol. xx, 251; Life, vol. iii, 203). Johnson’s writings repeatedly attest to his lifelong opposition to slavery, and in this he refused to temporize. On this score, Edmund Burke’s more “ambiguous legacy,” in the words of his biographer F. P. Lock, is a useful point of comparison, for if Burke affirmed that the slave trade was “directly contrary to the interests of humanity,” he also characteristically regarded this affirmation, “abstracted from all political, personal, and local considerations,” as problematic in the realm of practical politics.23 Such abstraction ran contrary to Burke’s political instincts, and in the context of the abolitionist debates in the 1790s, he voiced his apprehensions about the economic and social consequences of sudden and total abolition. Clement Hawes points to Johnson’s respectful depiction of his Ethiopian characters in Rasselas, who are accorded the same capacity for rationality and moral reflection as Europeans (a universalism, Hawes observes, that Thomas Babington Macaulay found so scandalous in the mid-​nineteenth century), as a potent literary expression of a “uniformitarian ideal” whose logic demands nothing less than emancipation for all.24 An opposing economic logic in the eighteenth century saw the triangular trade by which Africans were brought to the New World and enslaved as the purest expression of a policy that favored trade surpluses and the accumulation of specie. The tension of these opposed perspectives is everywhere evident in Johnson’s reflections on commerce and in the emerging disciplinary discourse of economics in the period. But whereas Johnson characteristically (though not invariably) approached economic questions from a classical and Christian moral perspective, other writers on commerce in the period increasingly sought to justify commercial “growth as a political benefit” in itself, equating, in Liz Bellamy’s phrase, “moral and economic good.”25 A present-​day reader might ask why Johnson does not methodically confront what social science would call the “systemic causes” of colonial exploitation and the slave trade,

23  F.

P. Lock, Edmund Burke: Volume II, 1784–​1797 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 413–​14; The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London: Hansard, 1806–​1820), vol. xxvii, 502. 24  Clement Hawes, “Johnson and Imperialism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114–​26. 25 Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-​ Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22.

406   Frans De Bruyn but that would be to look for him where he is not to be found. Johnson was a “systemic” critic of these and other ills, but the system he addresses is that of human nature—​its desires, passions, and impulses—​which he understands from a religious perspective to be fallen and broken. In a fallen world, there are limits to progress and to what can be done to ameliorate existing evils.

Further Reading Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Basker, James G. “An Eighteenth-​Century Critique of Eurocentrism: Samuel Johnson and the Plight of Native Americans.” In La Grande-​Bretagne et l’Europe des Lumières, edited by Serge Soupel, 207–​20. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996. Basker, James G. “ ‘The Next Insurrection’: Johnson, Race, and Rebellion.” The Age of Johnson 11 (2000): 37–​51. Basker, James G. “Intimations of Abolitionism in 1759: Johnson, Hawkesworth, and Oroonoko.” The Age of Johnson 12 (2001): 47–​66. Basker, James G. “Johnson and Slavery.” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 20, nos. 3–​4 (Fall–​Winter 2009): 29–​50. Bellamy, Liz. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-​Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Craig, John. “Johnson and Economics.” The New Rambler, series E2 (1998–​9): 3–​14. Dankert, Clyde E. “Samuel Johnson’s Economic Ideas.” Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 58–​76. Hart, Kevin. “Economic Acts: Johnson in Scotland.” Eighteenth-​Century Life 16, no. 1 (1992): 94–​110. Hart, Kevin. Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hawes, Clement. “Johnson and Imperialism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 114–​26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hudson, Nicholas. Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Law, Peter J. “Samuel Johnson on Consumer Demand, Status, and Positional Goods.” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11, no. 2 (2004): 183–​207. Mathias, Peter. “Dr Johnson and the Business World.” In The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 295–​317. London: Routledge, 1979. Middendorf, John H. “Dr. Johnson and Mercantilism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, no. 1 (1960): 66–​83. Middendorf, John H. “Dr. Johnson and Adam Smith.” Philological Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1961): 281–​96. Middendorf, John H. “Johnson on Wealth and Commerce.” In Johnson, Boswell, and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell, in Honor of His Eighty-​Fourth Birthday, edited by Mary Lascelles, 47–​64. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Miner, Earl Roy. “Dr. Johnson, Mandeville, and ‘Publick Benefits.’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1958): 159–​66.

Commerce   407 Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–​c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Pagden, Anthony. The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Stavisky, Aaron. “Samuel Johnson and the Market Economy.” The Age of Johnson 13 (2002): 69–​101. Weintraub, Sidney. “Samuel Johnson: A Closet Post Keynesian?” Journal of Post-​Keynesian Economics 1, no. 2 (1978–​9): 170–​1. Winch, Donald. Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–​1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter 23

Wome n Isobel Grundy

A Contested Field This topic is territory that has been much fought over. When Virginia Woolf imagined a harassed morning attempting to research the subject of Women in the British Museum (now the British Library), her long, long list of cataloged subheadings—​“Attractiveness of,” “Vanity of,” “Higher Education of,” etc.—​included “Dr Johnson’s opinion of.” She continues: “Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite.” Her footnote identifies Johnson’s remark: “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.” Her note also records that Boswell thought fit to check in a subsequent conversation that Johnson had been serious in what he said—​something which, it seems, surprised him.1 To this day material filed under “Women, Dr Johnson’s opinion of,” bristles with questions. Did he hold a coherent or a settled view of women? If so, what should we accept as evidence about that view? If not, is there anything distinctive about his range of views? How relevant are the ways that other people have read his opinion (those leaning toward Woolf versus those leaning toward Boswell)? Johnson denied that his friends had traveled over his mind: perhaps no part of it has been oftener explored than “Women, Dr Johnson’s opinion of,” but the explorers are sometimes violently at odds about their findings.

1 

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 1929, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37, 38 and note. She quotes Boswell, Life, vol. v, 226.

Women   409

Words and Meanings In the Dictionary, Johnson’s first definition of man is “Human being.” It’s true that “Not a woman” comes second, before “Not a boy” and long before “Not a beast.” But the primary sense is unmistakable, and examples given for the second sense (which involve Lady Macbeth’s preference for male children, male tears justified as inheritance from the mother, circumcision, and ancient, legendary sex change) are hardly such as to make a woman envy masculinity. Johnson routinely uses man and its cognates to include the female. “Let observation with extensive view, | Survey mankind, from China to Peru”; “Nor think the doom of man revers’d for thee”; the “strange inclination which every man feels to deceive himself.”2 From these sweeping statements women are not excluded. Johnson is a regular user of man in the Dictionary’s first sense, meaning “human being,” a usage which our contemporary ideal of inclusive language has rendered obsolete and, to some, offensive. Readers today may take umbrage at statements about, for instance, “the duty of every man,” but objections on purely linguistic grounds would also apply to Johnson’s contemporaries en masse, both men and women. This usage coexisted comfortably with that of man to mean “not a woman”—​as in Johnson’s “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 265). Crucially, however, the pervasive concept of the female as second sex made it easy for users of man in its first Dictionary sense to overlook or ignore its inclusion of women. This chapter will argue that Johnson does this not more but less than other thinkers of his time. These definitions imply contrasting approaches to women—​as human representatives, or as a group distinct from their male equivalents—​which are perceptible even where the term woman is not in question. Rambler 40 presents a tale of female friendship going sour, which might be read as an anti-​feminist cliché. But the essay opens with broken male relationships and ends with generalizing about “he” and “we”: evidence that these fictional women represent not their sex but human beings in general. A further potential stumbling block for modern readers approaching eighteenth-​ century discussions of women may be the gendering of personified abstracts as female. The personification of “youth” in Rambler 127 or “temerity” in no. 129 as female may strike the modern ear as referring to young women. “Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour . . . She is not easily persuaded” leads on to “He who” and “A man thus cut off.” Johnson has not switched the sex of his exemplar here, but has moved to example from generalization (Yale Works, vol. iv, 313–​14). One phrase of Johnson’s which has been held against him by feminists is (from the preface to the Dictionary): “words are the daughters of earth, and . . . things are the sons of heaven.” This is probably a semi-​quotation from the Irish writer Samuel Madden (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 79 and n. 4); in any case Johnson here taps into an antique style 2 

The Vanity of Human Wishes, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 91, 99; Rambler 67, vol. iii, 354.

410   Isobel Grundy of imagery, biblical or orientalist, which says no more about his own thinking than does calling Youth or Temerity by the female pronoun.

Actual Relations with Women This chapter will consider (briefly, since it is not the first time I have written on these topics)3 Johnson’s relations with actual, living women, his pronouncements, spoken and written, about women in general and as individuals, and responses to his words both during the time when his work was a recent and salient feature of the literary landscape, and closer to our own time. Fairly recent skirmishes over “Johnson and women” will be addressed not in chronological order at the end of this chapter, but in a digression, since they are based chiefly on Boswell’s reporting of Johnson’s conversational sallies. The argument then moves back to some responses from Johnson’s near-​contemporaries, which were based on immersion in his published works. Johnson’s author profile in Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (orlando.cambridge.org) has almost forty links—​an unusually high number—​to author profiles on women through the digital tag “Friends, Associates.”4 His relationships with actual, individual women have been much written about: his mother, who inculcated religion and the fear of hell; his wife, whom he loved without reference to social norms or expectations; and the many literary women whose writing was in one way or another related to his.5 His later years add two more categories: the circle of old ladies at Lichfield for whom his visits became a valued summer routine, and the girls he flirted with. Most interesting in a literary context are Johnson’s relations with women who in any way saw themselves as authors. This is a large inquiry: Johnson’s name recurs insistently in the lives of women writers, from seasoned professionals like Charlotte Lennox to private, provincial writers like Mary Jones of Oxford. Every stage of his life brought him friends who were not only writers but also women, and he consistently saw the world of books as including both sexes. One of the women whom he urged toward greater 3 

Isobel Grundy, “Samuel Johnson as Patron of Women,” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987), 59–​77; Grundy, “Early Women Reading Johnson,” in Philip Smallwood and Greg Clingham, eds., Samuel Johnson after 300 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 207–​24; various profiles in Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online, 2006–​), http://​orla​ndo. cambri​dge.org/​, March 3, 2019. 4  He was also the most-​mentioned author, female or male, in Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–​1800 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985); James G. Basker, “Myth upon Myth: Johnson, Gender, and the Misogyny Question,” The Age of Johnson 8 (1997), 175–​87, at 181. 5 This began in his lifetime with offensive printed scandal about Hester Thrale. It takes more acceptable and scholarly forms today, as in Norma Clarke’s Dr Johnson’s Women (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), and Kate Chisholm, Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011).

Women   411 confidence in her own powers, Frances Reynolds, began by supposing that he was prejudiced against women’s writing, and discovered that in this she was wrong.6 Johnson’s male peers were like him in coexisting with women in their professional fields, but few give such evidence of professional comradeship. His early connection with Edward Cave and the Gentleman’s Magazine made him an associate of several women who reached print in its pages: Lennox, Elizabeth Carter, and Mary Masters.7 Each of these combined literary aspiration with some kind of outsider status. To each the young Johnson offered energetic and generous support, less as a mentor than as an equal sharer in their circumstances and goals. He suggested literary projects to each and worked for the success of projects they undertook; he celebrated Carter in verse and Lennox with a boisterous all-​night party; and his hand can be seen in the impressive subscribers’ list amassed by Masters for her second poetry volume. He was proud of his female literary friends, boasting to Jones of his friendship with Lennox. He remained available to Lennox as a career consultant over their joint lifetimes. These were the earliest in a long list of women whom he significantly helped with their publishing careers or with their efforts to excel in private composition. Johnson did not gather satellites around him as did Richardson, but made an effort to walk in the shoes of other literary aspirants and to look through their eyes. Masters, a published poet and follower of Mary Astell,8 was one of those who “came about” Johnson with support after his wife died; so was the future historian Catharine Macaulay; and so was Anna Williams, a blind Welshwoman with an informed interest in natural philosophy (or to us, science), who became Johnson’s lodger and was close to him at the time he was writing the Rambler. Both Masters and Williams were to some extent Johnson’s protégées, and they therefore raise the issue of reciprocity in his literary friendships. These relationships were less one-​sided than is often supposed. Lennox’s biographer Susan Carlile rightly insists that it is a mistake to see support and influence as flowing all one way, from him to her.9 Similarly, a perceptive contemporary had “no patience of the manner in which Mrs [Anna] Williams is mentioned” as a burden on Johnson, when in fact they shared their scanty financial resources,10 and he depended for social comfort on her sharp and well-​stocked mind. Hester Thrale, too (whom Johnson enlisted to contribute to Williams’s publication), is well known for rescuing him from emotional collapse and supplying years of supportive care; but in return he gave her life as a writer (as she had dreamed in her youth), and facilitated her development into a salon hostess 6 

Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 76 n. 70. 7  The magazine printed and encouraged several more female poets (Grundy, “Johnson as Patron,” 64) with whom Johnson had no detectable links, though he praised Elizabeth Singer Rowe in a review in 1756. 8 See Orlando entry on Masters. Such author entries are the source for any uncited information about women writers here. 9 Susan Carlile, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 84–​5. 10  Philippina, Lady Knight, quoted in Orlando profile on Williams.

412   Isobel Grundy and (with her eyes opened by him to the requirements and advantages of her “odd kind of Life”) a superbly effective businesswoman.11 Johnson notoriously saw the literary world as a competitive arena in which writers vied with each other for fame or at least for praise. This was one of the aspects of being a writer that made it problematic for women, but Johnson encouraged literary ambition in women as warmly as he encouraged paid professionalism. He advised not only on the revision of manuscripts but also on overcoming bashfulness, selecting outlets, seizing opportunities, and building professional networks: exactly the same areas on which he advised young men with their way to make (like the inventor Lewis Paul). No element in Johnson’s view of women as a group was more unusual than his acceptance of competitiveness among them as normal, parallel to the same characteristic in men. With this went an understanding that the most valuable mentoring was to foster self-​help and self-​reliance—​particularly for women, who might easily have missed acquiring these skills.12 Johnson made approving comments on serious literary interests in young girls (the future Sarah Trimmer and Lady Anne Barnard), and as an old man he set the talents and achievement of a new generation, Frances Burney and Hannah More, on a par with those of Carter and (almost) of Lennox (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 275). He never allowed social snobbery to influence his judgment (witness his championing of Lennox and of the translator and medievalist Susannah Dobson).13 He urged Frances Reynolds to publish with her name, and the young and anxious Frances Burney to set herself up in competition with Elizabeth Montagu (a pinnacle in the literary world); he insisted on teaching Burney Latin, though she viewed her own classical learning with embarrassment. Even in his encounters, in the last year of his life, with the young, unpublished future radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and Henrietta Battier, he took care to set them so far as possible on a level with himself. To Battier (who ranked his support so highly that when he died she abandoned hope of publication) he said: “I have often been in need of a Subscription myself.” She held fast to his words as a talisman through the difficult years before her poems finally reached print.14 Johnson treated Wollstonecraft “with particular kindness and attention, had a long conversation with her, and desired her to repeat her visit often.”15 He does not presume on gender superiority, as he does not presume on superiority in age, income, or fame. 11   William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 23–​6. 12  Grundy, “Johnson as Patron,” 61. 13  Another friend from his wife’s lifetime, Mrs. Gardiner, introduced to him by Mary Masters, may have come from the labouring classes, since her work for poor girls’ education was associated with that of Betty Broom in the Idler. Boswell predictably saw this friendship as a favor bestowed by Johnson (Life, vol. iv, 245–​6). 14  Battier, preface to The Protected Fugitives, quoted in Grundy, “Johnson as Patron,” 71. She later developed into a fiery critic of England’s treatment of Ireland. It may be sheer coincidence that Johnson at this time often dined with Margaret Bingham, Countess of Lucan, whose Verses on the Present State of Ireland (1778?) is similarly and eloquently critical. 15 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication, quoted in Basker, “Radical Affinities,” 42.

Women   413

Written Treatment of Women Women as distinct from men play a larger role in Johnson’s oeuvre than popular estimation of him would suggest. In “philosophic” writings, he generally avoids dogmatizing about difference between the sexes (or, almost, what we now call gender), admitting instead to speculation or uncertainty. This is the tone of the marriage debate in Rasselas, where the prince and princess are trying to broaden their very limited experience of human society, and seem not to be conscious that their different views of marriage may stem from taking the part of their own sex. This is not the place to attempt consideration of all Johnson’s writings about women. In his tragedy Irene, the heroine is the moral center, a study in intellectual fortitude and resistance to pressure. In The Vanity of Human Wishes, the wish for beauty is indulged not by the beauty herself (who is female where Juvenal’s is male, in accordance with “dissimilitude between Roman and English manners”)16 but by her mother before she is even born—​an instance of sympathy with exclusively female experience. The exemplar of virtuous old age, whose sex is unspecified, was said by Hester Thrale to be based on Johnson’s mother.17 In Rasselas, the chief male character seems to have been shaped by his frustrated dreams of a throne. He is deeply and consistently interested in the way that societies outside the Happy Valley function, and in means for securing order and good, even flawless, governance. The motivation of the two chief female characters is more various, but it has this in common with that of Johnson and members of his circle, that they aim in all circumstances to excel. Nekayah has an “ambition of excellence” (something she loses, with “her taste of pleasure,” when Pekuah is kidnapped) (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 138). Pekuah shares this ambition, which enables her to keep calm (and calm her maids) in crisis, and to study the stars, first reluctantly with the Arab, and then with Imlac’s astronomer.18 But while Pekuah apparently has some scientific ability, it is Nekayah who carries the flag for learning at the end of the tale, ranking Johnson with Astell in having at least imagined an institution of higher learning for women long before such institutions came into being. One could trawl Johnson’s Shakespeare commentary for opinions which reveal his willingness to attempt a woman’s point of view: “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram”; “To Celia much may be forgiven for the heroism of her friendship” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 404, 264). Even the Lives of the Poets, lacking women poets as it so unfortunately does, 16 

The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 111. 17 Johnson, Poems, 129 n. 18  When Pekuah likens the harem women to caged birds hopping from wire to wire she echoes the letter written to the two universities in 1653 by Margaret Cavendish, later Duchess of Newcastle. The image had become commonplace, so Johnson only might be alluding to Cavendish: Yale Works, vol. xvi, 138; Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle, Philosophicall Fancies (London, 1653).

414   Isobel Grundy yields passages in defense of female intellectual abilities, as when Johnson criticizes Milton and Swift for their views of women as unequal and inferior. But the heart of Johnson’s opinions of women is to be found in his fiction, especially his essay-​fictions. These mostly present a view of English elite society which is slanted toward satire, and the society depicted, whether intellectual or fashionable, tends to attribute entirely separate interests and goals to men and to women. In fiction-​essays which turn on a particular case (where Johnson usually writes not as himself but as some imaginary correspondent), he often implicitly sides with women against current society, entertaining a proto-​feminist skepticism about that society’s views of women. Johnson’s essays that foreground women or women’s voices throw a vivid light on the ways in which near-​universal human troubles are exacerbated by being female, and widespread human failings take acute forms when shaped by women’s particular and unequal status.

Women in Dogmatizing Before looking at these essays in general one may ask: why then Johnson’s reputation for misogyny? The proto-​feminist side of his complex legacy has certainly been glossed over even in scholarly discourse. At the beginning of the twenty-​first century almost none of his essays written as from female correspondents had been chosen for classroom or general interest selections of his works, and only two among the many women who wrote extended critiques of him appeared in his volumes in the Critical Heritage series.19 But it is in any case not Johnson’s writings that have produced furious argument over “Women, Dr Johnson’s Opinion of ”; that part of his reputation rests on a few notorious remarks: throwaway remarks which show every sign of surviving as long as the English language. Almost a generation after James G. Basker published “Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers, and the Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny,”20 that myth lives on, reflected in every collection of quotations on the internet. Anyone claiming Johnson as a feminist fellow traveler is likely to be countered with these one-​liners of misogynist flavor: “the woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on’t”; a woman’s preaching “is not done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 463; vol. ii, 246–​7). Each of these examples was spoken as a put-​down of Boswell: exactly the kind of circumstance in which Johnson argued intemperately for victory. He addressed his crushing redefinition of whore to Boswell’s defense of the divorced and remarried Lady Diana Beauclerk (on grounds, among others, that it would be a pity to waste her “qualities to produce happiness,” that is, to give sexual pleasure to a man) (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 246). The notes from which Boswell wrote up this passage nearly twenty years 19  Basker, “Myth,” 78–​9, 84–​7; James T. Boulton, ed., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). 20 See also Basker, “Myth,” 1997, and Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer, “A Neutral Being Between the Sexes”: Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998).

Women   415 later have “Angry at me for defend Lady Di. Go to Scot. Go to Scot! I never heard talk so foolishly.” Johnson’s anger could have been misogynistic, but the notes make it far less so than Boswell’s final formulation.21 Lady Diana continued on good terms with Johnson till the end of his life. The case of the woman Quaker preaching is less transparent, but it seems likely that Quakerism rather than female gender was Johnson’s target here. Boswell probably felt, and may have communicated, that a woman in this masculine, dominant role was sexy. Johnson liked the simplicity of Quakers, but saw them, male and female, as unjustifiably arrogating to themselves sacred functions like religious guidance. He might well judge that a woman’s sermon appealing to tourists or sensation-​seekers like Boswell was a travesty of true religion. One can imagine, though of course one cannot demonstrate, that women’s preaching as such became collateral damage in his haste to squelch his disciple. A number of women linked to Johnson published texts with “sermons” or similar in their titles, and he subscribed to the second edition of Mary Deverell’s Sermons, 1776. Boswell’s reporting on these two occasions suggests that he wished his idol to hold patriarchal views, and was happy to record such views. (One may contrast his cautious response when Johnson expressed a belief that men fear to be excelled by women—​a belief also expressed to Hester Thrale, to explain the “Paltry Trick” of denying women education.)22 The concept of a patriarchal Johnson, which Boswell launched, has sailed down the centuries. It is particularly unfortunate that it was recirculated, as Basker points out, by two reference books dating from 1985, which were immeasurably influential in the rediscovery of eighteenth-​century women’s writing: Janet Todd’s introduction to A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–​1800, and the introduction to the period in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Norton Anthology of Writing by Women.23 Thus was a whole generation of feminist scholars raised on Boswell’s idea—​ not merely exaggerated but inaccurate—​of a misogynist Johnson. On the other hand, it is hard to claim Johnson as a feminist or proto-​feminist in the sense of a reformist. He almost never has an agenda to promote, or none beyond the values of Christian humanism. He consistently supports women’s claims to intellectual ability, to education (see Chapter 26, “Education”), and to opportunities for earning a living, but his writings on marriage never suggest that married people might be benefited by greater equality before the law (see Chapter 24, “Sociability”).24 He comes close to feminism or proto-​feminism in sympathetic comprehension of women’s position, but not in pushing for social change.

21 See

James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript, ed. Marshall Waingrow et al., 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994–​2020), vol. ii, 105. 22  Quoted in Basker, “Myth,” 74. 23  Basker, “Myth,” 180–​3. 24  This although he may have read Sarah Kirkham Chapone’s Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (London, 1735). Chapone uses the phrase “an act of complicated virtue” (for women’s religiously motivated obedience to their husbands), which Johnson later used in his Life of Savage (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 883).

416   Isobel Grundy

Women in the Rambler and Other Essays The women characters he imagines, like his gender-​blind encouragement of youthful talent, are of a piece with the Dictionary’s primary definition of woman, and with Johnson’s consistent vision of humans groping in the maze of fate. Although Mr. Rambler asserts (in no. 20, about giving a false idea of oneself) “it is much easier not to write like a man, than to write like a woman” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 112), his first female correspondent in the Rambler, Zosima of no. 12, does indeed write like a woman, using a reasoned, straightforward, but colloquial style to record the persecutions visited on her because she is a woman. Bruised from her recent job-​market experience, she supposes that “the life of a man of letters perhaps does not often make him acquainted” with the petty mental cruelties suffered by maidservants (vol. iii, 62); but she meets with a sympathy she does not expect from a literary male. Zosima’s tormentors use the sexist and classist tools that lie to hand for amusing themselves at her expense. They assume their right to criticize and control her looks, her dress, and her supposed sexual misbehavior. One equates literacy in a young woman with promiscuity; several use her to relieve their own unrelated sense of resentment against the hierarchies of society; a husband and wife treat her as a kind of prop or tool in their own erotic relationship. All this is closely observed response to gender; the hurtful language used on Zosima could not be applied to a male job-​seeker, whether a footman or a clerk. The essay implicitly recognizes, though it does not specify, another difference between the sexes. Zosima has not been trained for a job in the way that a potential footman or clerk would be; her genteel family has not qualified her to be self-​supporting when its own income fails. The Rambler presents her as a victim but also as a wasted resource. She has initiative, intelligence, the curiosity that led her to London, and the perception to diagnose stupidity in her insufferable cousin. Unvoiced below the surface lies the idea that menial work would be a waste of Zosima’s capabilities, and the hope that the charitable young woman of independent means who at last promises to provide for Zosima will do it by finding some less stultifying means of earning. This man of letters has made himself acquainted with “female difficulties”: the underlying structures that both enable disrespect and harassment, and close every door to gainful employment for respectable women on their own. By “an act of the imagination” he places himself “in the condition of [her] whose fortune we contemplate” (Rambler 60, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 319). The capabilities or the predicament of women as such, or women as compared with the other sex, are a fairly frequent Rambler topic. Out of 208 Rambler essays, more than a dozen at any count deal with what today are classed as feminist issues: female employment (in Idlers 26 and 29 as well as Ramblers 12 and 75) with its related issues of objectification, dress codes, and sexual harassment; the failings of marriage as institution and as practice (nos. 18,

Women   417 35, 45, 119, 167); fashionably assumed female helplessness (34); the exploitation and sufferings of sex workers (nos. 107, 171–​2); the overvaluing of beauty and its use as a yardstick of worth and identity (1nos. 30, 135); and the misuse of patriarchal power (no. 148). At least two Ramblers, nos. 39 and 66, offer masculine pondering over what it is like to be a woman: are they more unhappy than men? what validity have their opinions? In Rambler 18, the first about marriage, the writer says he will endeavor, in view of the opposition between gendered viewpoints, “to divest my heart of all partiality, and place myself as a kind of neutral being between the sexes” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 98); in no. 34 he adds that a moralist “whose instructions are accommodated only to one half of the human species, must be confessed not sufficiently to have extended his views” (vol. iii, 184). Setting out to accommodate each half of humanity, Johnson often strikingly anticipates the message of avowed feminists of later generations. No. 18 acknowledges that “as the faculty of writing has been chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has been always thrown upon the women”: (vol. iii, 98) exactly the point famously made by Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot more than half a century later. No. 35 (which like no. 18 reports unhappy marriages from a male viewpoint) observes that young women’s “maiden dignity” is compromised when their families set them to catch a husband in a manner not “much different from prostitution” or being “set to auction” (vol. iii, 112)—​a resemblance noted again in Idler 42. Anthea in Rambler 34 (described, significantly, not by herself but by an ex-​suitor) is shown up as foolish and irritating in the nervous, helpless delicacy which she assumes in compliance with a false notion of femininity. Edmund Burke argued that beauty is almost inseparable from delicacy, even fragility; Wollstonecraft was to excoriate this idea as deleterious to women. Generosa of Rambler 126 complains that scholars and experts refuse to take a woman’s request for information seriously, but turn it aside with meaningless gallant compliment, in what she calls “an universal conspiracy against our understandings” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 310). Generosa takes her revenge with a snub to scholarship, but in no. 173 (following a number that quotes the learned Anna Williams) Mr. Rambler himself assures scholars that nowadays a tea-​table is well able to provide them “an adequate audience,” and that they ought not to assume that “whoever desires to be well received in female assemblies, must . . . devote all his attention to trifles, and all his eloquence to compliment” (vol. v, 152–​3). The era of intellectual conversation between equals of both sexes has arrived. Two pairs of essays purportedly by female correspondents show Johnson at his most sensitive to women’s issues. Victoria, the fictional author of nos. 130 and 133, begins by suggesting that Mr. Rambler will not be able to understand her story without female help in interpreting it. She was born and bred a beauty, taught by her mother to identify herself with and value herself exclusively on her dazzling looks, and then loses them to smallpox. Irreparably scarred and ugly, she falls into despair which is lifted only by the eventual advice of another woman that she is “a being born to know, to reason, and to act” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 345). Wollstonecraft reprinted these essays in The Female Reader (1789), and none of its contents more closely reflect

418   Isobel Grundy the message of her preface: “As we are created accountable creatures we must run the race ourselves.”25 Wollstonecraft probably judged the topic of Ramblers 170 and 171 too controversial to be included in her pedagogic anthology. Misella writes to relate her life in prostitution: her adoption by a rich relation as a little girl, her memory of her mother’s parting kiss and prayers, her happy childhood and her downgrading when she reaches the age at which a young lady requires major expense. Her seduction by the rich relation is a tale of threats from him, ignorance and fear in her. Her seducer moves her into lodgings when she becomes pregnant; she says even less than a Defoe heroine about the child she bears. After years as a kept woman, she experiences four far worse years as a common prostitute or streetwalker, generally hungry, cold, and dirty, often ill. “If those who pass their days in plenty and security, could visit for an hour” this misery, she believes, they would feel compassion (Yale Works, vol. v, 144). She wishes that women like herself could be shipped to the colonies as is done in France, for a fresh start. This is perhaps the eighteenth century’s strongest statement that prostitution is a social problem, caused by social conditions not female vice, which could potentially be at least ameliorated by public action. It is unusual for Johnson to be so controversial: his favorite periodical-​essay topics are those concerning the literary life and literary ambitions, in which moral challenges were less stark and far fewer of his female than his male contemporaries were concerned. But close behind them come issues—​ fashion, idleness, subordination—​which concern women in particular, and which he often explores through female fictional characters both admirable and otherwise. The Rambler regularly gives currency to stereotypes (which no doubt often reflect actuality) of women who fail to behave like morally accountable creatures. These include airhead female adolescents; but Johnson stands out among his peers in regularly giving his coquettes a precocious rejection of control which is almost endearing. Properantia (in no. 107, which she shares with another eloquent plea for prostitutes) wants to “spend all my time without tasks, and without account, and go out without telling whither, and come home without regard to prescribed hours” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 207). Bellaria in no. 191 is sure that her mother and aunts have exaggerated the dangers of the world “only to make us live in quiet subjection” (vol. iv, 234). These girls are dangerously shallow and pleasure-​oriented, but to the best of their abilities they hunger for liberation. Another character, this time in Idler 28, breathes life into an antifeminist stereotype who therefore turns out to have her own justifications. The letter from a henpecking wife (which comes between the two letters from Betty Broom on education for laboring-​class girls) presents her not simply as a butt, but with a sense of how she has shaped herself to circumstances. “Those who cannot govern themselves must be governed,” she writes of

25 Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader, quoted in Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life

(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), 137.

Women   419 her husband: she keeps him away from the bowling alley because there he loses money and neglects customers. On Sundays she “make[s]‌him walk abroad” and then locks him in, because otherwise he would stay in bed long enough to eat six meals, and then escape to the alehouse. The terms she uses are shockingly contrary to the ideal of wifely submission, but she is keeping her family afloat (Yale Works, vol. ii, 88). The Rambler presents examples, too, of fashion-​obsessed mothers who spoil their sons (like Florentulus in no. 109) by feminizing them, making them replicas of themselves. This is a familiar stereotype, but Johnson presents these women as casualties of the code of idleness and triviality for wealthy wives. Eriphile of 112, the obsessively house-​proud old maid, is a familiar standby of satirists; but Johnson presents her in tandem with her male equivalent, Chrysalus. Similarly, Hymenaeus runs the gamut of objectionable women in his search for a mate, but his unsavory candidates are no worse than the objectionable men turned up by Tranquilla in her parallel search. Their story presents the most common fault in both sexes alike as a mercenary approach to the personal relationship of marriage. Their happy discovery of each other solves everything. The essay presenting this denouement does not mention the problematic inequality of the married state; nor does no. 39, which considers the unhappiness of women as a group. Here Mr. Rambler seems baffled that even women who escape having a husband “forced upon them by authority and violence” either make their own bad choice or fail to find happiness in being single and at liberty (Yale Works, vol. iii, 211). Not only does Johnson deploy stereotypical caricatures of women (even in the course of “feminist” statements like Betty Broom’s). He also plays with stale tropes like that of a magnet to detect female infidelity (Rambler 199); he uses the idea of a female army in Idler 5 as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the alleged narcissism and inactivity of actual male soldiers; and although he would doubtless have found it ridiculous in a man to perform the stunt of riding the same horse a thousand miles in a thousand hours, he presents it in Idler 6 as yet more ridiculous in a woman. His satirical portraits include those of masculine (loud, overbearing) women and feminine (affectedly overdressed and cowardly) men. Johnson, it seems, is not above drawing on shop-​soiled antifeminist tropes for occasional point-​scoring. Rambler 85 notes the physical and moral penalties of sedentary habits and inactivity, and argues that in this matter women have some advantage over men; they are kept from idleness, and so from vice, because their spare moments are given to needlework. But then their need for occupation is more acute than men’s, “as the weakness of their sex and the general system of life debar ladies from many employments” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 85–​6). This chapter expresses real regret for the vacant lives of society women (a passage picked up and elaborated by Wollstonecraft),26 yet also takes refuge in the kind of gallant banter that Mr. Rambler elsewhere exposes: “the confusion and slaughter that would be produced by so many piercing eyes and vivid

26 

Basker, “Radical Affinities,” 49.

420   Isobel Grundy understandings, turned loose at once upon mankind” by idle women with nothing else to do (vol. iv, 86). Elsewhere Johnson approaches analysis, even theorizing, of women’s condition. Rambler 148 tackles the taboo subject of cruelty in private families (what is now known as domestic violence) and concludes that malign exercise of power can give pleasure. “That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father [or husband] cruel?” (Yale Works, vol. v, 25). Like the fictional letters of Misella, no. 148 breaks a taboo that remained unchallenged until writers arose who self-​identified as feminists. Rambler 128 returns to the impossibility of judging the happiness of other people: or rather unhappiness, since it detects hidden discontent in “every age, every sex, and every condition” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 320). It turns last and at greatest length to the unhappiness of “ladies,” and draws the ironic conclusion that it is precisely the effort expended by society to flatter and coddle them and protect them from harsh realities, that makes them vulnerable to misery over the least little setback. Once again here Johnson sounds like an inspiration, as he was, for Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published a year after Boswell’s Life.

Women after Johnson Wollstonecraft’s fruitful, continuing intellectual relationship with Johnson has been thoroughly discussed by James Basker,27 though this too has proved insufficient to stem the flow of cheap digs at his alleged misogyny. Basker argues that Wollstonecraft found three aspects of Johnson valuable: he continued to serve, though absent, as a personal model and mentor; she could comfortably relate her own opinions on literature to the authority of his; and she could do the same with his views on the condition of women. She seems deliberately to have constituted herself the Johnsonian among the reviewers for the Analytical, writing notices of virtually all its publications by or about Johnson.28 She found strength in personal struggle (as Charlotte Smith had done just the year before, in a preface to a novel about the French Revolution) by means of relating her own difficulties to those that Johnson surmounted in producing work destined for lasting fame.29 Wollstonecraft belonged to that Romantic generation whose male members, as James Boulton has observed, took Johnson as standing for everything they needed to reject “if their own convictions were to prevail.”30 But in that same generation Johnson’s 27 

Basker, “Radical Affinities.” Basker, “Radical Affinities,” 42, 45. 29  Basker, “Radical Affinities,” 53–​4; Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man, 4 vols. (London, 1794), vol. i. 30  Boulton, ed., Critical Heritage, 8. Though Percy Bysshe Shelley almost echoes Imlac on poets as unacknowledged legislators of the world, he chooses Imlac speaking in an enthusiastic fit rather than in measured judgment. 28 

Women   421 established reputation caused large numbers of women writers to turn to him as a source of book titles and of epigraphs to books or chapters. And this kind of allusion was not the half of it. Wollstonecraft was by no means the only female Johnsonian among this generation—​nor the only one who, as a political radical or a Dissenter, would have been antipathetic to Johnson if they had perceived him as patriarchal. As I have argued elsewhere, she and her close associates Mary Hays and Eliza Fenwick were among many women writers who “entered seriously into dialogue or debate with Johnson’s ideas, or made telling use of him in contexts of defining and justifying their own art or opinions.”31 Johnson’s literary pronouncements often provided a standard under which women writers could enlist. These women included numbers of Dissenters, avowed radicals, and others whom one might expect to approach Johnson with caution: the American Lydia Maria Child, the semi-​American Susanna Haswell Rowson, the “fallen woman” Elizabeth Sarah Gooch (née Villa-​Real). Among practitioners of the new novel form, his name was invoked by a remarkably mixed bag: the Dissenting religious novelist Harriet Corp; the Irish nationalist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan; the so far unidentified Mrs. Martin (“Helen of Herefordshire”) and “Medora Gordon Byron”; the recently identified Frances Jacson; and the underestimated Barbara Hofland and Rachel Hunter of Norwich. All these used him (on title pages or in epigraphs or prefaces) to justify their creative choices. They variously affiliated their work with his defenses of using fiction in the service of truth, or his endorsing women’s education or the choice of single life, or his preference for common to noble or wealthy settings, and mixed characters to the exceptionally bad or good. His name and words headed studies of characters who would have been at home in Rambler essays, like the many female protagonists who are treated with casual anti-​feminist malice by prospective employers, or who advise or mentor other women, like the spinster in Harriet Corp’s Cottage Sketches (1813) who finds a single life keeps her free for her chosen occupations of devotion, literature, and good works. Other leading characters may be less readily associated with Johnson, like the heroine of Frances Jacson’s Disobedience (1797), who defies her parents to marry across class barriers, and with her new husband emigrates to share the republican virtues of the USA. Johnson proved as useful to those fortifying proto-​feminist positions as to those staking out literary ones. In her earliest publication, Letters and Essays (1793, well before she followed Johnson’s generic lead in Female Biography, 1802), Mary Hays invoked the authority of Nekayah rather than directly that of Johnson for her damning analysis of marriage. She invoked Johnson himself on the title page of her anonymous Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798). This text (which might today be as celebrated as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication if Hays had not held it back to let Wollstonecraft publish first) quotes Johnson writing on behalf of an unjustly disadvantaged group: the Scottish Gaelic speakers who still had no Bible in their own tongue. “Let it be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long

31 

Grundy, “Early Women,” 208.

422   Isobel Grundy tried”: a remark wryly and splendidly applicable to women. The Appeal goes on to deal with many topics (the stunting of women’s mental and moral development, the lack of opportunities for earning, the danger of prostitution) which Johnson had already raised. Eliza Fenwick, another associate of Wollstonecraft, drew on Johnson for readings she included in The Class Book (1806, published as by “the Rev. David Blair”), as Wollstonecraft had drawn on him for The Female Reader (1798, published as by “Mr Cresswick”). More significantly, the two heroines of her only completed adult novel, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795), might have been conceived to illustrate the mantra given to Victoria in Rambler 133: “remember you are a being born to know, to reason, and to act.” Sibella, the romantic, idealistic, sentimental wild child, responds indignantly to her uncle’s prohibition of thinking: “I was born to think:—​and I will think.” Caroline, the more intellectual of the two, tries to speak to the tyrannical uncle “in the language of reason, as one being to another.”32 This novel is truly tragic, in that both Caroline’s resourceful and persistent action, and Sibella’s unconventional thinking, result in disaster. Disparagers of Johnson, mostly those calling his style labored or his manner peremptory, naturally included women as well as men. This reaction, which tends to present itself as anti-​prescriptive, in fact became an orthodoxy, a substitute for first-​hand critical engagement. Some female disparagers, like Anna Seward and Mary Russell Mitford, are generally recognized to be part of the record; the comments of others (Janet Little, Mary Latter) have had less circulation. But they can count for little when compared with the way Johnson’s cast of thinking was absorbed and reshaped by moral writers of the generations immediately following him. These included the radicals already mentioned, who looked and worked for a revolution in the status of women, and other, less gender-​oriented, reformists who looked toward the Victorian age in thinking “not only for their own sex, but for mankind at large.”33 Johnson complimented Anna Letitia Barbauld for catching his prose style (in “On Romances”) better than any other imitator, but rapped her knuckles for confining her great abilities to writing for little children (in a project which derived in great part from Johnson’s admired Isaac Watts). In fact, his mark on her mind went far deeper than he ever realized. “On Romances” is thoroughly Johnsonian in its critical method (capturing, as he said, his sentiment as well as his diction) and another essay in the same volume, “The Hill of Science,” takes its inspiration and its conceptual framework from The Vision of Theodore. Barbauld went on to achievements comparable to Johnson’s own in canon-​shaping editorial and critical work, and in magisterial poems on weighty public topics from her Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) to Eighteen Hundred and

32  Eliza

Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough: Broadview, 1998), 43, 40. 33  Brief Sketch of the life of Elizabeth Heyrick, 1862, quoted by Kenneth Corfield, “Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker,” in Gail Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–​1930 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 41–​67, at 52.

Women   423 Eleven (1812). The latter was likened to Johnson’s Juvenalian satires both by a contemporary reviewer and by Barbauld’s modern biographer, William McCarthy.34 Another probably more effective if less-​known antislavery campaigner, Elizabeth Heyrick, carried an equally deep impress from Johnson. She might seem an unlikely Johnsonian because she was a Dissenter (like Barbauld) and later a Quaker convert; but both Barbauld and Johnson were in her family: her father had been a pupil of Barbauld’s father, and a copy of Rasselas had played a key role in his courtship of her mother. From the time of her early widowhood, Heyrick devoted her life to campaigning on behalf of the oppressed: against cruelty to animals, corporal and capital punishment, for prison reform, and especially for the abolition of slavery. The boycott against slave-​produced sugar which she and Susanna Watts originated in Leicester, was a startlingly successful grass-​roots movement. Heyrick’s printed works use some of Johnson’s pronouncements about slavery, though it is in writing against corporal punishment that she quotes him at length under the rubric of “our great moralist.” She follows him in recurrent aspects of her thought: the act of imagination necessary to understand motive (both of those who oppress and those who may potentially protest), the blunting of language by self-​ protective euphemism, faith in the abilities of women, the link between material causes and moral effects. These authors, who each in her day played a significant part in contemporary political struggles, carried the social aspect of Johnson’s thinking forward into the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, women writers continued to turn to him for titles of books (like Elizabeth Jenkins, Young Enthusiasts, 1947) or for governing literary concepts (like Johnson’s and Woolf ’s “common reader”). Often they turned to him for personal or even intimate statement. Edith Somerville, who died in 1949, opened her diary for the year 1946 with “Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage.” P. D. James titled her published diary Time to Be in Earnest (1999). Writers like this do not approach Johnson in the way that Wollstonecraft and her ilk did, as women drawn by his views on gender, but as ungendered people, men in the Dictionary’s first sense, drawn by Johnson’s humanity. Johnson’s words, those which were casually spoken as well as those which were thoughtfully written, are now out there for continual, uncontrollable circulation by new as well as old media. By coincidence, he received two highly visible insults from three feminist scholars in 1985 (above), and these, like almost everything else that was ever in print, are still current. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the expansion and circulation of knowledge about women’s writing (in progress then and still not complete) is bound to open up more and better understanding of Johnson’s relations with particular women and with women as a class, and that the better understanding produced is bound to be positive, not negative.

34 

Orlando profile; McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 475.

424   Isobel Grundy

Further Reading Basker, James G. “Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers, and the Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny.” The Age of Johnson 3 (1990): 63–​90. Basker, James G. “Radical Affinities: Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson.” In Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, 41–​55. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Basker, James G. “Myth upon Myth: Johnson, Gender, and the Misogyny Question.” The Age of Johnson 8 (1997): 175–​87. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online, 2006–​. http://​orla​ndo.cambri​dge.org/​. Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Corfield, Kenneth. “Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker.” In Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–​1930, edited by Gail Malmgreen, 41–​67. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986. Grundy, Isobel. “Samuel Johnson as Patron of Women.” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 59–​77. Grundy, Isobel. “Early Women Reading Johnson.” In Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, edited by Philip Smallwood and Greg Clingham, 207–​24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kemmerer, Kathleen Nulton. A Neutral Being Between the Sexes: Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998. Malmgreen, Gail, ed. Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–​1930. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986. McCarthy, William. Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Chapter 24

So ciabi l i t y Jaclyn Geller*

Friendship James Boswell’s Life of Johnson contains a brief dialogue between its subject and the Quaker abolitionist Mary Morris Knowles. At issue is Soame Jenyns’s theological treatise, View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion (1776). It earns one of Johnson’s backhanded compliments: Jenyns’s book is “pretty” but not remotely theological. Knowles appreciates Jenyns, but rejects his argument that friendship is not a Christian virtue. Johnson prods: Why, Madam, strictly speaking, he is right. All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others . . . Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren, which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers. Surely, Madam, your sect must approve of this; for, you call all men friends.

Knowles responds that Quakers are obliged to do good for humanity but allowed to make special efforts on behalf of loved ones. In other words, the sect makes space for both general, will-​directed love and particular affection. She explains that “our Saviour had twelve Apostles, yet there was one whom he loved. John was called ‘the disciple who Jesus loved.’ Johnson. (with eyes sparkling benignantly), ‘Very well, indeed, Madam. You have said it very well.’ ” A wide-​eyed Boswell chimes in: “ ‘Pray, Sir, had you ever thought of it?’ Johnson. ‘I had not, Sir’ ” (Life, vol. iii, 288–​9). The episode is quintessential Boswell. He compresses what was probably a lengthier, more diffuse exchange, stylizing Johnson’s speech while preserving its

*  For Greg Clingham.

426   Jaclyn Geller trenchancy. Johnson seems to talk spontaneously while carefully selecting each word. He repeats “interest” twice with polysemous emphasis, to connote friends’ shared agendas and connections as well as the mutual fascination that often inaugurates friendship. There is suspense; many contemporary readers would have known Johnson’s most famous review, a searing denunciation of Jenyns’s Free Inquiry (1757). Johnson found Jenyns complacent and amateurish.1 Will he revive the initial assault with fresh insults, unleashing his judgment, personified by Boswell as a gladiator (Life, vol. ii, 106)? Boswell invites readers to observe and reach their own conclusions. The intrusive biographer’s voice temporarily disappears. As he does throughout the Life, Boswell jettisons past-​tense verbs that identify speaker. Using only interlocutors’ names followed by periods, as playwrights did, he lets the agents express themselves with no overlay of narrative interpretation. But this scene lacks stage directions and Boswell’s signature descriptions of physical comportment, gestures, and facial expressions. What remains is direct speech. By paring the colloquy down to spoken words, Boswell gives it unusual intensity while suggesting Johnson’s fidelity to truth, unadorned. Readers watch a heartfelt conversation unfold while noting sharp contrasts: between male and female, celebrity and (relative) anonymity, Dissent and Anglicanism. There is tension between Johnson’s intellectual rigor and his disregard for Jenyns. Boswell casts himself as the naïf, reinforcing his biography’s central disparity between guileless curiosity, embodied in the tyro, and wit-​laced erudition exemplified by the teacher. When Knowles makes her case with scriptural evidence cited from memory, Johnson forfeits gracefully, not because Knowles is a woman but because she has won the debate by blending mastery of Scripture with compelling argument. In admitting that he has never considered friendship in terms of Knowles’s instanced passage—​John 21:20—​ Johnson goes further than he needs to. Johnson illustrates his concession by acting as a friend should act: accepting persuasive evidence rather than stubbornly clinging to an original idea. In so doing, he animates his point about the ancients’ high valuation of friendship. Under optimal circumstances great friendship entailed intellectual barter, with truth flowing between two congenial minds. Johnson also demonstrates something emphasized throughout the Life: ongoing phrenic self-​improvement. This practice requires willingness to discard an initial belief in favor of a better one, with gratitude to someone who has bested but also taught. By sharing knowledge Knowles, too, has been a true friend and enabled him to do the same with others.

1  See

189–​92.

Robert DeMaria, The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),

Sociability   427

Friends of Utility, Pleasure, Virtue For the most part, eighteenth-​century Britons located their identities in lineage, class, property ownership, work, and relationship status. The penultimate category was important for Johnson, a provincial of obscure birth who spent years living marginally after a truncated career at Oxford narrowed his professional options (see Chapter 1, “Youth”). The humiliating poverty that ended his studies in 1729, subsequent tribulations as a literary bootstrapper, disappointment with an aristocratic patron’s hollow promises, and distaste for anything resembling self-​importance may explain Johnson’s begrudging acceptance of social distinctions. I believe that something else factors into his tendency to give gradations of rank their due “but not one iota of anything more”: a high valuation of friendship.2 Johnson planned to translate the Nicomachean Ethics, which famously characterizes three types of friendship in ascending order: friends of utility, pleasure, and “virtue.”3 The first two categories are self-​explanatory, the last, areté, is less so. It does not denote moral pristineness but rather that which distinguishes the excellence of something given its definition: excellence in whatever state of being a person or thing is or does.4A knife may have a handle and embellishments, but its blade’s sharp edge is what cuts. Cutting is the knife’s areté. Similarly, human beings have distinct purposes. In Aristotle’s teleological view, excellence is intrinsic and allows an individual to achieve these ends. One loves an excellent friend, not because he assists in practical matters or provides diversion but for talents and habits that enable him to do his best in important situations. Virtuous friends can assist and enjoy each other, but excellence subtends such activities. Aristotle’s characterization of friendship can sound generic; David Konstan argues that it is not: “Aristotle is clear enough that friendship does not exist between virtues but between people, in whom virtues are instantiated; all instantiations are particular.”5 “Virtuous” or “excellent” Aristotelian friendship can seem frosty to moderns, who tend to explain cherished relationships in terms of extemporaneous feeling. In asserting that love should be anatomized and measured to fit its object, Aristotle seems to make caring for someone a mechanical process. And what happens if one’s friend alters course, ceasing to be excellent? Appreciation must cease; does the relationship end? Like Aristotle’s categories, these questions formed an intellectual backdrop against which Johnson wrote.6 2 

Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), 241. F. Suarez, S.J., “Johnson’s Christian Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 194. 4  I appreciate Gilbert Gigliotti and Blanford Parker’s help in unpacking this term. 5 David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76. 6 Tadmor, Family and Friends, 202–​15. 3  Michael

428   Jaclyn Geller We might better grasp Aristotle’s meaning by considering the broad range of qualities required to excel at certain things. For Plato, the ultimate human being exists in the world of forms. For Aristotle, a human being is a civic agent functioning in a society. His great asset is an intellect, since powers of reason and analysis are exclusive to human beings. But intellectualism includes the capacity to imagine what others feel. And excellence is not merely an applied skill; it embraces the full mental capacity of an individual, creating facets of sensitivity and insight. Hence, Burke could support North American colonists’ demand for independence. Johnson could repudiate this cause without threatening the relationship, since opposition helped Burke hone his own analysis, thereby refining his excellence.7 Alongside Johnson, Burke could reject the expansion of penal law, judging as brutally defective any legal code that executes pickpockets.8 He could grasp Johnson’s outraged denunciation of prisons that detained debtors for life, perhaps aware that the middle-​aged Johnson narrowly avoided incarceration in one when he was arrested for an outstanding debt.9 Political excellence also enabled Burke to use his imaginative powers when prosecuting Warren Hastings, India’s British Governor General, and decrying Britain’s financial exploitation of that continent. Burke had never visited India, but his ability to transmute legal documents into Technicolor images of a living culture flowed from political talent that included what Adam Smith called “sympathy.”10 Johnson, who held anti-​imperialist views, could add to this perspective. Burke’s reforms included his 1772 elimination of London’s Board of Trade, an advisory body established to evaluate information on North American colonies, which really provided sinecures for a few MPs, among them Edward Gibbon. He lost an income but preserved his friendship with Burke, whom Gibbon understood to be acting from political principles. I suspect that Johnson, for whom ideas were rooted in human experience, would have grasped areté as something that was not coldly doctrinaire. Areté, or something like it, cemented his long-​term relationship with a political antagonist: another outsider who was also an insider. Each made the other primary in his thinking and writing. Boswell narrates Johnson’s death with Burke’s offer to withdraw so his verbal sparring partner might have privacy and the former’s reply: “No, Sir . . . I must be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company would not be a delight to me” (Life, vol. iv, 407). Here the Life shows a shared culmination of excellence in friendship. And Burke’s statement that his relationship with Johnson had been “the greatest consolation and happiness of his life” does not sound excessive in light of Aristotle’s claim that “no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods.”11 7  Leo Damrosch reminds us that Johnson disdained North American colonists as interlopers who had stolen an indigenous people’s land. The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and Friends Who Shaped an Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 302. 8  Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 99. 9  Idler 38, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 117–​21. 10 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–​11. 11  Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2019), 1155a, 141.

Sociability   429 In conversation, Johnson isolated his friends’ quirks with merciless precision. His prose does the same with its subjects. He represents true friendship as something that unifies through mutually encouraged cultivations of excellence, remains permanent, and aims at goodness. At the same time, it is varied and hard to pin down. While hewing close to Aristotle, he presents friendship as a role that requires case-​by-​case negotiation. Representations of friendship have traditional precedents and radical implications. Johnson composed no formal treatise on this subject. His views must be extrapolated through select texts produced over fifty years. The early friendship writing is unremarkable. As David F. Venturo explains, Johnson’s poetic juvenilia typifies what student-​ versifiers of his time learned: mastery of rhetorical effects that showed one’s ability to pair topic with form.12 Accordingly, the “Ode on Friendship” uses exalted language that creates a feeling of sterility. Seven ballad stanzas deploy clichéd imagery: friendship ennobles and elevates humanity above the other species. It occurs, “When virtues kindred virtues meet, | And sister-​souls together join” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 71). Making reciprocal benevolence the litmus test of friendship and permanence virtue’s outcome while stating that scoundrels cannot be friends, this poem rehearses Aristotle. However, Johnson ultimately changed his original image, “sister minds,” to “sister-​souls,” which indicates a shift toward the Ciceronian. “Laelius: On Friendship” insists that real friendship only exists between ethical people, that friendship does not brook lies by overt deception or sly omission and admits no slander. He goes further, describing great friends as alter-​egos whose identities virtually merge into one soul.13 Aristotle avers that any non-​equal—​in ancient Greece a woman, a slave, someone much younger—​cannot be a premium friend. His highest plateau of friendship excludes marriage because it is pragmatic and financial: the ultimate utilitarian tie. Matrimony also involves women, of whom Aristotle held a particularly low opinion.14 Cicero demurred, considering great friendship powerful enough to level inequities and bring people of different rank into alignment.15 Johnson expressed the Ciceronian ideal in both his life and work. Francis Barber was integral to the Johnson household. Born into slavery and manumitted before joining Johnson, Barber became his heir. Johnson was democratic about age. He was fifty-​four years old and Boswell twenty-​ three when they came together. Through omission, distortion, and satiric caricature, Boswell shaped Johnson as a clubby male chauvinist; this portrait became iconic. Recovery work done over the past thirty years has dislodged it. Women he worked alongside, mentored, lodged with, supported, and accepted support from have become an established part of his legacy (see Chapter 23, “Women”). Damrosch aptly describes

12  David Venturo, Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 32. 13 DeMaria, The Life, 13. Cicero, “Laelius: On Friendship,” On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1971), 217. 14  The Nicomachean Ethics, 158. 15  “Laelius: On Friendship,” 172–​235.

430   Jaclyn Geller these assorted bluestockings as “a kind of shadow club” (The Club, 7), though its members frequently emerged from the shadows. Johnson crowning Charlotte Lennox with bay leaves at the 1751 party he organized to honor Harriet Stuart is a popular example. Invoking the muses on Lennox’s behalf in a famed literary setting did not just validate her first effort. It encouraged Lennox to see her work as part of literary history. Simultaneously, it invited her to stand apart from writers who relied on patronage and join the ranks of independent authors. Lennox did both. Her second novel, The Female Quixote, about a deluded ingénue who sees men as Petrarchan devotees or rapists, had critical and commercial success. No rigid partition segregated Johnson’s male and female communities; to a great degree they overlapped. The Literary Club did not admit women, but there was a mixed-​sex sharing of authorial energy—​an exchange of ideas, manuscripts, letters, and books. Johnson’s closest friend was a woman. His confidante and emotional ballast, Hester Thrale was someone to whom he wrote in Latin, which she read well, and recited poetry. Their relationship evinces his ability to jettison parts of Aristotle’s valuation and preserve one of its tenets for excellent friendship: time invested. “Those that have loved longest, love best,” he wrote to Thrale: “a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. A friend may be often found and lost, but an old Friend never can be found” (Letters, vol. iv, 238–​9). Frances Burney was one of his two main protégés. Her views on friendship seem very close to Johnson’s, which might partly explain the ironic, unsettling quality of her novels. “I am truly happy in being of a nature so little inflammable for love though so ardent in friendship,”16 she stated. Johnson’s other mentee planned to encumber his will with a male-​biased entail that would have robbed the three Boswell girls of their inheritance rights. Johnson persuaded Boswell against this plan.17

Rasselas Johnson’s sole extended work of fiction demonstrates egalitarianism that amends Greek conceptions of friendship while preserving their essence. The travelers in Rasselas are a heterogeneous group. An older man, Imlac has lived several lives before retiring to Abyssinia, and this is not his first expedition. Johnson uses his age for thematic effect, hinting that if a solution to this group’s problem exists, Imlac would already have found it. Apart from this, Imlac’s age is unimportant: Johnson does not equate maturity with wisdom. No parents participate in this quest or corral the travelers home. As Marshall Brown observes, “Rasselas . . . contains no mothers and depicts fathers only as tyrants to be fled.”18 While Imlac is the group’s father figure, Johnson depicts very little deference 16  Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide, et al. (London: Penguin, 2001), 3–​4. 17 Damrosch, The Club, 237. 18  Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 95.

Sociability   431 of youth to old age, with Rasselas’s other protagonists acceding to him, standing in his presence, or maintaining other social formalities.19 Johnson creates the expectation of a male road trip but delivers something else: an account of burgeoning friendship. In finding common cause with Imlac, Rasselas feels his situation immediately altered: “Much of his uneasiness was now removed. He had a friend to whom he could impart his thoughts, and whose experience could assist him in his designs. His heart was no longer condemned to swell with silent vexation” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 57). In showing Rasselas’s existence transformed by honest communication with a life partner, Johnson makes real Aristotle’s claim that death is preferable to living without friends, even among the most privileged. Johnson also animates Aristotle by showing the depth excellence demands. Rasselas proves himself superior to his circumstances by rejecting the opportunity for endless sheltering, coddling, and entertainment. Imlac establishes himself as an excellent friend in helping the prince proceed from thought to action. Johnson demonstrates that great friendship requires magnanimity, since here Imlac must bracket his prior disappointments. Johnson also evokes Renaissance notions of friendship, set out in numerous how-​to-​ be-​and-​select-​a-​friend primers, like Walter Dorke’s Tipe or Figure of Friendship (1589) and Thomas Breme’s Mirror of Friendship (1584). While these guidebooks recapitulate Aristotle’s taxonomy, the Renaissance produced much original writing on friendship, most famously Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon’s seminal essays. An elegiac homage to his four-​year relationship with author Étienne de la Boétie, Montaigne’s “On Friendship,” presents their bond as sui generis: “such a friendship has no model but itself.”20 That intimacy is inexplicable: “If I were pressed to say why I love him, I feel that my only reply could be: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’ ” Bacon’s essay details friendship’s advantages. Friends clarify each other’s ideas and defend each other’s reputations. But the crux of Baconian friendship is openness: “the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.”21 Both authors accept classical models while presenting their life experience as exemplary. Johnson’s prose bears Bacon’s strong imprint. Rasselas’s existence has been a cornucopia of recreation and physical gratification, but friendlessness has denuded it of intellectual focus and with that absence, real pleasure. In Bacon’s “Of Friendship,” the friend’s heart swells to a point of necessary release. Johnson picks up this diction and reverses it; the friendless individual’s heart swells with displeasure. True friendship is the antidote. Where gender is concerned, Rasselas demonstrates parity. Johnson deflects expectations by inserting Nekayah and Pekuah into the narrative as fellow seekers.

19  See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500–​1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 260; Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1982), 28, 149–​ 50; and Maureen Waller, 1700: Scenes from London Life (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 67. 20  Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1958), 97. 21  Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (Indianapolis, IN: The Odyssey Press, 1965), 113. See also A. C Grayling, Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 80.

432   Jaclyn Geller Appearing dramatically as Imlac and Rasselas dig their underpass, Nekayah explains, “I am equally weary of confinement with yourself, and not less desirous of knowing what is done or suffered in the world. Permit me to fly with you from this tasteless tranquility” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 60). At this point contemporary readers likely expected a querelle des femmes. The men would explain that Nekayah was too physically delicate for travel, too sensitive for exposure to “the world,” and unsuited for intellectual system-​ building. No such colloquy occurs. This is a striking choice, considering the way early modern gender roles were being recast, with an emphasis on “difference” rather than inequality.22 Women were said to have sensibility and heightened maternal instincts, neither of which Rasselas’s two female protagonists possess. Likewise, Imlac and Rasselas demonstrate no gender-​specific intellectual capacities, no talent for governance, and no gift at moneymaking. Instead of supplying a pedantic speech on gender difference, the narrative turns personal, revealing that Rasselas loves Nekayah more than his other sisters. This is not an indictment but a tribute to his humanity. He “grieved that he had lost an opportunity of shewing his confidence by a voluntary communication” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 60). The prince concludes that he has failed by keeping secrets. This would not be true with other female relations—​but they are not his friends. Johnson suggests the difficulty of implementing Christian agape: general, unconditional, will-​directed love.23 Because it accepts partiality, the classical friendship ideal is more livable. Rasselas’s narrator accentuates this point by subsequent references to Nekayah as “the favourite.” Without fuss, Imlac and Rasselas include her in their journey; she even manages to corral another woman. Such unusual plotting reminds readers that Rasselas is not simply an apologue about restless people driven by an impulse to keep moving. It shows four characters attempting to discover their own excellences. By bringing Nekayah into the quest, Johnson evokes Aristotelian friendship while discarding its sexist trappings. Rasselas and Nekayah are royalty, yet Imlac and Pekuah do not treat them as such. Discussion is freewheeling, with equal contributions from all four protagonists. They talk eloquently, in fully formed sentences that unfold in Johnson’s signature unit: the wholly developed expository paragraph. Having all four interlocutors discourse uniformly in the periodic style makes Rasselas unrealistic, but Johnson did not aim for a novelistic text in the new, fashionable style. Rambler 4 codifies his concerns about

22  See Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2005), 145–​60. For a nuanced discussion of how early-​modern gender roles affected the aristocracy, see Ingrid Tague, “Aristocratic Women and Ideas of Family in the Early Eighteenth Century,” The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 184–​208. 23  This kind of Christian love is famously detailed in the New Testament’s First Letter of John. Peter Brown describes it elegantly in his account of St. Augustine’s religious transformation upon relocating to Hippo in 391: “In Hippo, men will seem more opaque; but somehow more real. For love has come to embrace a whole community; and so has come to include a large measure of acceptance—​of the alien, of the unpromising, of the unknown and the unknowable in human character.” Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 205.

Sociability   433 realistic fiction. Mr. Rambler appreciates literature in which “an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man,” but he worries that readers will identify too closely with such characters and emulate them uncritically (Yale Works, vol. iii, 19–​25). Nowhere does Johnson aim to achieve the effects of formal realism. Because verisimilitude and believability are not in play, Rasselas can eschew discrepancies in speech between a prince and his sister’s servant, thereby making a larger point: friendship’s intellectual opportunities are available to anyone who will think, listen, question, and invest in her own mind. The narrative’s most piquant exploration of friendship occurs in the subplot involving Pekuah’s disappearance, when she separates from her companions during a visit to the pyramids and is kidnapped by an Arab band, which holds her captive for seven months. The group’s attempts to locate Pekuah fail, so Nekayah begins to process her closest friend’s absence with a regimen of mourning. As Fred Parker observes, “Our perception that this is a kind of foolishness interacts with our sense that there is something properly human about it.”24 Nekayah eventually liberates herself from the depleting routine, but her grief remains potent, resonating in “a thousand memories.” What Johnson shows is a process in which initial shock and sorrow recede, to be replaced by something more eerie: fading memory (suggested by Nekayah’s increasing laxness about her invented duties) and lessening astonishment (as other business calls). Emptiness prompts the mourner to redirect energy at her loved one’s absence and prevent it from becoming normalized. This revivifies the initial sense of loss, making it fresh. Nekayah reopens her emotional wound each day. While demonstrating grief ’s paradoxes, Johnson reminds readers of what it means to endure a double absence. Nekayah pines for Pekuah the unique human being and what her role entails: the “irreplaceable confidence of friendship.” Rasselas shows this with Nekayah’s Aristotelian diction: “I shall henceforward fear to yield my heart to excellence, however bright, . . . lest I should lose again what I have lost in Pekuah” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 129). The Nicomachean Ethics states that in friendship’s highest iteration, the friend becomes a second self.25 This claim generates divergent interpretations. Some see it as an over-​quoted comment that continues to create a falsely Romantic view of Aristotle. Others find it essential because for Aristotle, “Friendship . . . actualizes the very core of the personality.” In this reading, nous (ordering intelligence) is humanity’s signature feature, so those who lead contemplative, philosophically oriented lives transcend their own limitations, becoming “tangents to the divine curve.” Uniting in friendship, such people “become each other’s self in the act of apprehending each other’s moral excellence.”26 A third view holds that great friendship creates a milieu for virtue in which one

24  Fred

Parker, “The Skepticism of Rasselas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 139. 25  Nicomachean Ethics, 177. 26  See Suzanne Stern-​ Gillette, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 43, 34, 54.

434   Jaclyn Geller person’s happiness becomes the contentment of her significant partners. In this reading, Aristotle’s second self is less a soulmate and more a “self extended.”27 Johnson’s description of Nekayah and Pekuah’s bond seems to favor the third interpretation. Friendship in this text is self-​actualizing, but the narrator’s skepticism and understated irony prevent anything as lofty as twin selves commingling. Instead, life-​ structuring friendship burnishes each partner, creating a noetic environment in which both excel. Sharing the other’s concerns, each becomes a fuller version of herself, with the friend as a vital addition rather than a conjoined spirit. This is what Rasselas’s secondary characters miss. Johnson satirizes Stoic philosophy with the sage who preaches tranquil acceptance of life’s vicissitudes until personal loss shatters his theoretical bubble. Readers see the vacuity of a sensual, pleasure-​centered existence when Rasselas becomes bored with Cairo’s youth. Pastoral poetry as far back as Theocritus presents shepherds living contentedly in settings removed from urban corruption and worldly snares, but Rasselas shows bucolic life as monotonously unfulfilling when Nekayah and Pekuah meet a group of bitter shepherds. Solitude is little better, as demonstrated by the renowned hermit who retreats to a deserted area and finds nothing. Here Johnson overturns millennia of hagiographical writing on solitude’s spiritual enhancements. Rasselas’s hermit reports himself unchanged after a lengthy retreat. Having found only boredom and loneliness in the recluse’s autarkic life, he eagerly anticipates returning to Cairo. Each endeavor that beckons, promising enlightenment, contains unforeseen disadvantages and fails to deliver. In every subplot, however, the disappointed characters are friendless. The Stoic cannot unburden himself on students to whom he preached the relinquishment of reactive emotion. He remains stranded alone in woe. The young Egyptian men who exasperate Rasselas know only friendships of pleasure. The irate, exploited shepherds lack even this flimsy camaraderie. Rasselas’s ascetic eliminates all possibility of companionship by withdrawing to a remote spot on the Nile, where he learns that eremitic meditation leads nowhere. Those who see themselves as God’s agents suffer the ultimate isolation. They cannot relate to other human beings in the terms friendship demands: candor, illuminating argument, mutual refinement of talent. Nurturing an obsessive delusion disqualifies the astronomer for any close alliance.

The Poison of Discord Johnson’s other mature friendship writing is unsettling. It often details various challenges of negotiating this crux relationship. Idler 23 invokes Aristotle, claiming that friendship is the most elevated human pleasure. It stays within Aristotelian boundaries, 27  This is how Nancy Sherman understands the term “second self ”: “Aristotle on the Shared Life,” in Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Neera Kapur Badhwar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 94.

Sociability   435 asserting that most friendships are formed for pleasure and end when one party ceases to amuse the other. But considering even friendships of virtue, Johnson observes, “The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.” Ignited tempers will cool; hurt feelings can be mollified. “But when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless.”28 Taking into account excellence’s full range and ameliorative powers, Mr. Idler cannot ignore certain friendships’ cryptic downfalls. The culprit seems to be time, which has altered both parties, creating inexplicable alienation. Rambler 64 catalogs friendship’s vulnerabilities. Hypersensitivity to imagined insults, infatuation with new faces, temperamental coldness (or its opposite), and an overcrowded social circle can all derail established friendships. Mr. Rambler finds closeness between people who hold different political views to be virtually impossible. After a disagreement, “Exchange of endearments and intercourse of civility may continue indeed as boughs may for a while be verdant, but the poison of discord is infused, and though the countenance may preserve its smile, the heart is hardening and contracting” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 343). Professional competition obstructs friendship, and acts of extreme generosity strain it to the breaking point by creating self-​ consciousness. Real friendship requires people equally matched in virtue. Rambler 200, probably based on David Garrick, is told from the viewpoint of Asper, a man wounded by an old friend’s new pretensions: “We set out in the world together, and for a long time mutually assisted each other in our exigencies” (Yale Works, vol. v, 278). Their bond seemed unbreakable, but Prospero, “a man lately raised to wealth by a lucky project, and too much intoxicated by sudden elevation, or too little polished by thought and conversation, to enjoy his present fortune with elegance and decency,” metamorphosed into a materialistic poseur. Visiting his new home, Asper is detained in its outer rooms before viewing luxurious guest quarters he will never occupy, ascending stairs protected from his shoes by mats, and being told not to damage the china. By the time their visit ends the relationship has as well, but celebrity alone has not transformed Prospero. Rather, the abandonment of “thought and conversation,” which would put fame in perspective, has made him intolerable. These activities characterize friendships of excellence, so Rambler 200 leaves readers with two possibilities: either Prospero and Asper were always friends of utility who helped each other as young people must, or they shared a friendship of excellence that Prospero abandoned when his own success dazzled him. By keeping Mr. Rambler neutral, Johnson invites readers to wander afield of the Aristotelian triad and speculate on which scenario is likelier in fiction and life. Johnson’s essays show that while friendship may provide the basis of Aristotle’s good life, it can also engender forces of disquiet, tension, and opposition. Its corruption is devastating. In Rasselas, Johnson may be suggesting that excellent friendship is fortuitous or that this relationship thrives under the duress of shared disappointment. The constant that never betrays any of Rasselas’s travelers, that is never strained, that is never

28 

Idler 23, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 74.

436   Jaclyn Geller questioned by a cadre of questioners, is friendship. When the four decide on returning to Abyssinia, older but no wiser and nurturing sets of unrealistic plans, they do so together. After reading Rasselas, Frances Burney speculated that questers for happiness are less likely to find it than those who let their lives unfold without straining to locate meaning.29Rasselas’s chief irony may be that while scanning the horizon for anything that fixes existence with value, the protagonists do not see that they already possess it.

Romance and Marriage Jeffrey Meyers notes that Rasselas plans to return to the Happy Valley and devote himself to governing his little kingdom. His traveling companions hope to become religious and academic administrators; Pekuah as the prioress of a convent, Nekayah as the headmistress of a school. The joys of romance, family, and sexual life (God forbid!), the very stuff of fiction, are conspicuously missing.

With diagnostic certainty, Meyers attributes this bummer of an ending to “Johnson’s repressed desires.”30 His reading contains a few misprisions. Rasselas does not intend to rule Abyssinia, but rather envisions a hypothetical meritocracy in which each person pursues arête. In his ideal society, government functions efficiently, transparently, and fairly. That neither female protagonist wants to marry makes sense within Rasselas’s plot, since both have been horrified by their observations of marriage culture, with its competitive coquettes who scheme toward wedlock as arduously as they avoid books and serious conversation. Pekuah and Nekayah’s final hopes nod toward a distinguished history of learned churchwomen. And nowhere in Rasselas’s final pages does it say that the characters will eschew sex. Johnson makes it clear that none wish to marry and, since the marriage plot had achieved full momentum by 1759, this is a provocative choice.31 I suggest that it is generic—​demonstrative of Johnson’s response to fictional representations of matrimony rather than pent up sexual agonies. Novelistic endings in which betrothed characters find “joys” and financial solvency confirm many authors’ vision of wedlock as a sustainable, sustaining social good. Within the fictional universe they suggest order: completion both personal and societal, in which narrative conflict has been smoothed away. This was never Johnson’s style; his sensitivity to the chasm between cultural prescription and lived reality was too sharp. Satisfying each character with a romance institutionalized by bonds of wedlock would be an incongruous ending

29 Burney, Journals and Letters, 3–​4. 30 Meyers, Samuel Johnson, 266–​7. 31 See

Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 65–​108.

Sociability   437 for Rasselas. The book’s “conclusion” is consonant with the rest of Johnson’s corpus: perhaps no major author’s work evinces less enthusiasm for amorous pairings. His work contains little admiration for what Boswell called “the fine delirium of love.”32 A number of Ramblers depict pitfalls of courtship and married life. Rambler 18 includes five narratives of men who marry badly and pay for having done so. Here we find the essence of Johnson’s domestic critique: matrimony contains too many overlapping motivations, including financial self-​interest, sexual fulfillment, personal compatibility, a societal mandate to couple off, and familial pressure. By separating out modern marriage’s different strands Johnson problematizes the companionate ideal, which condenses marital ideologies, promising economic security, intellectual and emotional richness, sexual fulfillment, and social prestige in a single happy ending. Rambler 18 demonstrates that no one marital template is secure, but more importantly, that any relationship said to deliver this much is overburdened with expectation. Rambler 199 contains the first-​person narration of Hermeticus, another character possessed of a single obsession. His is female chastity, and he claims to possess an amulet that guarantees it. His pride in this talisman is the essay’s joke. It suggests a thin partition between a fanatic’s delusions and the largely accepted claim that female sexual reserve was natural and optimal. Medieval and Renaissance culture had considered women to be the lustier sex, and this was not a compliment. Traditional Europe was not, in the contemporary idiom, “sex-​positive.” Chastity was the loftiest state to which any person could aspire. Church wisdom held that most women could not achieve it, and physical ravenousness worsened women’s capricious nature. The eighteenth century, however, gave rise to the idea that women were weakly sexed and men highly libidinous. Stephanie Coontz argues that this new “cult of female purity encouraged women to internalize limits on their sexual behavior that sixteenth and seventeenth century authorities had imposed by force.”33 The Scottish medical author and moralist, Dr. John Gregory, explains in A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), “A virtuous girl often hears very indelicate things with a countenance no wise embarrassed, because in truth she does not understand them.”34 Many women must have grasped the obligation to affect embarrassment and ignorance. Now, a woman who admitted to possess erotic feelings was betraying her own nature. Rambler 199 demonstrates the fatuousness of these attitudes. No charm (or social guidelines) should be necessary to protect female chastity if it is inherent. And the cultural obsession with virginity rested on the shibboleth that each woman’s sexual activities revealed her moral character, which in turn determined her reputation. Johnson’s famous Misella, who narrates Ramblers 170 and 171, was seduced and abandoned by her guardian. Left with no other option, she became a prostitute: “sometimes the property of one man, and sometimes the prey of accidental lewdness; at one 32  Boswell’s London Journal: 1762–​1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 89. 33  Coontz, 159. 34  John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London, 1774), 58–​9.

438   Jaclyn Geller time tricked up for sale by the mistress of a brothel, at another by begging in the streets.” Johnson’s humanizing portrait directs readers’ attention to the harshness of a sexual code that stigmatizes women for sexual availability, only to deny them formal education and entry into the professions, the clergy, or the military. While British novelists and conduct-​book authors might promise distaff readers a happy ending in wedlock, no providential design existed to guarantee this outcome. “Many of us,” Misella laments, “. . . are wholly unqualified for any but the most servile employments” (Yale Works, vol. v, 144–​5). Historians Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger observe that as marital mythmaking intensified, an escalating number of prostitutes in European cities “symbolized . . . the hypocrisy of bourgeois sexual practices.”35 Johnson might well have concurred. He knew numerous prostitutes during the 1730s, and Misella is based on one of them.36 He asks readers to confront the paradox of an increasingly marriage-​centric society that is generating a growing number of female prostitutes. Rambler 39 presents female life as a choice between Scylla and Charybidis, with “no other choice than of the dangers equally formidable, whether they embrace marriage or determine upon a single life.” Mr. Rambler calls wedlock for women “slavery.” He highlights the compulsion to marry in a culture which treats “old maids as the refuse of the world.” Describing women’s position in a conjugally organized society, he avers, “the custom of the world seems to have been formed in a kind of conspiracy against them, though it does not appear but they had themselves an equal share in its establishment; and prescriptions, which, by whomsoever they were begun, are now of long continuance” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 211). This essay is remarkable for its open acknowledgment that Whiggish, progressive ideas of marriage were flawed—​evinced by the fact that some women consciously desired non-​marital life. Johnson sidesteps every damning cliché. These are not the unchosen, superfluous mass of bitter prudes that the word “spinster” had come to connote, but they are perceived as such. Faced with the damning stereotype, was it any wonder that many women elected matrimony—​ perhaps unenthusiastically? Well before women’s history emerged as a discipline, Johnson was reflecting that women, denied access to the polity and divided into the respectable (married) and unrespectable (never married or sexually active outside wedlock), had little input in laws that circumscribed their lives. He does not, however, err by rendering women passive agents acted on by unseen forces, malicious agents, and society at large. Mr. Rambler scoffs at their tendency to embrace matrimony and perpetuate what is most deleterious to their own gender. He disapproves of the “absurd vanity” (vol. iii, 212) with which wives boast of the change in their condition. This essay ends with two marriage narratives: the heiress Melanthia weds a vain fop and finds domestic life mentally deadening, and the sought-​after Agyris marries the tyrannical younger brother of a duke who lauds his social standing over her. In a country in 35 Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger, Europe and the Making of Modernity: 1815–​ 1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 112. 36  Ibid., 101.

Sociability   439 which divorce was available only to a wealthy elite whose members could shoulder the expense of ecclesiastical and civil lawsuits, both characters are, like their nonfictional counterparts, trapped for life. In her analysis of Johnson’s views on gender, Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer asserts that he takes standard positions where marriage is concerned: the happiness of any union is determined by people in it, and “a virtuous woman, properly educated, had the best chance of being happy and making a good wife.”37 This reading is peculiarly flat, reducing Johnson’s prose to the level of conduct-​book writers who advised women on how to become effective helpmeets. Kemmerer’s assumption seems to be that matrimony is a given, that Johnson presumed this as well, and that he wrote to upgrade the institution rather than interrogate it. Johnson’s writing on matrimony is much more systemic in its approach, and it never ceases to surprise. The Rambler, in particular, shows those losing in marriage and winning in Mr. Rambler’s estimation. Melissa in Rambler 65 does not mind losing her fortune—​and with it her marital prospects. Education has given her life a center. Rambler 130’s highborn beauty, Victoria, loses her looks to smallpox. In a terrifyingly believable interchange, Victoria’s mother tells her that she is now unmarriageable and would be better off dead. A biological parent fails her, but an excellent friend does not. Victoria makes her second appearance in Rambler 133. Here, Euphemia instructs, “Consider yourself, my Victoria, as being born to know, to reason, and to act . . . you will find that there are other charms than those of beauty, and other joys than the praise of fools” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 345). The “fools” Euphemia mentions appear to be Victoria’s suitors and her mother.

Marriage in Lives of the Poets In The Lives of the Poets, Johnson famously employs a tripartite approach in which biography, character, and talent (or lack thereof) commingle to produce literature (see Chapter 15, “Biography”). This critical method enables him to assess the wide array of traits necessary for anyone to attempt literary artistry and argues, implicitly, that an author’s social life is intertwined with his writing. Here, again, Johnson relinquishes the overblown effusions of marital bliss put forth in contemporary novels, with their courtship intrigues, wedding scenes, and authorial moralizing on behalf of coupling. Where courtship and matrimony are concerned, he achieves a tone of brusque disinterest through three techniques: omission, deflation, and deadpan humor. In failing to mention many of his subjects’ marital status, Johnson implies that their lives are complete without domestic partnerships, that identity does not hinge on

37 

“A Neutral Being between the Sexes”: Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998), 31, 37.

440   Jaclyn Geller conjugal attachment, and that intellectual achievement rather than children ensures a poet’s legacy. The Life of Cowley highlights the author’s creative mingling of the alexandrine and the heroic line but withholds details of his relationship status. This tells us something about Johnson’s priorities as a biographer. The lives of Dorset, Stepney, Philips, Walsh, Smith, Duke, King, Sprat, Parnell, Halifax, Hughes, Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Fenton, Gay, Yalden, Somerville, Pope, Pitt, Thomson, Watts, Collins, Dyer, and Gray likewise omit marriage status. By eschewing the erotic lives of his subjects, Johnson seems to be pulling readers’ attention away from what had become a national obsession—​the triumphant married couple—​and forcing it back to what he considered important: the work. The Lives of the Poets is virtually devoid of cheerfully self-​effacing wives and gratefully deferential children. When marriages occur they are narrated with curt dismissal. In the Life of Denham, acclaim does not secure happiness. Neither does matrimony: “A second marriage brought him so much quiet, as for a time disordered his understanding; and Butler lampooned him for his lunacy.” Johnson adds reassuringly, “His frenzy lasted not long; and he seemed to have regained his full force of mind, for he wrote afterwards his excellent poem upon the death of Cowley” (Lives, vol. i, 237). The Life of Waller is equally unsentimental: “Rich as he was by inheritance, he took care early to grow richer, by marrying Mrs. Banks, a great heiress in the city . . . Having brought him a son and a daughter . . . she died in childbed and left him a widower of about five and twenty, gay and wealthy” (vol. ii, 28). There is no deathbed scene, no pretense that this demise was not to the poet’s advantage. Johnson deflates the companionate marriage ideal by demonstrating courtship as a fetid brew of superficial attraction, personal vanity, and an unwholesome blend of affection and social ambition. Men are not at their best in marriage-​oriented courtship. Neither are women. Johnson writes drily that, though not brilliant, Lady Dorothea “was not to be subdued by the power of verse” and married a titled man of her set. Most of the poets’ personal lives are detached from their poetic achievements. The Life of Waller suggests continuity: “The general character of his poetry is elegance and gaiety. He is never pathetick, and very rarely sublime. He seems neither to have had a mind much elevated by nature, nor amplified by learning. His thoughts are such as a liberal conversation and large acquaintance with life would easily supply” (Lives, vol. ii, 54). The superficial suitor and husband becomes a poet whose shallow verse demonstrates slender intellectual resources: the kind of knowledge gained by chat with acquaintances rather than dialogue with friends. The poet Johnson must concede as undeniably great, John Dryden, “married the Lady Elizabeth Howard . . . with circumstances, according to the satire imputed to Lord Somers, not very honorable to either party” (vol. ii, 110). By omitting this dishonor’s source, Johnson lets readers imagine something worse than the events may have been. The Life of Lyttelton’s aristocratic poet starts out well enough: a stellar education at Eton, studies at Oxford, and the Grand Tour. Then comes wedlock: “He married (1741) Miss Lucy Fortescue of Devonshire, by whom he had a son, the Late Lord Lyttelton, and two daughters, with whom he appears to have lived in the highest degree of connubial felicity: but human pleasures are short; she died in childbed

Sociability   441 about five years afterward.” The clause “human pleasures are short,” which could stand on its own, gets buried in a compound-​complex sentence, as if to distract from Johnson’s point that even the best romantic unions have brief shelf lives. This suggests that painful reality does not deter Lyttelton: “After a while, he was content to seek happiness again by a second marriage with the daughter of Sir Robert Rich, but the experiment was unsuccessful” (Lives, vol. iv, 186). Omitting the details of this failed venture makes them seem insignificant—​one more example of amorous mismatching. Jonathan Swift is generally viewed as the poet Johnson treats least fairly in terms of acknowledging originality and talent. Johnson’s analysis of Swift’s personal life, however, makes an interesting contrast with the other Lives. Swift has encouraged the attentions of wealthy, intelligent Esther Van Homrigh, whom he nicknames “Vanessa.” In Johnson’s account, Swift was then about forty-​seven, at an age when vanity is strongly excited by the amorous attention of a young woman. If it be said that Swift should have checked a passion he never meant to gratify, recourse must be had to that extenuation which he so much despised: men are men: perhaps however he at first did not know his own mind, and, as he represents himself, was undetermined. (Lives, vol. iii, 201)

The middle-​aged dean excited by an admirer, penning poems to her, and leading her on is a disheartening spectacle, especially for the author of Gulliver’s Travels. As usual, Johnson attempts to be fair, considering possible ambivalence on Swift’s part. But the point here is that romantic feelings are unreliable because they too often originate in vanity: a need to be admired rather than genuine appreciation of another person, which undergirds excellent friendship. Johnson concludes sardonically, “She thought herself neglected, and died of disappointment, having ordered by her will the poem to be published, in which Cadenus had proclaimed her excellence and confessed his love.” Vanessa’s last acts have the signature of amatory foolishness; she is not necessarily overlooked but believes herself to be, and this misprision kills her. To ensure that posterity remembers her as Swift’s companion, she publishes a love letter from him. Johnson comments (unflatteringly) on Swift’s behavior but says nothing about Vanessa’s, which stands on its own as sadly misguided. Throughout the Lives Johnson’s narrations of courtship and marriage are abrupt and unadorned. They generally tell a story of mercenary romantic pursuit, mismatched spouses, inflated expectation followed by disappointment, or contentment shortened by death. No dialogue between lovers brings the relationships to life: Johnson relies almost entirely on summary. Sometimes betrayals or cruelties are delineated; often they are hinted at. As in Rasselas, Johnson shows himself unwilling to work within the conventions of the fictional marriage plot or the formula through which female helpmeets assist men of genius in their aesthetic undertakings. (In the Life of Milton, Johnson expresses pointed hostility to this arrangement.) Where

442   Jaclyn Geller amorous pairings are concerned, men and women appear as equally self-​serving or confused.

Family From his initial expression of ambition, when he failed as an educator and retreated to the homes of friends, Johnson lived a strikingly friend-​centered life. This was true just prior to his marriage, when his idealized Ciceronian view emerged in letters like the one he wrote to a fellow undergraduate that praises “our rural Retreats, shades unpolluted by Flattery and falsehood, thickets where interest and artifice never lay concealed” (Letters, vol. i, 9). It was true during his seventeen connubial years. One year into the marriage, he traveled alone to London in search of work and attenuated the visit to six months. After five years of wedlock he basically commenced living as a bachelor, socializing independently as his spouse’s health deteriorated, her mental state declined, and her dependence on alcohol and opium increased. By 1748, when they had been married for thirteen years, Tetty and Johnson were maintaining separate lodgings. According to Boswell they were somewhat consensually non-​monogamous. Johnson had confided, “My wife told me that I might lie with as many women as I pleased, provided I loved her alone.”38 Though Boswell took pains to conceal this fact, Johnson both lay with and loved other women.39 Perhaps it should not be surprising, then, that a concern linking Johnson’s representations of romance is the arbitrariness with which wedlock confers social standing and financial advantage. Johnson was attuned to his culture’s capricious ways of doling out and withholding privilege. “What is it but opinion,” he pressed Boswell in 1772, “by which we have respect for authority that prevents us, who are the rabble, from rising up and pulling down you who are gentlemen from your places and saying, ‘We will be gentlemen in our turn’ ” (Life, vol. ii, 153). The prevailing view that a small subsection of British society deserved power and wealth because it possessed power and wealth is here shown as absurd—​albeit perhaps necessary to preserve civic stability. But marriage’s awarding of status because it awarded status is not defensible in the same way in Johnson’s oeuvre. The peculiarity of imbuing an institution with the power to transform women of sketchy reputation into reputable wives, and, in the rhetoric of advice-​book authors, unite two halve-​selves into a complete entity, did not escape Johnson’s notice. These paradoxes were apparent to an 38 Damrosch,

The Club, 30. Boswell deleted this passage as Life of Johnson was going to press, having been warned that it could offend readers (and presumably hurt sales). 39  Johnson had a limited physical relationship with Elizabeth Desmoulins: see Holmes, Dr. Johnson, 32–​3. Early in his marriage he fell in love with a scholarly gentlewoman named Molly Ashton. John Wain, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), 95–​9.

Sociability   443 author who remained hyper-​vigilant about social hypocrisy and the injustice of unearned accolades. The Dictionary defines family as “those who live in the same house.” After its completion, Johnson lived with an entourage that included Barber; the blind poet Anna Williams; the uncredentialed medical practitioner Robert Levet; the late Tetty Johnson’s companion Elizabeth Desmoulins; and a former prostitute named Poll Carmichael. It is fashionable to mock this group as a motley crew of hangers-​on. Freudian cause-​ and-​effect narratives have encouraged scholars to pathologize Johnson’s choice of housemates as unconsciously self-​destructive, but Occam’s Razor suggests a better explanation: Johnson loved these people, felt responsible for them, and enjoyed their company. Barber, Williams, Levet, Desmoulins, and Carmichael did not constitute a substitute family. They were Johnson’s family. Johnson famously disliked solitude, and complaints about his household have the curmudgeonly tone of one who enjoys decrying people whose company he depends on: “Willams hates everybody; Levet hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them” (Life, vol. iii, 368). Williams, who had unsuccessful surgery to remove cataracts, was perhaps the most unfortunate member of this group. Impecunious and disabled, she resided in each of Johnson’s homes. A letter to poet and classicist Elizabeth Carter shows that Johnson could be an able friend of utility when circumstances demanded it: “I am soliciting a benefit for Miss Williams, and beg that if you can by letters influence any in her favour . . . you will be pleased to patronise her on this occasion” (Letters, vol. i, 126). Johnson intervened with publisher Thomas Davies, and Williams’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse appeared in 1766. Johnson publicized the volume and lent it prestige by contributing a few poems. He appears to have believed that what made Williams a dedicated poet also rendered her a superlative friend. Like her, he was visually impaired. Like him, she was a night owl, and they shared hours of evening conversation. After her demise in 1783, he eulogized Williams to a more flamboyant woman of letters, Elizabeth Montagu: “Her curiosity was universal, her knowledge was very extensive . . . Thirty years and more she has been my companion, and her death has left me very desolate” (Letters, vol. iv, 203). Meyers calls Williams “a peevish blind woman.”40 Johnson described her as his surrogate sister. Robert Levet’s sudden death in 1782 inspired Johnson’s elegy, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” which recapitulates Rasselas’s theme that life entails serial disappointments, and people are too easily enchanted by hope. Levet is shown as that rarity: a man who rose to meet the Christian friendship ideal: “Well tried through many a varying year, | See Levet to the grave descend; | Officious, innocent, sincere, | Of every friendless name the friend” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 314). The stanza suits its subject and serves Johnson’s tone of uncomplicated grief. Each tetrameter line’s missing foot suggests Levet’s absence and the deficiency of words adequate to convey his virtue. As Venturo writes, “ ‘On the Death of Robert Levet’

40 Meyers, Samuel Johnson, 280.

444   Jaclyn Geller is a simple but powerful celebration of a humble, good man” (Johnson the Poet, 168; see also Chapter 7, “Verse”). Johnson’s esteem for charity—​“benevolence” was the eighteenth-​century term—​ surely factored into his helping to support such people.41 He considered charity an essential, distinctly Christian virtue that differed from forbearance, sagacity, and justness, which were qualities also valued by pre-​Christian religions.42 Idler 4 begins, “Charity, or tenderness for the poor . . . is, I think, known only to those who enjoy, either immediately or by transmission, the light of revelation” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 12–​13). This Idler reminds us that religion informed how Johnson conceptualized the worthwhile life. In 1765, he accepted Henry and Hester Thrale’s invitation to take a room at their Streatham home, ten miles from London. From this point on his life was balanced between the communal London household (transplanted to Johnson’s Court and then Bolt Court) and the Thrale estate. Johnson became an uncle to the Thrale children, developing a close relationship with Hester Maria, whose nickname, Queeney, he chose. His companionship buoyed Hester Thrale, who had married practically in the traditional style. A letter from Johnson to Thrale provides glimpses of his views on family: “Though I purpose to come home to morrow I would not omit even so long to tell you how much I think myself favored by your notice . . . I count the friendship of your house among the felicities of life” (Letters, vol. i, 307). The Thrale estate is “home”: no matter that blood, marriage, or legal adoption do not bind him to it. Canonical friendship writing describes bonds between two people. Johnson expands this ideal to friendship with a household. Though less frequent by the 1760s, his club attendance provided access to a third community. These friendship configurations recur in his writing as images of family. One can deduce something about Johnson’s valuation of blood family by his behavior. A statue in Uttoxeter memorializes one rainy day when Johnson stood where Michael Johnson’s stall had been located, repenting for an occasion on which he refused to help the latter sell books. This suggests remorse for unmet filial obligation. Yet, for nineteen years he did not set foot in Lichfield, where Sarah Johnson continued to live after her husband’s death. As she aged and her health failed, Johnson penned tributes: “You have been the best mother, and I believe the best woman in the world . . . I . . . beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, and all that I have omitted to do well” (Letters, vol. i, 177). But her death failed to bring him home. In its aftermath he returned to his birthplace repeatedly, sometimes staying for weeks. Biographers tell us that their relationship was not close, and he made little attempt to conceal this fact. In 1780, he wrote to Mary Prowse, a denizen of Somerset, inquiring about Nathaniel Johnson, who had passed away at age twenty-​seven. Three years his junior, Nathaniel had also not been close to Johnson, who eulogizes, “His memory might probably continue for some time in some favourite alehouse . . . He was my near relation” (Letters, vol. iii, 320). He did not—​perhaps could not—​use the term “brother.” 41  Maurice J. Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 102. 42  Ibid., 106–​8.

Sociability   445

Relationship Status Relationship status among Johnson’s female—​and male—​friends has yet to be adequately studied. Most shadow club members were unmarried at the time he knew them. These include Burney, Johnson’s stepdaughter Lucy Porter, his correspondent (and desideratum) Hill Boothby, Carter, Williams, the superb portrait painter Frances Reynolds, and the writer Hannah More. For early modern Englishwomen, living married or widowed was quite different from being never married. Adulation of matrimony was reaching such pinnacles that the word spinster had changed. It had traditionally been a respectful term for any unwed, self-​supporting woman who spun yarn. In the seventeenth century, it became a neutral descriptor of any never-​married woman. By the eighteenth century it was pejorative. Even the briefest marriage spared an Englishwoman this insulting label. Wives wielded various kinds of authority. They could run businesses with their spouses and continue as deputies after the latter’s demise. With the mantle of marital status, widows could head households, choose where to live, manage their own finances, work in retail, oversee servants, and take business loans. It was acceptable for them to run boarding houses or alehouses.43 Married women could also assume government functions. Hester Thrale did this before her MP spouse’s death, when two strokes prevented him from representing his borough. In 1780, she “went before the electors on his behalf and made a good impression.”44 When she was widowed in 1781, Thrale chose not to maintain the brewery but undertook a complex process of selling it and did exceptionally well. By contrast, a never-​married woman’s prescribed role was that of daughter. Such women were assumed to belong in a household headed by someone to whom they owed deference. Throughout much of Tudor and Jacobean England it had actually been illegal for never-​married women to live alone. By Johnson’s time, laws against solo female living had been nullified, but the social role of submissive, sexually inexperienced singlewoman persisted.45 Marrying women eschewed autonomy as femes soles and took up occupancy under their husbands’ legal cover, which offered permanently increased status and myriad benefits. Several never-​married women in Johnson’s circle did not fit the conventional mold. Carter worked closely with him in the 1730s, launching Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Serving as Cave’s two central writers cemented a lifelong friendship between Johnson and Carter. Lucy Porter cared for Johnson’s aging mother, assuming logistical 43  Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42. 44 Damrosch, The Club, 355. 45  Amy M. Froide, “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England,” in Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250–​1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 241–​2.

446   Jaclyn Geller and financial management of the Lichfield bookshop. Other never-​married women Johnson would have known include Burney’s aunts, Ann and Rebecca, who lived in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood, running an establishment, called Gregg’s Coffee House, well into their late fifties.46

Filius Nullius Like never-​married women, Britons born out of wedlock received their share of scorn. Johnson’s Life of Savage raises questions about this prejudice. An anonymous Account of the Life of Richard Savage (1727) narrativizes Savage’s claims. Illegitimated by Parliament, Savage loses his godmother at age ten. He is then deprived of £300 she bequeathed him, stripped of a second inheritance, threatened with deportation to the colonies, apprenticed to a shoemaker, and, upon discovering his biological mother’s identity, repudiated by her. Eager to be truly rid of him, Lady Macclesfield encourages Savage’s execution after he is convicted for murder in a bar brawl. Nevertheless, he becomes London’s author du jour before falling into disrepute and penury. He dies in debtor’s prison. This biography bears strong literary influences and was partially incorporated into Eliza Haywood’s Utopia (1724), which contains a thinly veiled account of the Earl of Rivers’s liaison with Lady Macclesfield, describing two non-​marital children. Here, Savage’s kindly godmother makes her debut, and the abortive plan for shipping him to North America appears. Johnson disapproved of, and refrained from writing, melodramatic fiction. Uncharacteristically, he uses these titillating storylines in his biography, assimilating events from the 1727 chronicle into its first part while basing the rest on his perceptions and quotes from Savage. Initially, then, the Life of Savage confronts readers with two questions: who is Richard Savage, and why does Johnson never ask? Johnson narrates Savage’s early life as a series of abuses at the hands of Lady Macclesfield. One of two possibilities would explain her behavior: either someone stalked an aristocratic matron, making bizarre claims of kinship, or she was a depraved monster. Scholars have tended to accept the first explanation. But Johnson’s narration of a famous non-​marital son’s story forces readers to apprehend a social system stacked against anyone living outside wedlock’s purlieus of respectability. Probably to achieve credibility, Johnson removes himself from the story and chronicles Savage at an apparent distance. This establishes a seemingly impartial narrator who pictures the infant Savage “launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks” (Lives, vol. iii, 121). Placing foundling children in or near water is, of course, a conventional topos. Flowing water symbolizes the child’s open-​ended fate; she can move upward or downward. The act need not be cruel. As in Moses’s case, placement in water can save a child’s life and

46 Froide, Never Married, 109.

Sociability   447 establish a course to greatness. Johnson changes this formula by using the ocean analogically and stressing its hazards: quicksand and rocks. This sets up a narrative that will accuse one person (Lady Macclesfield), while bringing a set of social practices under scrutiny. Whether he was a conman or a dupe to his own story, Savage could well have been born outside marriage.47 This would explain his efforts to secure a foothold in both the aristocracy (why not?) and the conventional family. In Britain, non-​marital birth had long carried serious disadvantages. A bastard could inherit no “title, honor, business, license, charter, or other devisable private or public claim or good.”48 He was barred from high political office, upper-​level military posts, jobs as prison superintendents, positions as church wardens, and jury service. He was filius nullius. Because common law classified them with libelers, usurers, and “sodomites,” bastards could not legally execute parental estates.49 The offspring of unmarried female servants fared worst. To avoid scandal and loss of employment, such women could pay “killer nurses”: ostensible wet nurses who starved non-​marital children to death.50 In 1739, Thomas Coram established the London Foundling Hospital to care for abandoned children. Non-​maritally born charges were given new names, as if to eradicate their origins.51 Each day the children said prayers apologizing for their births. When Lady Macclesfield gave birth to the boy she named Richard Smith, it was in London rooms rented under two pseudonyms. The Earl of Rivers identified himself as the child’s godfather. She wore a mask throughout her labor, so the attending midwife would not know who she was.52 Throughout the Life of Savage, non-​maritally born people’s vulnerability surfaces as a concern. A key passage turns the concept of filius nullius on its head. When Savage meets his first patron, Richard Steele (himself the father of a non-​marital child), Steele asserts that “the inhumanity of his mother has given him the right to find every good man his father.”53 While the sentiment is attributed to Steele, this sentence reads like a lapidary Johnsonian epigram. It transforms the bastard from a child of no one into a child of everyone. If a culturally constructed hierarchy of shame makes an “illegitimate” anathema to his blood relatives, each Christian becomes, de facto, his relative and caretaker.54 Johnson pays tribute to Christian friendship’s universalizing impulse. 47 

See Holmes, Dr. Johnson, 235. John Witte, Jr., The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 124. 49   Ibid., 124. 50  See Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-​Century England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 4. 51  Ibid., 98. 52 Holmes, Dr. Johnson, 60. 53  Life of Savage, 125. 54 Michael Warner uses the term “shame hierarchy” in reference to matrimonial custom and law. Warner argues that in a maritally organized culture, those whose actual or alleged non-​marital sexual encounters are publicized inevitably feel embarrassed. Shame is a primary means of policing the population and ushering its majority toward wedlock. The politics of shame are basic to marriage because wedlock relies on discriminatory juxtaposition. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 48 

448   Jaclyn Geller He describes Steele’s non-​marital child as “a natural daughter,” using the gentlest available nomenclature—​less sensational than love child, less vitriolic than bastard, less condemning than illegitimate. He also makes bastardy a self-​referential joke: the penniless Savage, “having no profession, became by necessity an author.”55 Here the professions are “legitimate” ways to earn a living, while freelance writing is a bastardized version of respectable work. Augustan culture did not univocally accept laws disenfranchising non-​maritally born people. Throughout the long eighteenth century these regulations provoked sharp satire. Daniel Defoe mocks familial integrity as an illusion in “The True-​Born Englishman,” telling the history of a country repeatedly raped by invaders who dilute national bloodlines. And in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Peachum is mortified by his daughter Polly’s betrothal announcement: “Do you think your mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together, if we had ever been married?”56 Gay turns affectations of social superiority into jokes; he drains the marriage plot of love and shows connubial respectability as a sham. Johnson adds a subtly ironic voice to this mocking chorus with Rasselas’s four chapters in which the prince and princess debate marriage. Envisioning yet another potential venue for meaning, Rasselas expresses infatuation with companionate marriage, insisting, “If marriage be best for mankind it must evidently be best for individuals” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 106). Johnson lets Rasselas’s naivety sink in and gives Nekayah intellectual high ground when she wryly avers that human propagation does not require wedlock: “I see no danger that the present generation should omit to leave successors behind them” (vol. xvi, 106). Wedlock, in other words, does not safeguard the survival of a libidinous species that will procreate with or without legal permission. As we have seen, Rasselas suggests that “legitimate” relationships are not those that impress the stamp of family name upon children. Friendships in which excellence prevails perform this function. “It is dangerous for a man and woman to suspend their fate upon each other, at a time when opinions are fixed and habits established,” Nekayah says of mature marriage (vol. xvi, 108). Each of the apologue’s seekers has reached this stage. As friends of excellence, their fates are suspended on each other; this renders matrimony and marital procreation unnecessary. Life of Savage treats non-​marital birth understatedly, slipping a phrase into descriptive sentences: “So peculiar were the misfortunes of this man, deprived of an estate and title by a particular law” (Lives, vol. iii, 172; emphasis mine). The law alluded to is no minor statute but the undergirding legality of marriage, which dispenses property rights, professional benefits, and prestige on those who follow its mandates and derogates those who do not. Johnson hints at the problem: it is impossible to consider oneself blessed, validated, and completed by matrimony, in accordance with eighteenth-​ century

55 

56 

Ibid., 124. John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (London: Penguin, 1986), 55.

Sociability   449 conduct authors’ reassurances, without considering never-​wed or non-​maritally born people to be deprived, invalid, and incomplete. Law codified this prejudice. It is easy to overlook such nuances because Lady Macclesfield dominates Savage’s story, and Johnson shapes her as a villainess of monstrous proportions. One could explain her demonization as an apotheosis of misogyny, but Johnson’s female characterizations are generally respectful and sympathetic. And whatever their gender, Johnson’s characters come alive through their complexity—​their capacity for behaving unpredictably and revealing hidden dimensions. He generally avoids cartoonish personifications of evil or good. The monotonously craven Lady Macclesfield is an exception. Holmes argues convincingly that Johnson fell under the sway of Savage’s “romantic drama” and wrote about “a victim of society, and particularly . . . of one woman’s cruelty” (Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, 57). Even so, Lady Macclesfield seems to be more than a chimera of bad maternity writ large. She is a figure of quadruple authority: mother, (remarried) wife, maritally born Briton, and aristocrat. Johnson presents her committing a series of atrocities. These are gratuitous but not random. Parents of non-​marital children did abandon them, place them in apprenticeships, and deny their existence. Some arranged for non-​marital infants to be killed. These abuses took place every day, and they provide a context for Johnson’s characterization of Lady Macclesfield. In her, Johnson concentrates the measures English culture took against non-​marital children. She is a metonym for all that British society denied its actual Richard Savages. John Richetti observes that racy eighteenth-​century fiction tends to rely on pornographic subtexts expressive of “the ideology of persecuted female virtue.”57 Johnson had the perfect opportunity to exploit this ideology in Rasselas’s subplot of Pekuah’s abduction. He did not. Pekuah is not seduced or raped—​or, what would be more likely, threatened with sexual domination—​so narrative tension builds. Johnson usually avoids sizzling melodrama and amatory sensationalism. Lady Macclesfield is the exception. From promiscuity to amoral machinations, to the use of rank in an attempt to suppress Savage, she behaves as a larger-​than-​life miscreant. Johnson’s contemporary readers remarked on his comparatively generous treatment of Savage, liberality that verges on whitewashing. From Johnson’s magisterial opening, which situates his subject among history’s sufferers, whose tribulations “were often the consequences of the crimes of others, rather than his own,” Savage is exonerated (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 120). Johnson minimizes as a “quarrel” the fracas in which Savage and two drinking companions kill someone (vol. xvi, 133). By summarizing the event briskly, he denudes it of intensity. While several witnesses speak at the trial, only Savage is granted the privilege of direct speech. His (invented) summation lingers in readers’ minds. While Johnson may use Savage to elicit sympathy for non-​maritally born Britons, he scrutinizes his character unflinchingly—​with the Lives of the Poets’ other subjects. Johnson chronicles someone led astray by impulses he never attempts to control,

57 

Popular Fiction, 187.

450   Jaclyn Geller whose friendships are exclusively those of pleasure and utility: “his conversation was so entertaining and his address so pleasing, that few thought the pleasure which they received from him dearly purchased by paying for his wine” (Lives, vol. iii, 146). Using forms of please as both modifier and noun in one sentence evokes Aristotle’s friendship taxonomy. Because misfortune gives Savage a sense of bottomless entitlement, “Whoever was acquainted with him was certain to be solicited for small sums, which the frequency of the request made in time considerable” (vol. iii, 166). Treating friends as financial utilities exhausts a series of allies. Non-​marital birth may play a part in his financial ineptitude, imbuing him with the belief that wage earning is beneath his station. But the behavior is not excused: “To supply him with money was a hopeless attempt; for no sooner did he see himself master of a sum sufficient to set him free from care for a day, than he became profuse and luxurious” (vol. iii, 167). Unable to accept criticism of his writing, Savage inhales praise. He craves attention of any sort: “It was always Mr. Savage’s desire to be distinguished; and, when any controversy became popular, he never wanted some reason for engaging in it with great ardour” (vol. iii, 158). Because Savage is emotionally reckless, he betrays loved ones when minor squabbles erupt: “His friendship was therefore of little value” (vol. iii, 187). Excellent friendship would always elude Savage. For Johnson, there is probably no more damning statement. Johnson sustains two levels of critique: the first highlights a broad socioeconomic policy that disadvantages children for situations into which they are innocently born. The Life of Savage shows how this practice enables one malicious relative to destroy someone. The second interrogates how someone in these circumstances negotiates his life, holding him accountable for egregious decisions and erratic behavior. After cataloging Savage’s faults—​ financial incompetence, self-​ pity, ingratitude, a long memory for pain inflicted on him and no memory for grief he has caused others—​ Johnson concludes that no “wise man will presume to say, ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage’ ” (Lives, vol. iii, 188). This is both a general reminder against judging others rather than ourselves and a specific allusion to anti-​bastardy laws’ brutality. As Holmes points out, the rebellious loner who recurs in Savage’s verse is an early version of “the Romantic outsider.”58 Johnson does not present the non-​maritally born person as nobly individualistic or possessed of fabulous auras. He creates his own scenes to evoke Savage’s quandary. Young Savage is “so touched with the discovery of his real mother, that it was his frequent practice to walk in the dark evenings for several hours before her door, in hopes of seeing her as she might come by accident to the window or cross her apartment with a candle in her hand” (Lives, vol. iii, 124). This description augurs full-​blown Romanticism: a solitary wanderer is shunted to society’s margins and relegated to anonymity. He is pathetic, riveting, proud, and tortured; his emotions take center stage. Just as powerfully, though, this image conjures up the non-​maritally born Briton’s unmoored life as one who is filius nullius: “Savage is, for the young Johnson,

58 

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, 52.

Sociability   451 the poet who has no place, no social position, no influence on affairs, and literally no home.”59 It would be a mistake to write off the relationship-​status discrimination Life of Savage touches on as a moribund prejudice. Clarence Tracy provides essential backgrounds to the latter’s myth, accompanied by marriage-​centric editorializing. He praises the Macclesfield court case as a milestone in matrimony’s secularization: “Evidently the time had come for putting an end to church control over family relations.”60 But he omits to mention that eighteenth-​century Britain would see an expansion of secular government controls on private life, culminating in Hardwicke’s 1753 Marriage Act, which reified laws against non-​maritally born children and non-​marital families. This legislation made wedlock more compulsory. Tracy mocks the Fourth Earl of Rivers for making financial legacies to women he did not marry. He snidely derides one Elizabeth Colleton, “who was rewarded for her services.” The earl’s behavior belies this slur. He may not have sealed their relationship in the culturally mandated way, but if Rivers cared nothing for Colleton, he clearly did not know it. He left her two homes. Tracy seems astonished that the earl gave his daughter with Lady Macclesfield the Savage surname. He praises Parliament for granting Lord and Lady Macclesfield a divorce but damns it for declaring all of her children “illegitimate.” In his view, the House of Lords “created an artificial bastard by attaching the stigma of illegitimacy to a child born in wedlock and deprived him by law of his natural right of inheritance.”61 What is “natural” about imbuing marital children with inheritance rights while denying their non-​ marital counterparts those same benefits? Life of Savage prods readers to contemplate this question. Boswell’s Johnson stands with upright virtue against unscrupulous sexual profligacy. It is therefore not surprising to hear him extol female chastity as the basis of social order. He opposes granting equal rights to “illicit” and “lawful” children. Boswell quotes Johnson and then provides his own lengthy, positive commentary. Boswell’s basic position on anti-​bastardy laws is, “There may, at times, be a hardship, and seemingly a strange one, upon individuals; but the good of society is better secured” (Life, vol. ii, 457). Johnson may have made a case for differentiating between “legitimates” and “illegitimates.” He may have spoken in partial support of this social stratification, only to have Boswell imagine the rest of his statement. (The cognitively dissonant Boswell, a staunch defender of marriage-​based families, fathered two non-​marital children.) Johnson was also a verbal performer finely attuned to his audience. He may have praised the connubial status quo because he was talking to Boswell, whose concern for “society” was paramount. Johnson’s writing, however, speaks for itself. It is skeptical of the notion that dignity is passed down through the generations and protected by matrimony, rather than earned by merit. 59 Holmes, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, 51.

60  Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 12. 61  Ibid., 12–​13.

452   Jaclyn Geller Long before academics began writing about non-​ standard families and non-​ traditional households, Johnson built his own. If he had a sister, it was Anna Williams. If he had a son, it was Francis Barber. If he had a niece, it was Queeney Thrale. Many of his relationships defy classification and have no moniker. His non-​marital communities provided emotional solace, intellectual nourishment, and source material. Johnson’s exploration of social life, including non-​marriage, is among the remarkable aspects of his best writing. In centering his emotional and intellectual life on non-​marital configurations, Johnson was not acting provocatively. He was not rebelling against demagogues who enshrine the marital family and insist that any deviation from it imperils civilization. Johnson’s style of life, like his writing, had powerful historical precedents. Aristotle himself stated, “Those who welcome each other but do not live together would seem to have goodwill rather than friendship. For nothing is as proper as friends living together.”62 We might best see Johnson as an author whose work expresses a unique style of innovative traditionalism. For him, relationship function trumped relationship form. If one principle of social relations appears throughout his corpus, this is it.

Further Reading Chappell, Michael J. “Samuel Johnson and Community.” PhD dissertation. Fordham University, 2000. Froide, Amy M. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Grayling, A. C. Friendship. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Grundy, Isobel. “Samuel Johnson as Patron of Women.” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 59–​77. Hudson, Nicholas. “Social Hierarchy.” In Samuel Johnson in Context, edited by Jack Lynch, 360–​6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Konstan, David. Friendship in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lee, Anthony W. Mentoring in the Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson: A Study of the Dynamics of Eighteenth-​Century Mentoring. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Mazo Karras, Ruth. Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Rizzo, Berry. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-​Century Women. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500–​1800. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-​Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

62 

Nicomachean Ethics, 1157b.

Chapter 25

Humor J. T. Scanlan*

“Peculiar Powers of Wit and Humour” Perhaps every reader of this volume can easily call forth a cherished example of Johnson’s humor. I well recall the scholar and popular writer Paul Fussell repeating, on various occasions, one of his own favorites: speaking of his duty to react constantly to his students’ and his fellow professors’ writings, Fussell smiled and quoted a line from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets on William Congreve’s early work, Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled: “I would rather praise it than read it.”1 I suspect most readers would quote something not from Johnson’s writing, but from his conversation, for it is there that Johnson’s wit is perhaps amply on display. The editor of this volume discovered the title for his blog—​Dull in a New Way—​in a classic piece of Johnson’s snappy conversation. “Next day I dined with Johnson at Mr. Thrale’s,” reports James Boswell. “He attacked Gray, calling him ‘a dull fellow.’ Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him Great’ ” (Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 327). In fact, the Life of Johnson, the source of this amusing passage, provides the most extensive treasure house of various enactments of Johnson’s sense of humor.

*  For joining me in lively conversation about Johnson’s sense of humor, and for helping to shape my views on the subject, I would like to thank Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, Professor Stephen McJohn, Agnes Bundy Scanlan, Joseph Antebi, and Professor David Venturo. I should also like to thank George Davidson for giving me the opportunity to explore this topic in an embryonic way in a talk to The Johnsonians at the Century Association in New York City in September 2013. Finally, I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Professor Howard D. Weinbrot, who himself had a wide-​ranging and infectious sense of humor, and a ready, convivial laugh. 1 

Numerous conversations with the author. For the context of the quotation, see Lives, ed. Lonsdale, vol. iii, 65–​6.

454   J. T. Scanlan This latter example, as well as other notable ripostes from that great biography, suggests that reliable commentary on Johnson’s sense of humor must begin with James Boswell. In part because of Boswell’s artful and meticulous reconstructions of Johnson’s conversations, based on a friendship of more than twenty years and Boswell’s own robust sense of humor, readers throughout the world have come to delight in Johnson’s distinctive wit. Were it not for Boswell’s quasi-​legal aspiration to set the full record before the reader, we would have much less of an awareness of Johnson’s complicated sense of humor, which, depending on the situation, could be learned, allusive, bracing, provocative, acerbic, abusive, jovial, rowdy, compassionate, or reassuring. Boswell himself experienced Johnson’s comic-​aggressive habit of mind on the first day they met in Tom Davies’s bookshop in May 1763, and from that moment until the publication of the Life of Johnson in May 1791, Boswell persisted in trying to represent and explain as best he could this striking aspect of the mind of his longtime friend. As Boswell’s great editor Gordon Turnbull has written, that meeting in Russell Street was a “rather bruising first encounter”:2 Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies “Don’t tell where I come from.” However he said From Scotland. Mr. Johnson[,]‌said I[,] indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it. “Sir” replied he[,] “That I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” (London Journal, 220).

Johnson’s very first words to Boswell were humorous—​a crack at Boswell’s Scottish background. As the butt of a joke, and as the son of a prominent advocate and judge, the twenty-​two-​year-​old Boswell was doubtless taken aback. He wrote up the meeting in his journal with some pique. “Mr. Johnson is a man of most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king’s evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice.” Boswell found his “dogmatical roughness of manners disagreeable.” But Boswell was a perceptive young man, and after only one meeting, he notes that Johnson’s “great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. I shall mark what I remember of his conversation” (London Journal, 220). And, of course, Boswell did just that. In both his journal and in the Life of Johnson, Boswell scrupulously transformed variations of Johnson’s “great humour,” especially the needling conversational put-​downs, into enduring specimens of Johnson’s wit. But Johnson’s sense of humor finally baffled Boswell. In his concluding summation of Johnson in the last pages of the Life, published almost thirty years after that first meeting,

2  Gordon Turnbull, introduction to James Boswell, London Journal, 1762–​1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (London: Penguin Books, 2010), xli. Subsequent references to this work will appear in the text and be abbreviated “London Journal.”

Humor   455 Boswell offers only broad generalities. He does little to individualize Johnson’s complex sense of humor: Though usually grave, and even aweful, in his deportment, he possessed uncommon and peculiar powers of wit and humour; he frequently indulged himself in colloquial pleasantry; and the heartiest merriment was often enjoyed in his company; with this great advantage, that as it was entirely free from any poisonous tincture of vice or impiety, it was salutary to those who shared in it. (Life, vol. iv, 428)

“Peculiar powers of wit and humour”: that’s a start. Johnson’s sense of humor, like so much else in his thinking, was indeed unusual and distinctive. As William Gerard Hamilton famously put it to Boswell when Johnson died, “there is nobody;—​no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson” (vol. iv, 421). But that Boswell of all people can’t say much more suggests the difficulty of characterizing Johnson’s sense of humor. If we must begin an examination of Johnson’s sense of humor with Boswell, he hardly provides the last word on the subject.

Contexts and Humor: “The Colour of the World as It Moves Along” Hester Thrale and others who knew Johnson well commented on his delight in laughing and his strong sense of humor. But curiously, the vast majority of modern Johnson scholars have not been drawn to this essential aspect of his character. One possible explanation is that scholars who wish to write about humor can choose to write about any number of eighteenth-​century writers who made permanent contributions to satiric or comic expression. The list of such writers is long. Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett stand at the top of the list, but many others are not far further down, including perhaps John Gay, Charles Churchill, Oliver Goldsmith (especially in She Stoops to Conquer), Mary Leapor, Robert Burns, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, George Crabbe, and William Shenstone (though he doesn’t appear to be cognizant of his own wit at times: for example, “Nothing tends so much to produce drunkenness, or even madness, as the frequent use of parentheses in conversation”).3 And this only touches on the saturation of the comic. As Simon Dickie has revealed in Cruelty and Laughter, eighteenth-​century letterpress was choked with low comic narratives and ribald tales of humiliating jests—​works which bring to mind

3  William

Shenstone, On Writing and Books, in Eighteenth-​Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 912.

456   J. T. Scanlan illuminating similarities with aspects of canonical authors.4 At a time when comic-​ satiric expression ruled the day, it may well seem surprising that Johnson, who lived and worked for decades in the heart of literary London, is not more of a comic writer. I think most readers of Johnson would say that he writes more of misery than of mirth. And yet humor is so significant to his life and writing that the concept “Johnsonian” would seem incomplete without it. A few scholars have recognized the significance of Johnson’s inclinations for the comic and have made significant contributions to our understanding of Johnson’s sense of humor. Philip Smallwood, for example, concentrates on Johnson’s writing, and particularly “the enduring comic irony of Johnson’s criticism.” Emphasizing Johnson’s literary criticism, Smallwood observes, “The tone that Johnson adopts is part of his critical perspective, and part of his meaning. Sometimes terse and sardonic, at others self-​mocking, infinitely light or buoyant, bathetic, po-​faced or inscrutably deadpan, . . . Johnson’s satirical humour is a delicate instrument of critical understanding, expression, and control.”5 John A. Vance, in “The Laughing Johnson”—​ a remarkable essay, now more than thirty-​five years old and still eminently worth reading—​notes Johnson’s inclinations to put others off balance in conversation by surprising them with sometimes outlandish views and declarations, many of which were at odds with what he actually believed, what he wrote, or most significantly, what he thought others expected him to say. He liked to indulge this “impish spirit,” writes Vance, to get a laugh, usually when around friends. “This was Johnson’s way; through his vigorous and brash method of needling he ‘shook’ laughter or at least a begrudging smile from his many friends. He could not abide in social situations a dour countenance or an air of pomposity or solemnity.”6 Vance accurately captures one aspect of Johnson’s social self in middle age and beyond: what he writes applies especially well to Johnson’s conversations with Boswell because Johnson knew, from 1773 onwards, Boswell would write his biography. In a way reminiscent of Swift, Johnson evidently delighted to “vex” his auditors, especially Boswell. Perhaps the most penetrating commentary to date on Johnson’s sense of humor has come from W. J. Bate. In an essay that originally emerged as an after-​dinner talk to a gathering of American book collectors, scholars, and Johnson enthusiasts in 1958—​The Johnsonians—​and that evolved in 1970 into “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” Bate argues that Johnson did indeed have strong satiric tendencies, but that he characteristically deflects them. “Ridicule, anger, satiric protest are always in the process of turning into something else. It is the process that is important.” The paradigmatic example of this act is Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), “the prototype . . . for much else in

4  Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5  Philip Smallwood, Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ix, 96. 6  John A. Vance, “The Laughing Johnson,” in Boswell’s Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers, ed. John A. Vance (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 210.

Humor   457 the prose-​writing that follows.”7 A few years later Bate extended his concept of “satire manqué,” and further analyzed the essentials of Johnson’s sense of humor. The influence of this view of Johnson’s sense of humor has been widespread, not least because for decades, Bate taught at Harvard an extremely popular undergraduate course on the second half of the eighteenth century—​English 140b: The Age of Johnson. Like many “period” college courses on literature, “coverage” demanded that he pick and choose his topics with care. Bate devoted an entire lecture to Johnson’s sense of humor.8 In its heyday, that course enrolled hundreds of students, with the result that thousands of people now well into middle age, and in various walks of life, think of Johnson’s sense of humor according to Bate’s perspective. Notwithstanding the contributions of these three scholars, however, our understanding of Johnson’s sense of humor remains incomplete, in part because of a very simple matter: these studies do not, by design, pay close attention to the evolution of Johnson’s sense of humor over time, over the course of many years. I am not sure why, but we evidently tend to think of one’s sense of humor as relatively fixed, as a permanent feature of one’s character, but a moment’s thought reveals the limitations of that supposition. While perhaps one’s broad psychological disposition remains consistent from adolescence into adulthood, the changing contexts and experiences of one’s life influence one’s sense of humor as much as they influence any other aspect of one’s life. Once we recognize this, Johnson’s sense of humor appears much less static than we might have believed. Moreover, while Johnson certainly had his views, he liked to change his mind. In a note for a Rambler essay, Johnson wrote, “Hard it would be if men entered life with the same views with which they leave it” (Life, vol. i, 206). As Gwin Kolb has written, “a number of Johnson’s opinions were decidedly not monolithic, [and] shifted and evolved with the passing of time and circumstances.”9 It is my contention that Johnson’s sense of humor changed in important ways as the years passed. Johnson’s views on humor naturally changed over the years. As the century evolved, many people’s thinking on humor changed, and Johnson more or less fell in line. Satire and comedy were everywhere—​in theaters, taverns, clubs, parks, pleasure gardens, and even the streets. People vigorously reacted to one another’s public postures, as Vic Gatrell has emphasized in City of Laughter. But as the times and contexts changed, they reacted differently. “The reflex of laughter,” writes Gatrell, “is controlled by mental processes; and mental processes have histories. The subjects that people think it appropriate to laugh at, what kinds of people laugh, how cruelly, mockingly, or sardonically they laugh (or how sympathetically and generously); and how far they permit others to

7  W. Jackson Bate, “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” in Eighteenth-​Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York: The Grolier Club, 1970), 150, 154. 8 I thank David Venturo, a graduate student assistant for the course during the 1980s, for his memories of the course and Bate’s presentation of Johnson’s humor during those years. 9  Gwin Kolb, review of The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham, Modern Philology 98, no. 2 (May 2001), 680.

458   J. T. Scanlan laugh—​all vary, with time, sex, class, place, and culture.”10 If we take a look at the actual contexts in which Johnson reveals his sense of humor, in both his writings and his life, we’ll see that his sense of humor changes significantly, and in ways that broadly reflect the waning of the satiric spirit in the literary world in general and its gradual replacement with an exploration of “laughter’s potential for geniality and generosity.”11 This should not be surprising. As Johnson once said to Boswell, “Why, Sir, I am a man of the world. I live in the world, and take, in some degree, the colour of the world as it moves along” (Life, vol. i, 427). It is worth noting at the outset, too, that modern scholars’ collective tendency to miss the significance of the development of Johnson’s sense of humor may be explained in part by the concurrent valuable advances in the annotations of editions of Johnsonian materials during the last century or so. Because Johnson was a prolific writer, and spent much time proposing or agreeing to literary work over the course of a long career, he inevitably wrote on the same topic more than once—​a dimension of literary work he well understood. As he writes in a note to King John in his edition of Shakespeare, “No man writes upon the same subject twice, without concurring in many places with himself ” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 428). And so inevitably, the many superb scholarly editors and research assistants who have worked on editions of Johnson, Boswell, and other figures in Johnson’s circle, from L. F. Powell to Gwin Kolb to Robert DeMaria, Jr. to Katie Gemmill, have been especially adept in elucidating one passage by referring the reader to a similar passage elsewhere in the Johnson canon. Unless the reader compares the two passages closely and pauses to think about the implications of the different contexts of composition, however, such annotations have the effect of consolidating Johnson’s views somewhat, erasing the different contexts and thus the gradual shifts over time in how Johnson came to understand a particular topic. To some extent, then, recapturing a full conception of the development of Johnson’s sense of humor requires us to resist, at least for the moment, the pleasures of reading cross-​references and their related scholia.

Johnson’s Early Sense of Humor: “The Snarling Muse” When Johnson first came to London from Staffordshire in the 1730s, he found work at the Gentleman’s Magazine, a new general-​interest publication on the move (see Chapter 6, “Journalism”). Under the editorship of Edward Cave, the Gentleman’s Magazine provided Johnson with the opportunity to explore an embryonic talent

10  Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-​Century London (New York: Walker and Company, 2007), 5. Subsequent quotations from this book will appear in the text and be abbreviated “City of Laughter.” 11 Gatrell, City of Laughter, 170.

Humor   459 traceable to his youth in his father’s bookshop as well as to his impressive ability at Latin: distilling, summarizing, translating, updating, or simply presenting the works of other writers for “common” readers. An early idea entirely typical of Johnson’s scholarly predispositions and deference to classical, Renaissance, and philological studies is his proposal to translate the work of Politian, the great Italian poet and classical scholar (see Chapter 9, “Scholarship”). Johnson never executed that work, but much of the work he did complete in these early years, as Thomas Kaminski and Robert DeMaria, Jr. have shown, is marked by his special ability to transform a previously written work into something a London readership could easily grasp. A typical example is his life of Herman Boerhaave, the eminent Dutch physician and professor of chemistry, botany, and medicine at the University of Leiden. The biography was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in four installments in early 1739. Johnson was evidently handed a published version of a spirited eulogy delivered in Latin at the Grand Auditorium in Leiden by one of Boerhaave’s close friends on the faculty, the linguist Albert Schultens. Johnson loosely translates the eulogy, softening the passion of Schultens and presenting the story of Boerhaave’s life as a kind of biographical exemplum on the interrelations of intellectual curiosity, scientific research, and religious faith. The work is not especially funny. Nevertheless, it notably veers toward satire when he recounts one scene in which Boerhaave, the son of a minister, had to endure the false charge that he was a follower of “Spinosism, or, in plainer terms, of atheism itself ”: As Boerhaave was sitting in a common boat, there arose a conversation among the passengers upon the impious and pernicious doctrine of Spinosa, which, as they all agreed, tends to the utter overthrow of all religion. Boerhaave sat, and attended silently to this discourse for some time, till one of the company, willing to distinguish himself by his zeal, instead of confuting the positions of Spinosa by argument, began to give a loose to contumelious language, and virulent invectives; with which Boerhaave was so little pleased, that at last he could not forbear asking him, whether he had ever read the author against whom he declaim’d. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 35)

The core of this passage pits a learned, pious, and unpretentious scholar against a rude, partially educated, zealous pretender to low wit. By the late 1730s, readers of Swift and Pope on intellectual pride and “positiveness” (to use a word Swift favored) would recognize the pattern and point in Johnson’s handling of the episode. While not bitingly satiric, Johnson’s “Life of Dr. Herman Boerhaave” speaks to Johnson’s natural acceptance, as a practicing journalist, of the presiding literary norms against intellectual pretentiousness, popularized by the leading satirists of the day. A much stronger example of Johnson’s acceptance of the satiric spirt of the early eighteenth century is his poem London (1738), an imitation of the Juvenal’s third satire. As David Venturo has persuasively argued, Johnson’s London is a vigorous political satire, a blast against “the closing years of the Walpole administration. Johnson was no mere mercenary journalist making a ply for fame, but an enthusiastic proponent of the ideas

460   J. T. Scanlan of the ‘Ancient Constitution,’ ” as understood by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and as dispensed more broadly in the writings of Swift, Pope, and other Scriblerians. The values of selfless service to the nation—​“civic virtue”—​and an equitable distribution of the various political powers had been replaced by political corruption, self-​interest, patronage, vulgar wealth, and French cosmopolitanism, all of which threatened “the traditional English love of freedom.”12 As a result, London had become coarse, violent, and unlivable. In working with a Latin poem, and in updating Juvenal’s satire on Rome, Johnson in this early work again aligns himself with other late seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century satiric writers. Like many a young writer coming of age, he chooses to contribute to a discussion already well underway, and in a recognizable manner, rather than to strike out in an entirely new direction. For Johnson, coming of age in London and writing in the shadow of Swift and Pope, it was difficult not to write satire, as Juvenal put it. As readers would have noted, the images, phrases, and diction of the poem underscore Johnson’s embrace of satire’s aggression and anger. This is especially apparent in the poem’s handling of legal issues. The opening of the poem offers a vision of a lawless city, a crowded urban jungle that did not in the 1730s have anything akin to a modern police force. The earliest proto-​policemen in any modern sense, the so-​called Bow Street runners, did not walk the streets of London until the late 1740s: Here Malice, Rapine, Accident conspire, And now a Rabble rages, now a Fire; Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay, And here the fell Attorney prowls for Prey.13

It is the attorney, a lower member of the legal establishment (and a traditional butt of satires against the law), not the “Ruffians” as one might have thought, whom Johnson describes as “fell”—​that is, savage. Many passages in London present Johnson’s embryonic interest in the law, which he cultivated much more deeply later in life (see Chapter 19, “Law”). Because of Johnson’s relative poverty when he was starting out, one passage with legal associations stands out because of its quasi-​ autobiographical energy: All Crimes are safe, but hated Poverty. This, only this, the rigid Law persues, This, only this, provokes the snarling Muse. (lines 159–​61) 12 

David Venturo, Johnson the Poet (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 62. Johnson, London, lines 13–​16, in Eighteenth-​Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 343. I choose this edition of Johnson’s poem because the editors present the first edition of the poem. Subsequent quotations from this work will appear in the text and indicated with lines numbers. 13  Samuel

Humor   461 The reference to law’s hold on debtors must have called to readers’ minds the horrid conditions in such prisons as Fleet Prison, not far from where Johnson lived and the offices of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Johnson’s use of the classical notion of the muse of satire as a snarling dog also connects his take on London to the long, distinguished literary tradition of principled invective: The worst legal threats come at night. Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam, And sign your Will before you sup from Home. . . . Some frolick Drunkard, reeling from a Feast, Provokes a Broil, and stabs you for a Jest. Yet ev’n these Heroes, mischievously gay, Lords of the Street, and Terrors of the Way; Flush’d as they are with Folly, Youth and Wine, Their prudent Insults to the Poor confine; Afar they mark the Flambeau’s bright Approach, And shun the shining Train, and golden Coach. (lines 224–​35)

In the 1730s, London was still a pretty dark place on moonless nights, and that fact itself became a political issue at roughly the time the poem was published: in 1736 an act of Parliament increased the number of lights in the city fourfold.14 In noting “the Flambeau’s bright Approach,” Johnson is commenting on a contemporary urban issue here, and with a stridency entirely befitting the satiric orientation of this political poem. While the poem has many echoes of Pope, Johnson leaves the reader with the image of a poet who, as the speaker puts it in the last couplet, “In Virtue’s Cause” “exert[s]‌his Rage” (line 262). In London, Johnson obeys the power of the “snarling Muse.” Other works Johnson wrote at this time are perhaps less aggressive and more workmanlike. An example might be his Parliamentary Debates, written from notes in the early 1740s (see Chapter 13, “Polemic,” and Chapter 20, “Politics”). But with their elaborate neo-​Gulliverian wordplay on the names of the leading political figures of the day, Johnson shows a natural reliance on what Paul Fussell has called the “inherited tones” of early eighteenth-​century writers.15 Johnson’s sense of humor during his early years in London, in other words, tended toward the satiric, and as such, his writing paid respect to the presiding elders of his day. In this orientation, at least, Johnson resembled other authors of the time.

14 See E. S. de Beer, “The Early History of London Street Lighting,” History 25, no. 100 (March 1941), 322–​4. 15 Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 25.

462   J. T. Scanlan

“Perpetual Gaiety”: Johnson’s Sense of Humor in the 1750s and 1760s The late 1740s and early 1750s were a turning point in Johnson’s life, by all accounts,16 and I think his sense of humor and his thinking about humor changed as well. First and foremost, the Rambler, published 1750–​2, brought him a degree of literary and social acceptance (see Chapter 8, “Essays”). The twice-​weekly publication brought him a solid reputation in London’s hardscrabble literary world, especially when the essays were collected in book form. But his reputation was not that of a comic writer. Johnson chooses and treats his topics from “the province of the moralist,” as he puts it in Rambler 47, and few readers would consider the series fundamentally comic or humorous (Yale Works, vol. iv, 257). Johnson himself addresses this very issue in the final installment, Rambler 208, when summarizing his achievement: “The essays professedly serious, if I have been able to execute my own intentions, will be found exactly comfortable to the precepts of Christianity, without any accommodation to the licentiousness and levity of the present age” (vol. v, 320). And yet humor is an important dimension of the series, and principally in two ways. First, many of the topics, themes, and characters Johnson presents are pregnant with comic, satiric, or humorous possibilities, and this aspect of the Rambler marks a shift away from the aggressive tones of Johnson’s earlier satiric writing. A standard theme of many of the Rambler papers is blasted hopes, “disappointed expectations,” “perpetual delusion,” and the “miscarriages of imprudent boldness, and the folly of attempts beyond our power” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 291; vol. v, 192; vol. iv, 321)—​exactly the kinds of topics that stand at the heart of many of the greatest comic works of the eighteenth century. The term “folly” in that last phrase hints at Johnson’s deep familiarity with the long comic tradition of praising folly, which flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Rambler 66, Johnson even offers to his readers a bit of literary history, declaring up front his knowledge of this comic tradition: The folly of human wishes and persuits has always been a standing subject of mirth and declamation, and has been ridiculed and lamented from age to age; till perhaps fruitless repetition of complaints and censures may be justly numbered among the subjects of censure and complaint. (vol. iii, 349)

16 

See, e.g., W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 275–​6, and Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 110–​12.

Humor   463 Certainly many of the characters Johnson presents in the Rambler could easily be made risible. But in presenting his vain, impulsive, or impatient characters, many of whom fail to cut just the right style in this or that social circle, Johnson seems to show a certain degree of sympathy, or even compassion, for the sad sack under discussion, especially in concluding paragraphs. And this feature of the endings often abridges the drift toward the comic. Typical is Johnson’s handling of Victoria, a beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother “who pleased herself with the hopes of seeing my exaltation,” as Victoria writes in a letter to the Rambler. Victoria’s proud mother expends much energy in exposing Victoria to all the fashionable activities. “I was looked upon in my ninth year as the chief ornament of the dancing-​master’s ball . . . At twelve I was remarkable for playing my cards with great elegance of manner and accuracy of judgment.” One would think a comic-​satiric pratfall is near. And Johnson intensifies that expectation by supplying a reference which for many readers would bring to mind Don Quixote, which had been translated into English by Peter Motteux (1700) and Charles Jarvis (1742), and had become by 1750 one of the most popular comic works of the time: “At last the night arrived from which my future life was to be reckoned. I was dressed and sent out to conquer, with a heart beating like that of an old knight-​errant at his first sally.” But what happens? Although Victoria is initially received with “a tumult of applause,” the man she picks ultimately chooses someone else “with less beauty and fortune than mine, because he thought a wife ought to have qualities which might make her amiable when her bloom was past.” A short while later, at age nineteen, she “was seized by that dreadful malady which has so often put a sudden end to the tyranny of beauty,” and after recovering, sees a face no longer beautiful and sinks “at once into melancholy and despondence.” Is this funny? In the hands of Swift it might have been, with a few alterations. But in Johnson’s hands, not really, in part because the description of Victoria remains faint and general, aligning the tale not with comic, naturalistic fiction, and certainly not with Swiftian biting satire, but with a sermon on a well-​known subject: beauty is fleeting. We feel for Victoria who, after all, was shaped more by her mother than her own decisions. And as Fielding has written, “when we come to reflect on the Uneasiness this Person suffers, Laughter, in a good and delicate Mind, will begin to change itself into Compassion.”17 Second, Johnson always writes with a special precision and directness on the vainglory of authors—​“the drudges of the pen,” he calls them in Rambler 145 (Yale Works, vol. v, 10)—and when they appear, the humor tends to be more fully realized. What he writes

17  Henry Fielding, Essay on the Knowledge and of the Characters of Men (1743), quoted in Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 169.

464   J. T. Scanlan in Rambler 106 on the blasted hopes of authors is more likely to generate a crooked grin from the reader rather than compassion: No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a publick library; for who can see the wall crouded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditation, and accurate enquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue, and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning, without considering how many hours have been wasted in vain endeavours . . . Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity, most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered.

And yet even this bracing essay closes with a few sentences that salve the astringent tone. Johnson introduces Bacon’s essays, which did last, and recommends that if one hopes for higher rewards, one ought to be less “anxious to obtain praise, as to discharge the duty which Providence assigns him” (vol. iv, 200–​1, 204). What takes place in these two essays is more than simply satire turning into something else, though that does happen. The essay on Victoria’s predicament is undoubtedly less comic and critical than the essay on authors, where Johnson seems to indulge his hard-​ nosed amusement at the sin of literary pride. Taken together, however, they show Johnson’s willingness to explore and experiment in the Rambler with the extent to which a humorous approach to everyday moral issues is justified. Such concerns clearly arise in other Rambler papers, and Johnson tests the limits of humor there as well. And this suggests that humor itself is on his mind when he is writing the Rambler essays. By the early 1750s, the frame of mind he brings to his literary work is quite different from that which he brought to his early projects in the late 1730s and early 1740s. He is much less comfortable following the examples of his predecessors on comic, satiric, and humorous topics. This is really no surprise because in many Rambler essays he directly addresses the nature of humor itself. In Rambler 20, where Johnson offers his thoughts on affectation, he distinguishes between hypocrisy and affectation—​between a man who conceals a crime while pretending to “the rigors of devotion,” and a man who is socially awkward and unpleasing but brags about “conquests made by him among the ladies.” The language he deploys is reminiscent of Fielding’s much more famous commentary on the source of the ridiculous in the opening of Joseph Andrews (1742). As Johnson writes, “Hypocrisy is the necessary burthen of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 113). He continues and extends his commentary on affectation in Rambler 179 with the story of Gelasimus, a quiet, academic figure “in rural retirement,” who, at age forty-​nine, enters the public social world of a college. “Laughter, he knew, was a token of alacrity,” writes Johnson, and, therefore, whatever he said or heard, he was careful not to fail in that great duty of a wit. If he asked or told the hour of the day, if he complained of heat or cold, stirred

Humor   465 the fire, or filled a glass, removed his chair, or snuffed a candle, he always found some occasion to laugh. (vol. v, 180–​1)

Gelasimus’s problem? While he knew that “no charm was more generally irresistible than that of easy facetiousness and flowing hilarity,” he thought the act of laughing, rather than the act of doing something to promote good humor, was the main thing. In short, he affected laughter. Such extended interest in hypocrisy, affectation, and laughter indicates that Johnson was an active participant, though not a leading voice, in the widespread conversation about the nature of comedy and laughter in the eighteenth century. There are many moments in the Rambler where Johnson places his characters in situations where they are required to think about the social function of wit, laughter, raillery, or mirth. In Rambler 141, Johnson sensitively explores the plight of a Papilius, who complains that, having achieved the reputation of a wit, he now suffers from having to supply mirth all the time: “The call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.” And so Papilius works hard to supply his mind with the bright words he overhears at coffee houses and with jests from “obsolete farces.” He claims he has “delighted a whole circle at one time with a series of quibbles.” But it’s no use, since now, at age forty-​five, his repertoire is “coldly received.” At last he understands that “gaiety must be recommended by higher qualities, and that mirth can never please long but as the efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxuriance, but esteemed for its usefulness” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 387–​8). As these passages from the Rambler suggest, Johnson was not only joining the conversation about laughter and comedy in the eighteenth century, but also providing comments on the moral difficulties the public’s embrace of social wit generates. More important from our perspective, he is for himself beginning to shape the desiderata of good humor. By the early 1750s, Johnson seems tentatively to believe that social mirth is more important than satiric social condemnation. And a burst of laughter, while pleasing, simply doesn’t measure up to the good humor that an easy social jocularity provides. His work on the Dictionary at this time confirms this orientation toward humor. Many of his definitions of words relating to humor tend to elevate the significance of mirth. For example, Johnson defines comick as: “1. Relating to comedy. 2. Raising mirth.” He defines comical tersely: “Raising mirth; merry; diverting.” And as one would expect, “mirth” appears throughout the definitions of the related words comically, comicalness. Merriment he defines similarly: “Mirth; gaiety; cheerfulness; laughter.” Gayety follows suit: “1. Cheerfulness; airiness; merriment.” And in illustrating gay, he quotes Pope’s Rape of the Lock: “Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play; | Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.” When he defines mirth, he recirculates the terms he uses for the words already mentioned: “1. Merriment; jollity; gaiety; laughter.” And in his illustrative example he quotes from the Sermons of the divine Robert South (1634–​1716), and with a sentiment suggesting the connections between the Rambler and the Dictionary: “Most of the appearing mirth in the world is not mirth but art: the wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise.”

466   J. T. Scanlan Another dimension of the illustrative examples provides further evidence of the centrality of mirth to Johnson’s sense of humor in the 1750s. First of all, because he presents the illustrative examples in chronological order and because he often offers in miniature a history of English literature by means of his illustrative examples of a particular word or concept, the list of works often proceeds from the early Renaissance to the more satiric, humorous lines of Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Swift. Such a progression is, in itself, a kind of light-​hearted humor. And the lines he chooses from Pope and Swift are often not particularly biting. The illustrative examples of beer provide an example: Here’s a pot of good double beer, neighbor; drink. Shakesp. Henry VI p. ii It were good to try clarifying with almost in new beer. Bacon’s Natural History, No. 768. Flow, Welsted! Flow, like thine inspirer, beer; Tho’ stale, not ripe; tho’ think, yet never clear; So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull; Heady, not strong; and foaming, tho’ not full. Pope

The quotations he chooses from the eighteenth-​century writers are often not so much satiric as amusing. Pope’s parodic lines on the “dunce” Leonard Welsted are a good example. Another example appears when Johnson turns to Addison to illustrate bad in the sense of “bad for”: “Reading was bad for his eyes, writing made his head ache. Addison.” And notwithstanding his complicated and sometimes hostile quips and writings on Jonathan Swift, Johnson does quote Swift a great deal in the Dictionary, and often includes the less biting moments in his poetry. Under the word blab, Johnson quotes from Swift’s send-​up of a poetry-​sodden, lovesick college boy in “Cassinus and Peter,” who inadvertently observes his darling at stool. “Cassy” implores his friend never to say a word about what he saw: Nor whisper to the tattling reeds The blackest of all female deeds; Nor blab it on the lonely rocks Where echo sits, and list’ning mocks. Swift.

Taken in context, the humor increases when readers encounter those lines after reading a few lines from Milton, which Johnson quotes earlier. Johnson reveals his ideas about humor pretty plainly, and in a way that looks forward to his edition of Shakespeare, when he has occasion to quote the lines of Falstaff or of others speaking to Falstaff, which he does often, since the language of the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap in Henry IV captures the older colloquial language of the late-​sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which Johnson is careful to include in his Dictionary, as he says he aspires to do in the preface. In his illustrative example of barebone, for example, Johnson quotes Prince Hal: “Here comes lean Jack, here comes

Humor   467 barebone: how long is it ago, Jack, since thou sawest thy own knee?” He operates similarly when defining and illustrating bull-​calf: A he-​calf; used for a stupid fellow: a term of reproach. And, Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly, and roared for mercy, as still ran and roared, as ever I heard a bull-​calf. Shakesp. Henry IV.

If the preface of the Dictionary has few if any comic flourishes, the reading Johnson did for the Dictionary informs us that Johnson not only thought a lot about the nature of comedy and humor, but that he also tended to take a stand on what he liked—​on what brought him joy and merriment. Johnson’s reading for the Dictionary followed no strict preconceived system, and as such, it provides a window into the bosom of Johnson’s comic heart. As Allen Reddick, one of the great students of the procedures Johnson actually followed in working on the Dictionary, writes, He would simply read through a book, or a portion of the text, and mark any passage that he felt would be a useful illustration of some usage for any word . . . Ranging wide, unrestrained by subject matter or alphabet, Johnson’s practice, we can imagine, was unselfconscious. The exuberance with which he says in the Preface that he began his reading must have been at its height at this early stage as he immersed himself in literature and language.18

We can add to Reddick’s clearheaded observation that Johnson read a good portion of comic writing, and in doing so he enlarged, developed, and began to define for himself his ideas on what he did and didn’t approve of. In short, his understanding of satire, comedy, humor, and laughter deepened when he worked on the Dictionary and the Rambler, and he came to tentative conclusions that directed how he would think and write about comedy in succeeding years. By the later years of the 1750s, as his notoriety as a literary figure rose (notwithstanding his financial difficulties), Johnson did experiment more freely with comic writing. A more genial critical spirit emerges in some of the writing he did for the ill-​ fated Literary Magazine and the Idler, suggesting that Johnson, always attuned to the expectations of his readers, seemed to be aware that by mid-​century, “Satiric wit gave way to benevolent humor,” as Stuart Tave observes.19 Johnson’s oft-​quoted comment on tea in his review of Jonas Hanway’s Journal of an Eight Days’ Journey, for example, is critical in nature but benevolent and even self-​deprecating in sentiment: it can scarcely be candid not to make a previous declaration, that he is to expect little justice from the author of this extract, a hardened and shameless tea-​drinker, who 18  Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​ 1773, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40. 19  Stuart M. Tave, “Corbyn Morris: Falstaff, Humor, and Comic Theory in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Philology 50, no. 2 (November 1952), 102.

468   J. T. Scanlan has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnights, and with Tea welcomes the morning.20

In Idler 64, Johnson once again comments on a man who believes he needs to learn to be a wit in public, in this case Tim. Ranger, but this time Johnson treats the character with amusement rather than with a blend of criticism and sympathy. In this new scene of life my great labour was to learn to laugh. I had been used to consider laughter as the effect of merriment, but I soon learned that it is one of the arts of adulation, and . . . I now began to laugh when I wished to please. This was at first very difficult . . . Sometimes . . . I was deficient in loudness or in length. But by diligent imitation of the best models, I attained at last such flexibility of muscles, that I was always a welcome auditor of a story, and got the reputation of a good-​ natured fellow. (Yale Works, vol. ii, 199)

Johnson’s writing is here more amiable, with fewer marks of the sermon that he displays in similar moments in the Rambler. And it’s notable that Tim. Ranger, though a social climber, seems to have a good, generous heart: he hires a French cook and puts on a big spread for guests, even though, he confesses as a hearty Briton, “I love plain meat” (vol. ii, 201). And there are other moments in the Literary Review and the Idler where we see Johnson try his hand at comic writing. Perhaps the most memorable display of Johnson’s thinking about mirth comes in one of his most famous critical statements, his celebration of “sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff ” because of what he brings to others: But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Though compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt . . . Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. It must be observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth. (Yale Works, vii, 523)

Johnson engages here a handful of the topics that he addresses in the Rambler in compact form: this is hardly the first time Johnson addressed the subject of the boaster. And 20 

The Literary Magazine 1 (1756), 191.

Humor   469 so Johnson’s statement on Falstaff, notably ending with the word “mirth,” is not only a celebration of one of Shakespeare’s most enduring characters; it’s also Johnson’s presentation of what he believed, from roughly the early 1750s deep into the 1760s, constituted the essence of good humor. By the time Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare was published in 1765, Johnson had somewhat solidified his views on humor and comedy. But although he experiments with comic writing, his writing as a whole tends not to present in full his views on mirth and “perpetual gaiety” prominently. Illustrative examples in his Dictionary, and notes in his edition of Shakespeare, indicate where he stands on humor, as do some of his comments on humor in the Rambler. But they are not at the heart of his literary effort. What’s striking, in fact, is that Johnson’s humor tends not to be a prominent feature of his writing during these years, even while he clearly developed his ideas on the subject.

“Enough of Settle”: The Life of Johnson and the Lives of the Poets In the latter part of his literary career, and especially in the Lives of the Poets, however, humor emerges as a significant part of his work. And it emerges because his conversation, along with the changing critical tastes and attitudes in comedy and humor in the eighteenth century, influences his writing. The connection between his conversation and his Lives of the Poets has long been recognized. Thomas Babington Macaulay, not one of Johnson’s greatest admirers, nevertheless noted, “The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson’s works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel.” And he connects his assessment, and especially the change in the style, to conversation: When . . . he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The improvement . . . in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader.21

Chauncey Brewster Tinker, the long-​time professor and librarian at early twentieth-​ century Yale who taught the first course titled “The Age of Johnson,” concurs. For Tinker, conversation was “the form that lent itself best to the expression of his critical faculty.” And he notes its influence in the Lives. “He is at his best when he is most crisp and dogmatic: ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ . . . The value

21 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Samuel Johnson,” in Literary Essays of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. George A. Watrous (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900), 315–​16.

470   J. T. Scanlan of Johnson’s criticism consists in such sentences . . . not in longer passages of sustained comment like the analysis of Gray’s Bard.”22 So, if Johnson’s conversation is essential to his achievement in the Lives, then what aspects of Johnson’s humorous conversation turn up in the Lives? Two fundamental traits of his humorous conversation are often on display in his later years, and they both turn up in the Lives of the Poets. The first is his amiable needling of his friends and social acquaintances, typically calibrated to the specifics of the context in which he is speaking. The second, which blends with the first to an astonishing degree, is the relentlessly literary character of his pungent wit. Thanks to Boswell and others who found Johnson’s conversation so engaging that they recorded it in their different ways, we can identify easily the relationship between his conversation and his mature criticism in the Lives. A few examples should suffice. Johnson’s playful teasing of Boswell’s Scottish background is legendary, but sometimes Boswell flipped the script and introduced topics that put Johnson on the defensive. Johnson every now and then suggested to Boswell that he was drinking too much, and Boswell on one occasion reminded Johnson “how heartily he and I used to drink wine together, when we were first acquainted; and how I used to have a head-​ache after sitting up with him.” We should recall, as a way of substantiating Boswell’s claims about Johnson’s drinking, Johnson’s willingness in 1753 to head out late at night with Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton—​“What, is it you, you dogs! I’ll have a frisk with you!”—​ and after repairing to a tavern for “Bishop, which Johnson had always liked,” decided to stay out the entire night and “persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day” (Life, vol. i, 250–​1). Johnson drank less later in life, and had a quick reply to Boswell: He did not like to have this recalled, or, perhaps, thinking that I boasted improperly, resolved to have witty stroke at me: “Nay, Sir, it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.” Boswell. “What, Sir! Will sense make the head ache?” Johnson. “Yes, Sir, (with a smile) when it is not used to it.” (Life, vol. iii, 381–​2)

The parenthetical “(with a smile)” provides a sense of the contextual cheerfulness underlying the rebuke. Johnson speaks similarly when he pricks at authors, some of whom he knew. His words on Lord Monboddo provide one typical example. In September 1769, Johnson and Boswell dine together at the Mitre, and they argue about the possible “superior happiness of savage life.” Johnson rejects Boswell’s support of the idea out of hand: “No, Sir; you are not to talk such paradox: let me have no more on’t . . . Lord Monboddo, one of your Scotch Judges, talked a great deal of such nonsense. I suffered him; but I will not suffer you.” Boswell. “But, Sir, does not Rousseau talk such nonsense?” Johnson. 22  Chauncey Brewster Tinker, “Johnson and the Art of Conversation,” in The Salon in English Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 229. Subsequent quoatations from this essay will appear in the text and be abbreviated, “Tinker.”

Humor   471 “True, Sir; but Rousseau knows he is talking nonsense, and laughs at the world for staring at him.” Boswell. “How so, Sir?” Johnson. “Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense. But I am afraid, (chuckling and laughing,) Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense.” (Life, vol. ii, 73–​4)

In both passages, Johnson’s strong criticism is ameliorated by Boswell’s carefully conceived insertions of clues to the context—​the italicized words as well as the parenthetical asides, “(with a smile)” and “(chuckling and laughing).” Both passages are critical and joyful at once, notable for Johnson’s deft, on-​the-​spot wit. As I suggested earlier, Johnson comments with a special energy and verve when he addresses writers, and this is especially true in his conversation. He likes to compare authors to one another, to rank them. “Johnson, for sport perhaps, or from the spirit of contradiction,” as Boswell writes, warmed to the idea of comparing Samuel Derrick and Christopher Smart. “Johnson at once felt himself rouzed; and answered, ‘Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea’ ” (Life, vol. iv, 192). Since the idea of true excellence, even greatness, was never far from his mind, many of his comments on authors are designed to knock them down a bit on the scale of greatness. For example, his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds said that Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspeare (1769) “does her honour.” Johnson. “Yes, Sir; it does her honour, but would do nobody else honour. I have, indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery” (Life, vol. ii, 88). This same predisposition is what gives life to the infamous comment on Thomas Gray, who “was dull in a new way.” We know from the concluding words of his Life of Gray in the Lives that he had profound respect for some aspects of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751). “The Church-​yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns and echo” (Lives, vol. iv, 184). But in his high-​spirited conversation on Gray, Johnson challenges his listeners not simply to accept the general praise of Gray; Johnson also sees Gray’s social reticence as a fault. His comment on Gray, in the end, is fundamentally good-​humored. It “raises mirth.” His ironic recitation of lines from Gray’s Odes is a social act as much as it is a critical act. Although his Lives of the Poets do not by any means show a one-​to-​one correspondence between his humorous sallies in conversation and his flashes of humor in his biographical and critical writing, the resemblance in attitude, perspective, and in his reflexive urge to consider how common readers handle literature is strong. Tinker again provides wise words: “as he grew older, he tended to introduce more of the ease of his talk into his written work. Sentence after sentence from the Lives of the Poets might be cited to show the almost colloquial ease of his late manner.”23 And this is especially true when Johnson is humorous.

23 Chauncey Brewster Tinker, “Johnson and the Art of Conversation,” in The Salon in English Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 219.

472   J. T. Scanlan Take, for instance, his language on the research habits and dubious claims of some poets’ earlier biographers. Johnson’s Life of Milton, written as Stephen Fix has observed in response to a knot of fawning Miltonists,24 is laced with amusing asides on corners cut. “A very particular story of his escape is told by Richardson [one of Milton’s biographers] in his Memoirs, which he received from Pope, as delivered by Betterton, who might have heard it from Davenant” (Lives, vol. i, 263). Johnson is skeptical of Richardson’s rendition of Milton’s habits of composition. There’s little evidence on the matter, and Johnson frowns on Richardson’s “wish to find Milton discriminated from other men.” So he sets up what amounts to passage that more or less follows the pattern of a conversational tale with a punch line: These bursts of lights, and involutions of darkness; these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention, having some appearance of deviation from the common train of Nature, are eagerly caught by the lovers of a wonder . . . That, in his intellectual hour, Milton called for his daughter to secure what came, maybe be questioned; for unluckily it happens to be known that his daughters were never taught to write. (Lives, vol. i, 268)

The multi-​syllabic “Johnsonese” of the first part of the passage serves to increase the humor of the punch line. And the word wonder for Johnson signals uncritical credulity, exactly what Johnson’s critical effort in his edition of Shakespeare, the Lives more generally, and much of his other writings designed for the everyday reader, seeks to dispel. “Of institutions,” he writes earlier in the Life of Milton when commenting on Milton’s school in Aldersgate Street, “we may judge by their effects. From this wonder-​working academy, I do not know that there ever proceeded any man very eminent for knowledge: its only genuine product, I believe, is a small History of Poetry, written in Latin by his nephew Philips, of which perhaps none of my readers has ever heard” (Lives, vol. i, 249). Johnson himself was no great researcher, as Edmond Malone noted at the time. But that’s not the issue: for Johnson, there is something pleasantly risible in the entire Milton admiration society in the late eighteenth century. And so naturally, he depends on colloquial levity to describe the entire scene. He wants to guard the common reader from respecting Milton for the wrong reasons. And he must have known that deploying a little printed raillery would do the trick. In the Life of Shenstone, one of the minor but perhaps underappreciated lives, Johnson writes with a similar conversational drollery on a similar topic. Because the entire topic of Shenstone demanded that he return to the theme of the isolations of pastoral life, the life of Shenstone offers a good example of his amiable sense of humor at this stage of his

24 

See “The Contexts and Motives of Johnson’s Life of Milton,” in Domestick Privacies: Samuel Johnson and the Art of Biography, ed. David Wheeler (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 106–​32.

Humor   473 life and its relation to his literary talk. To be sure, Johnson respected particular elements of Shenstone’s work: when talking about the pleasures of an inn, Johnson, “repeated, with great emotion,” according to Boswell, the final stanza of Shenstone’s engaging poem on a well-​known inn at Henley: Who’er has travell’d life’s dull round, Where’er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.25

But Johnson’s interest in Shenstone and his poetry was modest. And so, as he often did, Johnson relied on another work to get his information for his work. John Nichols probably alerted Johnson that a few pages on William Shenstone were about to appear in Treadway Russell Nash’s History and Antiquities of Worcestershire (1781), which included a section on Hales-​Owen, where Shenstone lived on his family farm, the Leasowes. As one of the local worthies, Shenstone had earned a few double-​column pages in this massive two-​volume tome. According to Roger Lonsdale and others, Johnson may well have read a pre-​publication copy of this section of Nash’s book.26 As in the Life of Milton, Johnson uses this source in part to challenge the admiring perspective of Nash. And in doing so, he beckons his readers to join him in reacting skeptically to the received opinion, and to see Shenstone’s entire world as one worthy of critical fun. Early in his article, Nash tells one admiring, sentimental story of Shenstone’s early love of reading: From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for his great fondness for reading, so that when any of his family went to distant markets or fairs, he constantly importuned them to bring him presents of books, which . . . were always taken up to bed with him; and sometimes when they had been forgotten, his mother had no other means to allure him to sleep but by wrapping a piece of wood in paper like a book, which he would hug to his pillow.27

In presenting the same subjects, Johnson depends on Nash, but transforms it entirely, focusing not only on Shenstone, but also on why readers should receive such tall tales with skepticism. Young Shenstone, Johnson writes, soon received such delight from books that he was always calling for fresh entertainment, and expected that when any of the family went to market, a new book should be brought to him, which when it came, was in fondness carried to bed and laid with 25 Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 452. I quote the last stanza of Shenstone’s poem as Boswell presents it in the main text of the Life, which is slightly different from the stanza as published in Dodsley’s edition of 1766, which Boswell presents in a footnote. 26  See the notes to the Life of Shenstone in Lives, vol. iv, 417–​29. 27  Treadway Russell Nash, History and Antiquities of Worcestershire (1781), 528.

474   J. T. Scanlan him. It is said, when his request had been neglected, his mother wrapped up a piece of wood of the same form, and pacified him for the night. (Lives, vol. iv, 126)

Immune to Nash’s egregious hometown grandstanding, Johnson offers his readers a thoroughly average little kid, demanding that stuff be brought to him, and who is outsmarted by his mother in the end. He substituted for a precocious boy a rather needy little child, which is to say, a normal child. Young Shenstone, as Johnson tells it, was nothing out of the ordinary. This is the same take he has on tall tales of the young Milton. And the language Johnson deploys in the Life of Shenstone is a perfect example of, to quote Tinker, “the colloquial ease of his late manner.” The entire subject of Shenstone writing poetry out at the Leasowes in Hales-​Owen is funny to Johnson. His language shows no real malice. Well known as a Londoner now, Johnson amusingly comments on his limitations as an interpreter of Shenstone’s abilities at landscape gardening and “rural pleasures”: Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any great powers of mind, I will not enquire. (Lives, vol. iv, 127)

Lest the curt close of this passage is deemed an attack, Johnson qualifies his language by noting that “to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement” (Lives, vol. iv, 127). Shenstone’s love of such things causes him to overextend himself, and, as Johnson writes, “In time his expenses brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lamb’s bleat and the linnet’s song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies” (Lives, vol. iv, 128). As in the Rambler, the language here is general, but Johnson doesn’t ask his readers to have sympathy for the plight of Shenstone. Rather, he presents the man as an amusing figure, almost as if he is chatting about one poet’s hobbies. Not all of Johnson’s flashes of humor in the Lives are as carefully wrought as those we find in the Life of Milton and the Life of Shenstone. But many bear a similar mark of his literary table talk. A final brief example appears in his Life of Dryden, one of his more ambitious and successful lives. In describing the feud between Dryden and a rival playwright Elkanah Settle, Johnson goes into great detail, careful to be sure readers know that Dryden wrote about him in a dedication to a play “such criticism as malignant impatience could pour out in haste” (Lives, vol. ii, 84). Johnson then prepares his readers for a lengthy excerpt of Settle’s reaction to Dryden, commenting that “justice requires that something of Settle’s should be exhibited” (vol. ii, 90). After pages of Settle’s overheated vindication of his own writing, Johnson simply writes, laconically, “Enough of Settle” (vol. ii, 93). The sentence has the punch of Johnson’s conversational put-​downs, and as a comment on the contumely among authors long ago, it works splendidly as prose. As

Humor   475 Tinker writes, “In reading the Lives of the Poets, we do not feel that matters are gradually illuminated, but that they are revealed by sudden flashes” (Tinker, 229). “Enough of Settle” is one of those flashes. So is “I would rather praise it than read it” in the Life of Congreve. Both are typical of his humorous conversation and humorous writing at this time. They resemble Johnson’s comment to Boswell on his defense of savage life: “Let me have no more on’t.”

Clara No commentary on Johnson’s sense of humor would be complete without at least a few words on how Johnson laughed. Johnson’s laughter was evidently something of a curiosity, and it functioned as a social lubricant, entirely consistent with his notion of mirth and gaiety. “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner,” writes Boswell. “It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’ ” (Life, vol. ii, 378). Why a rhinoceros? The animal was not native to Great Britain, and yet Boswell thinks Davies’s statement witty and perceptive. As Glynis Ridley has explained, Douwe Van der Meer, a Dutchman, actually brought a female rhinoceros named Clara from Calcutta to Europe in the eighteenth century, and he took her on a kind of Grand Tour, stopping in Rotterdam, Liepzig, Paris, Rome, and Venice. And since both naturalists and everyday people were interested in her, she became well known. As it turned out, although she was physically imposing, she was much less fierce than people had expected. Ridley thinks that Davies probably knew something about her, and had perhaps seen her. So maybe Davies’s comment reveals that he did have a feel for Johnson’s rough, conversational humor that was, by the 1760s, mirthful at heart. As Boswell reports in the Life’s version of the first “bruising” meeting, “Don’t be uneasy,” said Davies, “I can see he likes you very well” (Life, vol. i, 395). To argue that Johnson’s sense of humor can be understood in three stages only begins to help us understand Johnson’s complicated sense of humor. Why, how, and under what conditions human beings respond to the world with humor is at this moment a significant topic among both academic and popular writers—​among evolutional biologists, theorists of human cognition, and many others—​and much current and future research into humor and laughter will doubtless be directly applicable to further research on Johnson’s sense of humor. How could such scientific research not be applicable to Johnson? As one scientist has noted, “Humor . . . depends on thought . . . it requires a certain category of information processing involving most of the faculties of thought, including memory recall, inference, and semantic integration.”28 Johnson excelled in precisely these three cognitive acts. Much remains to be done, but the more

28  Matthew

Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr., Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-​Engineer the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 5.

476   J. T. Scanlan we take into account the development of Johnson’s “peculiar powers of wit and humour” over time, the more we’ll appreciate the centrality of humor to the broader evolution of what Boswell aptly identified as Johnson’s “art of thinking, the art of using his mind” (Life, iv, 428).

Further Reading Bate, W. Jackson. “Johnson and Satire Manqué.” In Eighteenth-​Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, edited by W. H. Bond, 145–​60. New York: Grolier Club, 1970. Bate, W. Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. Dickie, Simon. Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Eagleton, Terry. Humour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Gatrell, Vic. City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-​Century London. New York: Walker, 2007. Hurley, Matthew, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-​Engineer the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Reddick, Allen. The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tinker, Chauncey Brewster. “Johnson and the Art of Conversation.” In The Salon in English Letters, 217–​35. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Vance, John A. “The Laughing Johnson and the Shaping of Boswell’s Life.” In Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”: New Questions, New Answers, edited by John A. Vance, 204–​27. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Venturo, David F. Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

Chapter 26

Educati on Jessica Richard

Samuel Johnson was famously learned, a teacher, an autodidact, and a didactic writer. He understood all of his work to be educational in purpose. When we consider the idea of education in his life and work we should do so in the broadest sense in order to capture his own capacious understanding of how education happens. In his ideas about education, Johnson is, as in so many other aspects of his life and thought, both idiosyncratic and very much of his age. Like so many educational thinkers of his era, he was strongly influenced by John Locke and excited by the opportunities that an expanding print market offered for learning. He participated in many of the era’s educationally oriented print genres, from tales to periodical essays to biographies to sermons to school texts to dictionaries. Yet, at the same time that his interest in education is quite conventional, Johnson is also idiosyncratic, distinctively Johnsonian, in his unusual psychological perceptiveness about his own mind’s workings and in his sympathies with the minds of others. He understood and acknowledged more than most educationalists of his era how one’s psychology might undermine efforts at learning; rather than fighting these weaknesses, he structured his educational approach around them. Johnson’s experience of reading throughout his own largely self-​directed education influenced his views of education, the educational texts he produced, and the texts he produced more generally, which could all be considered educational even if they are not explicitly framed as such.

Johnson as Student and Teacher Johnson’s formal education in childhood was traditional and typical for a boy in his socioeconomic position. After being read to and perhaps taught to read by his mother he attended a “dame school,” a small establishment likely in the home of one Ann Oliver, until age six or seven; he then attended a local day school run by “a cobbler turned schoolmaster” named Thomas Browne, where he continued learning to read,

478   Jessica Richard write, and do simple arithmetic.1 Johnson proceeded to Lichfield Grammar School, where he studied Latin with an “usher” named Mr. Hawkins for two years, and then was transferred to the tutelage of the school’s headmaster Mr. Hunter (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 44). While Johnson credited his accomplishment in Latin to corporal punishment, explaining that “My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing,” he also criticized Hunter’s methods: He “was very severe, and wrong-​headedly severe. He used (said he) to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. He would ask a boy a question; and if he did not answer it, he would beat him, without considering whether he had an opportunity of knowing how to answer it. For instance, he would call up a boy and ask him Latin for a candlestick, which the boy could not expect to be asked. Now, Sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him.” (Life, vol. i, 46, 44)

Even late in life as he was recounting his school days to Boswell, Johnson retained his sympathy for the student’s position in school, for the boy who cannot be expected to know what he has not yet been taught. Throughout the eighteenth century, from at least the publication of John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), education reformers critiqued corporal punishment as a pedagogical tool, and Johnson’s comments align with this critique and influence his later approach to education. After he left Lichfield school, Johnson spent a year at Stourbridge grammar school as a student and an assistant to the headmaster, responsible for teaching the younger boys. Two years after leaving Stourbridge, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford; lacking sufficient funds, Johnson left Oxford before taking his degree. He worked for less than a year as an “usher” or undermaster at Market Bosworth grammar school. In 1735, Johnson opened his own school at Edial near Lichfield, where he seems to have followed a conventional classical curriculum, if we judge from an advertisement in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by Samuel Johnson.”2 Johnson only had three pupils and he closed his school after a little more than a year. Catherine Dille notes “the school’s failure was attributed to what was assumed to be Johnson’s temperamental unsuitability to teaching, but the proximity of the well-​respected Lichfield Grammar School was also a possible factor” in its failure.3 But Boswell’s speculations about the failure of Johnson’s teaching endeavor are more complicated than simple 1  Catherine Dille, “Education,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 176. 2 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 97. Boswell also reprints a “Scheme for the Classes of a Grammar School” written by Johnson, outlining a curriculum for learning Latin, including activities each class would pursue morning and afternoon, examinations, etc. (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 99). 3  Dille, “Education,” 177.

Education   479 “temperamental unsuitability” and instead give us insight into the origins of what would become Johnson’s unusual insight into the psychological challenges of learning. “He was not so well qualified for being a teacher of elements, and a conductor in learning by regular gradations, as men of inferiour powers of mind. His own acquisitions had been made by fits and starts, by violent irruptions into regions of knowledge; and it could not be expected that his impatience would be subdued, and his impetuosity restrained, so as to fit him for a quiet guide to novices” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 97). Conventional instruction in classical languages proceeded systematically from foundational to advanced knowledge “by regular gradations.” Johnson’s learning, however, had been much less regular; the deep reading that was so remarkable to his tutor at Oxford4 and that underpinned all his accomplishments as a writer and thinker took place primarily outside of his formal schooling. His largely unsuccessful teaching experiences combined with his experiences and habits as a reader to inform what would be a much more innovative articulation of teaching and learning than Johnson ever experienced himself in schools as a student or, as far as we know, practiced as a teacher.

Johnson and Youthful Reading The most important trait by which to assess reading material for children, in Johnson’s view, was its ability to arrest and retain a reader’s attention. A book might be arresting to a reader because it is discovered by chance, because it is not given as a task but read with pleasure, or because it is fantastical. Johnson values a book’s ability to arrest a reader’s attention more than the content of the book, and this value recurs in all his comments on reading and shapes his thinking about education more generally. An example of his reverence for even the earliest reading material that arrested his attention is in his fond memories of being read to by his mother and her maid as a very small child, particularly the tale of St. George and the Dragon. According to Hester Thrale, “The recollection of such reading as had delighted him in his infancy, made him always persist in fancying that it was the only reading which could please an infant; and he used to condemn me for putting Newbery’s books into their hands as too trifling to engage their attention. ‘Babies do not want, said he,’ to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.”5 Johnson describes fantastical tales as more educationally productive than the careful, representational, simple, didactic texts Newbery sold. Johnson continues to underline attention in his comments on the reading matter of older children and even university students and adults. He emphasizes especially the power of a chance encounter with a text for engaging the reader’s attention; anecdotes

4 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 59. 5 

G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 156.

480   Jessica Richard of his childhood reading suggest a biographical basis for his belief in the pedagogical efficacy of the chance encounter. Johnson described his reading as “fortuitous and unguided excursions into books” in the preface to the Dictionary (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 84). Accounts of his childhood reading show that his promotion of a child’s chance encounters with books derive from his own experience. Boswell tells a well-​known anecdote that highlights the power of fortuitous reading: looking for apples he thought his brother had hidden behind a large book on an upper shelf in their father’s bookshop, Johnson picked up a volume of Petrarch, “whom he had seen mentioned in some preface, as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book” (Life, vol. i, 57). Thrale tells a similar anecdote in which the young Johnson happens across a book and stops to read it right where he is, engrossed: “When he was about nine years old, having got the play of Hamlet in his hand, and reading it quietly in his father’s kitchen, he kept on steadily enough, till coming to the Ghost scene, he suddenly hurried up the stairs to the street door that he might see people about him.”6 Experiences such as these, in which Johnson’s attention is absorbed by an unplanned encounter with a book, shape the advice he gives on children’s reading. Johnson recommends what we might call free-​range reading for children (or rather boys, the subject of Johnson and Boswell’s conversations about reading and education; although Johnson appreciated and encouraged learned women writers, he does not as far as I know comment on girls’ education):7 “I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 385). While he acknowledges that eventually one must read deeply to be a true scholar, Johnson maintains that dipping into books can have particular benefits for the child learner: Snatches of reading (said he,) will not make a Bentley or a Clarke. They are, however, in a certain degree advantageous. I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains from the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study. (Life, vol. iv, 21)

6 

Hill, ed., Miscellanies vol. i, 158. scholarship on Johnson and women that touches on education includes James G. Basker, “Myth upon Myth: Johnson, Gender, and the Misogyny Question,” The Age of Johnson 8 (1997), 175–​87; Claudia Thomas, “Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Carter: Pudding, Epictetus, and the Accomplished Woman,” South Central Review 9, no. 4 (Winter 1992), 18–​30; Isobel Grundy, “Samuel Johnson as Patron of Women,” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987), 59–​77. 7  Some

Education   481 Drawing on his own experience, Johnson maintains the importance of fortuitous reading even for advanced students. During the period between his time at Stourbridge and his entrance to Oxford, Johnson says that in just such an “irregular manner I had looked into a great many books, which were not commonly known at the Universities, where they seldom read any books but what are put into their hands by their tutors; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr. Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me I was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 47). When advising his friend George Strahan during Strahan’s years at University College, Oxford, Johnson recommended a variety of reading material: “Do not omit to mingle some lighter books with those of more importance; that which is read remisso animo is often of great use, and takes hold of the remembrance.”8 A friend tells Boswell that as a boy “Johnson was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them throughout life” (Life, vol. i, 49). Light-​hearted pleasure reading is both useful and memorable and thus an important part of a good education.

The Preceptor Most discussions of Johnson’s ideas about education have not given extensive consideration to his preface to an early multi-​subject textbook published by Robert Dodsley called The Preceptor (1748), focusing instead on his miscellaneous comments as Boswell recorded them, or passing references to education such as in Johnson’s discussion of Milton’s Of Education in the Life of Milton. Yet we have in the preface to The Preceptor a theory of education and justification of a curriculum, as well as pedagogical guidance, all written by Johnson. We can’t determine the extent to which Johnson was involved in selecting the educational material featured in The Preceptor, but as Allen T. Hazen notes, “the Preface shows that Johnson knew precisely the contents, and it would seem probable that Dodsley had advised with Johnson concerning the plans for the book.”9 The Preceptor was conceived of as a rival to Newbery’s best-​selling collection of small educational volumes The Circle of the Sciences (1745). There were eight London editions of The Preceptor published between 1748 and 1800, as well as Dublin editions and a German translation.10 Johnson wrote the lengthy preface summarizing the contents and advising on their use in instructional contexts; he also wrote a fable, The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe, Found in His Cell for the final section of The Preceptor

8 

Johnson to George Strahan, May 25, 1765, in Letters, vol. i, 248. Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 172 n. 2 (quoting Tyers in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Dec. 1784, p. 901). 10  Gwin J. Kolb, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Yale Works, vol. xvi, 191. Dale Randall traces the life of a copy of The Preceptor in the Rutgers family, signed by Harman Rutgers in 1770, Anthony Rutgers in 1782 and 1783, and Robert Rutgers in 1806. Dale Randall, “Dodsley’s Preceptor—​A Window into the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 22, no. 1 (December 1958), 10–​22. 9 

482   Jessica Richard (see Chapter 10, “Fiction”). Johnson was said to have composed The Vision of Theodore “in one night after finishing an evening in Holborn” and to have “sat up a whole night to compose the Preface.”11 While the preface was occasional writing, suited to the purpose at hand, it nonetheless outlines an educational theory that is striking both in its differences from Johnson’s prior experience of formal schooling as a pupil and a teacher and in its similarities to his extracurricular reading and to the educational philosophy underlining much of his later writing. Johnson begins the preface to The Preceptor, as one might expect, critiquing the “Treatises hitherto offered to the Youth of this Nation.” As education is expanding for “every Age, Sex, and Profession,” the previously available texts are “either unpleasing, or abstruse, or crouded with Learning very rarely applicable to the Purposes of common Life.”12 While Johnson never directs his educational writing explicitly to girls, it is clear here that he does not exclude girls from the market for educational works that Dodsley and other booksellers are targeting. His critique suggests important goals for a successful textbook: educational texts fail if they are not pleasing, if they are difficult for students to follow, or if they are not oriented toward practical life. These goals shape the subjects represented in The Preceptor and they align closely with the educational values John Locke outlined nearly fifty years earlier in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693).13 Locke believed that children learn best when their interests and playfulness are engaged, suggesting that “were Matters order’d right, Learning anything, they should be taught, might be made as much a Recreation to their Play, as their Play is to their Learning.”14 On the question of a practical education, Locke writes “Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their Childrens time should be spent in acquiring, what might be useful to them when they become Men; rather than to have their Heads stuff ’d with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do (’tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live, and so much of it as does stick by them, they are only the worse for,”15 While later in life Johnson departs somewhat from Locke (to Boswell, Johnson asserts the value of teaching Latin even to the sons of tradesmen as it gave them an advantage over those who did not learn it, and to Boswell he suggests that Locke may have swung too far in the opposite direction from Milton in his rejection of classical education),16 in the preface he outlines an educational approach very much influenced by Locke.

11 

Prefaces and Dedications, 172. Prefaces and Dedications, 176. 13  Chester Chapin notes that “The importance Johnson attached to education is evident in the many quotations from Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education [sic] in his Dictionary” and that “ ‘Locke on Education’ was in Johnson’s undergraduate library.” See Alley Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings (1928; rep. New York: Octagon, 1968), 5: 218; Chester Chapin, “Samuel Johnson on Education and the English Class Structure,” 1650–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 9 (2003), 197; 197 n. 18. 14  John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 135. 15  Locke, 157. 16  For Latin’s value to a tradesman, see Boswell, Life, vol. i, 457–​8. “Education in England has been in danger of being hurt by two of its greatest men, Milton and Locke. Milton’s plan is impracticable, and 12 

Education   483 Johnson’s particularly astute psychological insight into the challenges of learning is prominent in his preface to The Preceptor. Influenced by Locke, Johnson emphasizes the young learner’s resistance to tasks set by instructors. Locke warns, when a child is taught to read, “That a great Care is to be taken that it never be made as a Business to him, nor he look on it as a Task. We naturally, as I said, even from our Cradles, love Liberty, and have therefore an aversion to many Things, for no other Reason, but because they are injoyn’d us.”17 Johnson writes, “Every Man, who has been engaged in Teaching, knows with how much Difficulty youthful Minds are confined to close Application, and how readily they deviate to any thing, rather than attend to that which is imposed as a Task.”18 Throughout his life Johnson remarks on the human resistance to assigned tasks even in adults, as I discuss below. In the preface, he states this resistance as a simple fact and explores how to work with that fact rather than fight it. While instructors must try to check this “Disposition” to stray away from tasks, “it cannot wholly be suppressed” and therefore “it is surely rational to turn it to Advantage.”19 The preface describes how an understanding of students’ different learning levels can be used effectively by a teacher; extolls novelty, pleasure, and wonder as teaching strategies; offers innovative pedagogies; and finally outlines a practical curriculum—​all in the service of engaging the attention of youthful minds that resist imposed tasks. One of the most important insights that Johnson outlines in the preface is that students learn at different paces and that what looks like bad behavior in students is actually a symptom of a one-​size-​fits-​all task fitting none. He describes a classroom in which everyone is “confined indiscriminately to the same Forms of Composition, the Repetition of the same Words, or the Explications of the same Sentiments,” yet inevitably the tasks “must either by Nature or Accident be differently received by them; that the Ideas to be contemplated, may be too difficult for the Apprehension of some, and too obvious for that of others: they may be such as some Understandings cannot reach, though others look down upon them as below their Regard.”20 Locke believed that successful education “requires Care, Attention, Observation, and a nice study of Children’s Tempers, and weighing their faults well” and that methods should be suited to temperaments.21 Similarly, Johnson argues it is not productive to give the same task to children who are “either by Nature or Accident” at different points in their learning process. An attentive teacher will give students tasks at an appropriate level. For someone known as something of a genius himself, Johnson is impressively attuned to struggling students in the preface. He notes that students’ minds wander when they are forced to study something that is too hard for them. What looks like inattention “may be often the

I suppose has never been tried. Locke’s, I fancy, has been tried often enough, but is very imperfect; it gives too much to one side, and too little to the other; it gives too little to literature” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 358). 17 

Locke, 208. Prefaces and Dedications, 176. 19  Prefaces and Dedications, 176. 20  Prefaces and Dedications, 177. 21  Some Thoughts, 140. 18 

484   Jessica Richard Struggle of the Understanding starting from that, to which it is not by Nature adapted, and travelling in Search of something on which it may fix with greater Satisfaction.” The mind moves away from what it can’t understand toward what it can. Furthermore, he emphasizes that “this roving Curiosity” is experienced by all learners and is nothing to be ashamed of; rather such “Wanderings” are a natural and even rational response to the rigors of learning: Every Mind in its Progress through the different Stages of scholastic Learning, must be often in some of these Circumstances, must either flag with the Labour, or grow wanton with the Facility of the Work assigned: and in either State it naturally turns aside from the Track before it. Weariness looks out for Relief, and Leisure for Employment, and surely it is rational to indulge the Wanderings of both. For the Faculties which are too lightly burthen’d with the Business of the Day, may with great Propriety add to it some other Enquiry; and he that finds himself over-​wearied by a Task, which perhaps, with all his Efforts, he is not able to perform, is undoubtedly to be justified in addicting himself rather to easier Studies, and endeavouring to quit that which is above his Attainment, for that which Nature has not made him incapable of pursuing with Advantage.22

Johnson demonstrates remarkable empathy for both the bored advanced student insufficiently challenged by the material he studies and the struggling student grappling with material that is beyond him. Both are likely to stray from the task at hand, though for opposite reasons. He imagines an ideal textbook to offer something to both kinds of student, for “every Inclination” and “every Capacity.” Some of its “allurements” may “employ the stronger Genius” while others may “engage the less active or forcible Mind.” Rather than berate slower students, Johnson highlights the importance of offering weaker students “easy Knowledge,” thus “obviating that Despondence, which quickly prevails, when nothing appears but a Succession of Difficulties, and one Labour only ceases that another may be imposed.” Thus he presents to both the underchallenged and the overwhelmed student The Preceptor, “a Book intended Thus to correspond with all Dispositions, and afford Entertainment for Minds of different Powers.”23 To break up the labors of learning so that students at all levels need not grimly face “a Succession of Difficulties,” Johnson emphasizes the pedagogical efficacy of novelty, pleasure, and wonder. Rather than fight the “restless Desire of Novelty, which gives so much Trouble to the Teacher,” he urges teachers to enlist children’s naturally wandering attention by “taking Care that the Mind shall never want Objects on which its Faculties may be usefully employed.”24 Students require continuous engagement. The Preceptor addresses diverse, novelty-​seeking learners through the variety of its subjects according to its “great Design of pleasing by Instruction.” While such allusions to the

22 

Prefaces and Dedications, 177. Prefaces and Dedications, 177. 24  Prefaces and Dedications, 176. 23 

Education   485 Horatian commonplace are ubiquitous in eighteenth-​century didactic texts, Johnson invokes it in the context of comparing The Preceptor to competitors’ textbooks: terribly dull-​sounding “Compendiums of Science,” “Synoptical Tables,” and texts written “in a Language, which, to Boys, is more difficult than the Subject.”25 Unlike such works, The Preceptor promises to emphasize the “delight” in the “instruct and delight” in order to retain students’ attention. In contrast to the “Synoptical Tables” of other books, Johnson’s preface communicates his genuine joy in learning about the wonders of the world across the subjects and disciplines featured in The Preceptor. He recommends “such Observations and Narratives, as may amuse the Mind and excite Curiosity” in students, for example giving students “the Narrative of the Englishmen that wintered in Greenland” to engage their interest when they study “the State of the Polar Regions.” He describes “the Study of Chronology and History” as “one of the most natural Delights of the Human Mind.” “Rhetoric and Poetry supply Life with its highest intellectual Pleasures,” he exhorts. And he waxes positively rhapsodic on the pleasures of geography: “in a word, no Studies afford more extensive, more wonderful, or more pleasing Scenes; and therefore there can be no Ideas impressed upon the Soul, which can more conduce to its future Entertainment.”26 We can hear in these invocations the delight of the young Johnson absorbed in the books he happened on in his father’s shop. Pleasure, curiosity, amusement, and entertainment are all enlisted here as the inducements to learning that Johnson enjoyed in his extracurricular reading but may not have encountered or made use of as a pupil or teacher in school. Beyond cultivating the delight that secures a student’s attention, Johnson offers some specific, innovative pedagogical strategies for teachers (though there is little evidence that he was a particularly innovative or successful teacher himself). In his summary of The Preceptor’s section on geometry, Johnson continues to demonstrate sensitivity to the difficulties of learning complex ideas; rather than forcing a student to persist until mastery is gained, he recommends a pedagogical approach he credits to the seventeenth-​ century mathematician Ignace-​Gaston Pardies, namely “that when the Student cannot be made to comprehend some particular Part, it should be, for that Time, laid aside, till new Light shall arise from subsequent Observation.”27 In an era when it was still acceptable to beat students who failed to learn, advice simply to leave the difficult subject for a later time sounds radical.28 There is little to be gained from trying to force superficial learning of something a student doesn’t deeply understand. He similarly promotes 25 

Prefaces and Dedications, 178. Johnson follows Locke in criticizing the dominance of classical languages in children’s education, suggesting that “it is too hard a Task to be condemned to learn Science in an unknown Tongue” (178). 26  Prefaces and Dedications, 181–​2. 27  Prefaces and Dedications, 181. 28  Johnson’s attitude toward corporal punishment seems, like that of most educationalists of the era, complicated. As noted above, he credits his excellent Latin to his school-​master’s beatings but criticizes that same master for beating students for not knowing what they had no opportunity to learn. Later he dictated an argument in support of corporal punishment in schools for Boswell, who was defending a Scottish schoolmaster accused of using excessive force in punishing students. Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 183–​5.

486   Jessica Richard deeper understanding by recommending that teachers encourage students to demonstrate the application of their knowledge in new contexts rather than merely reciting facts. In his précis of the Geometry section, he advises that the instructor not merely ask questions as they appear in the book nor ask the student to repeat them back verbatim “for this may be only an Act of Memory, not of Understanding; it is always proper to vary the Words of the Question, to place the Proposition in different Points of View, and to require of the Learner an Explanation in his own Terms.”29 When teaching Logic, Johnson recommends that the teacher move beyond the set curriculum to explore the principles of logic in the wild, as they happen to appear elsewhere in their reading: “the Teacher [should] take frequent occasion, in the most easy and familiar Conversation, to observe when its [Logic’s] Rules are preserved and when they are broken, and that afterwards he read no Authors, without exacting of his Pupil an Account of every remarkable Exemplification or Breach of the Laws of Reasoning.”30 By cultivating students’ ability to apply their knowledge in new situations, the pedagogy Johnson highlights in the preface (which we might analogize to today’s active-​learning techniques) aligns with the utilitarian emphasis of The Preceptor’s curriculum. In its approaches to learning and in the content presented to students, The Preceptor offers a practical education for modern learners. After describing a general approach to education based on sympathy with a range of learners’ plights, the difficulties of sustaining attention, and the importance of both pleasure and practical application in learning, the remainder of Johnson’s preface to The Preceptor outlines the subjects the book covers. It presents a distinctly modern curriculum with a particular emphasis on “Learning” that he describes as “applicable to the Purposes of common Life.”31 Practical application is evident in an innovative section on “Trade and Commerce” that is deemed especially appropriate for the English book market: “it was thought necessary to introduce something that might be particularly adapted to the Advantage of that Country for which it is designed.” Indeed “it becomes every Man of this Nation to understand at least the general Principles” of trade and commerce, because all are affected by them (see Chapter 22, “Commerce”). Similarly, the book features a section on “Laws and Government” because “this Knowledge by peculiar Necessity constitutes a Part of the Education of an Englishman.”32 While it is not uncommon for such discourses of national identity to be invoked in educational texts in this period, Johnson’s preface highlights the practicality of such studies. If a commercial economy and a parliamentary government are peculiarly English, then the English student must learn these subjects in order to participate effectively in the English political and economic systems. Even in his description of other sections of the curriculum that might seem more academic and less directly practical, Johnson notes the text’s emphasis on practical 29 

Prefaces and Dedications, 181. Prefaces and Dedications, 185. 31  Prefaces and Dedications, 176. 32  Prefaces and Dedications, 187. 30 

Education   487 application. Thus, in the section on reading and writing, he highlights the importance of learning to write proper and effective letters. “It is possible to pass many Years without the Necessity of writing Panegyrics or Epithalamiums; but every Man has frequent Occasion to state Contract, or demand a Debt, or make a Narrative of some minute Incidents of common Life.” He outlines the practical applications of geography to pupils of all classes, whether they will grow up to be gentlemen of fortune who will need to understand “the Situation of Nations, on which their Interests general depend,” members of “any of the Learned Professions” which all require this knowledge, or if they are “designed for the Arts of Commerce, or Agriculture.” Geography is useful across classes; for every child, “some general Acquaintance with these Sciences will be found extremely useful to him.” The practical application of mathematics hardly needs noting: “It is unnecessary to expatiate,” Johnson writes, “on the Usefulness” of geometry “in an Age when Mathematical Studies have so much engaged the Attention of all Classes of Men.” Even a skill such as drawing is useful for students no matter what their class or professional destiny; drawing is described as a practical subject because it helps students understand and remember things that are harder to account for in languages, such as “Engines, Utensils, or any complex Pieces of Workmanship.”33 Johnson’s experience as a classically educated student and teacher does not prevent him from describing the benefits of a curriculum that has almost nothing in common with that experience; instead, he outlines the importance of a modern practical education that would benefit students across gender and class lines. Johnson concludes his preface to The Preceptor by introducing the section of the textbook that he wrote (though he does not mention his authorship): the fable The Vision of Theodore. The final section of the textbook features three fables, the first written by Johnson, followed by The Choice of Hercules by Bishop Robert Loweth and The Picture of Human Life, adapted from Cebes by Joseph Spence.34 Johnson’s preface argues that the fables demonstrate the “Application” of the “Knowledge” that the preceding textbook “thus supply’d the young Student.” The fables thus enact the active-​learning pedagogy Johnson described earlier in the preface, encouraging students to apply what they have learned elsewhere to their reading of the fable and to apply the fable itself to their lives. The student’s education up to the final fable section has “qualified [him] to act his Part”; through the fables “he [will] be at last taught to chuse it.” The fables constitute a final section of The Preceptor on “Human Life and Manners: in which he is cautioned against the Danger of indulging his Passions, of vitiating his Habits, and depraving his Sentiments.”35 While the lessons outlined in the fables seem abstract, in his preface Johnson situates them in the context of practical education; the fables are meant to show how to apply the learning from the textbook to the broadest and most important educational goal: living a moral life. We can see from his illustrative quotations for education in the Dictionary how important this ultimate goal is in Johnson’s approach to 33 

Prefaces and Dedications, 181–​4. Prefaces and Dedications, 173. 35  Prefaces and Dedications, 188. 34 

488   Jessica Richard education. From Hooker, he quotes: “Education and instruction are the means, the one by use, the other by precept, to make our natural faculty of reason both the better and the sooner to judge rightly between truth and error, good and evil.” From Swift: “All nations have agreed on a strict education, which consisted in the observance of moral duties.” The Dictionary’s illustrative quotations highlight the traditional Christian view of education’s end and purpose; Johnson’s prefatory framing of The Preceptor’s fables—​as well as the placement of the fables at the conclusion of the textbook—​points the student toward this end. As the conclusion to a textbook oriented toward practical education, the section of fables will be useful in helping the student put all his learning into practice as a moral person.

The Vision of Theodore Like his preface, Johnson’s contribution to the body of The Preceptor, The Vision of Theodore, demonstrates the ways in which his approach to education is informed both by the major educational theories and trends of his time and by his own particularly sensitive appreciation for the experience of the learner. Unlike the preface, The Vision of Theodore had a wide circulation beyond The Preceptor, reaching adult readers as well as the child readers of Dodsley’s textbook; it was first reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1748 and then in many other periodicals, including the Lady’s Magazine (“which recommends The Vision to those ‘who superintend the education of youth’ ”), as well as successive collections of Johnson’s works.36 The allegorical dream-​vision or fable was a popular didactic genre throughout the eighteenth century, both in specifically educational contexts and in print culture more generally. From Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, one of only three books Johnson “wished longer”) to Addison’s Vision of Mirzah (1711) and beyond, eighteenth-​century readers seemed especially fond of such tales, particularly when set in exotic locales.37As Jane Steen argues, “fictitious vignettes” are instructive because they “assist the reader to internalize patterns of behavior to be imitated or rejected in the formation of character by experience.”38 In a text published contemporaneously with The Preceptor, David Fordyce comments in Dialogues concerning Education (1748) that “ ‘fable, allegory, and similar pleasant dialogue[s]‌’ are ‘the best and most successful method we can use in the education of children’ ”39 (406–​7, quoted in Yale Works, vol. xvi, 189–​90). Johnson’s use of the dream-​vision genre is thus standard practice for educational writing. Yet we might also see Johnson’s use of the dream-​vision genre as an example of his sympathy with the child learner in that such a tale presents 36 Yale Works, vol. xvi, 192. 37 

Hill, ed., Miscellanies, vol. i, 332. Steen, “The Creation of Character,” in Freya Johnson and Lynda Mugglestone, eds., Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 117. 39  David Fordyce, Dialogues Concerning Education (London: 1748), 406–​7, quoted in Kolb, 189–​90. 38  Jane

Education   489 didactic material in what Fordyce called a “pleasant” way, hoping to secure the young reader’s attention with an engaging tale. The Vision of Theodore begins with a scene that Johnson later revisits in several forms in Rasselas. We are introduced to the hermit Theodore of Teneriffe, who has retired from the bustling world seeking in retreat the satisfaction of basic needs and “forgetfulness of all mortal cares” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 195). Johnson uses secluded happy valleys and hermit caves in his texts that explore the conditions of happiness to show that removal from the world, whether in material abundance or asceticism, does not facilitate happiness. If happiness cannot be found in the world, in seclusion, in abundance, or in minimalism, the seeker must turn from the physical to the metaphysical. While in later works such as Rasselas, Johnson infamously evaded offering a “choice of life” that leads to happiness but instead ends with a “conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” The Vision of Theodore traces a clear though extremely difficult metaphysical path to happiness. The certainty of The Vision likely derives from Johnson’s strong belief in the importance of giving young readers absolutely unambiguous moral lessons.40 Thus, restless in his seclusion, the hermit starts to climb the mountain of Teneriffe, tires, and is shown an instructive vision by an angelic figure. This allegorical vision demonstrates the challenges of the life path that humans take along the “Mountain of Existence” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 198). Each stage of the journey features a guide and at least one personified temptation away from the path. For example, in the earliest stage one is guided first by Innocence, then by Education, and tempted by Appetite. Later Reason and Religion join together, supplanting Education, as the guides and Passions join Appetite as temptations. Reason seems to offer a strong defense against the forces that would tempt the traveler off the path, but only Religion can provide nearly failsafe protection. As thus outlined, Johnson’s tale is unsurprising and orthodox. Perhaps the most interesting element of the allegory, however, is the significant and complex role played by “Habits.” In Johnson’s representation of Habits, we see both the influence of Locke and Johnson’s own sensitivity to the challenges of learning. Habits are a constant, though not always visible, presence on the path men follow up the Mountain of Existence in the Vision. Habits appear on the path just ahead of the follower of Education as a silent, barely noticeable “troop of pygmies” whom Theodore is tempted to dismiss as insignificant despite Education’s frequent warning of their danger (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 200). When Theodore notices that each Habit “held secretly a chain in her hand, with which she prepared to bind those whom she found within her power,” he begins to take their power seriously. In the Vision, Habits can be forces for good or bad. “They were always willing to join with Appetite” to tempt the traveler off the path, but when kept in check Habits actually “make the narrow roads in which they were confin’d easier and smoother.” Theodore also observes that the stature of Habits was “continually 40  Johnson writes in Rambler no. 4 “That the highest degree of reverence should be paid to youth, and that nothing indecent should be suffered to approach their eyes or ears; are precepts exhorted by sense and virtue from an ancient writer, by no means eminent for chastity of thought” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 21).

490   Jessica Richard growing or decreasing” but that they grew much more quickly than they shrank (vol. xvi, 201). Habits develop easily but are hard to break. Johnson’s thinking about habits is decidedly Lockean. He illustrates habit n.s. 3 in the Dictionary with a quotation from Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding.41 We can also see a more extensive foundation for Johnson’s understanding of habit in Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education, where he declares good habits to be the most important element of both learning and virtue. He likewise warns that unless children’s play and activities are explicitly “directed toward good and useful Habits,” “they will introduce ill ones.”42 Locke describes the ideal governor or tutor as one who “makes it his chief Business to form the Mind of his Scholars, and give that a right disposition: which, if once got, though all the rest should be neglected, would in due time, produce all the rest: and which if it be not got, and settled, so as to keep out ill and vicious Habits, Languages and Sciences, and all the other Accomplishments of Education will be to no purpose but to make the worse, or more dangerous Man”.43 Parents should “Seek out somebody that may know how discreetly to frame his [the child’s] Manners. Place him in Hands, where you may, as much as possible, secure his Innocence, cherish and nurse up the Good, and gently correct, and weed out any Bad Inclinations, and settle in him good Habits. This is the main Point, and this being provided for, Learning may be had in to the Bargain.”44 Good habits are, in Locke’s view, the foundation of all education. This is echoed in the prominent role that habits play in Johnson’s Vision. Locke argues that the tutor must “Teach him [his student] to get a Mastery over his Inclinations, and submit his Appetite to Reason. This being obtained, and by constant practice settled into Habit, the hardest part of the Task is over.”45 Locke presents this as difficult but (without any specific guidance on methods) both achievable and primary—​a task to accomplish before moving on to other elements of education. We see in Johnson’s Vision, in contrast, his exceptional sensitivity to the psychological challenges students face in obtaining mastery over their inclinations and developing good Habits. This “hardest part of the Task” is indeed never over in the Vision but is ongoing throughout the lifelong path that tracked the Mountain of Existence. Bad Habits continue to duel with Reason and Religion, sometimes even growing stronger “by these repeated contests, [such] that if they were not totally overcome, every struggle enlarged their bulk and increased their strength; and a Habit oppos’d and victorious was more than twice as strong as before the contest” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 207). This is an especially interesting and less common insight: that trying but failing to break a bad habit can actually end up making it stronger. Johnson recognizes that good habits can be difficult to sustain and bad habits difficult to conquer. 41 Yale Works, vol. xvi, 200 n. 4. 42 

Some Thoughts, 192. Some Thoughts, 234. 44  Some Thoughts, 208. 45  Some Thoughts, 255. 43 

Education   491 Locke mentions “ill and vicious Habits” occasionally but most of his discussion of habits centers on the efficacy of developing good habits as a kind of educational automation: “Indispensible practice . . . will beget Habits in them, which, being once established, operate of themselves easily and naturally, without the assistance of the Memory.”46 The Vision of Theodore, by contrast, represents good habits as more tenuous and bad habits as more resilient. Less time is spent in the Vision on the educational efficacy of good habits and more is spent on the dangers posed by bad habits. In Theodore’s first view of habits “As Education led her troop up the mountain, nothing was more observable than that she was frequently giving them cautions to beware of Habits; and was calling out to one or another at every step, that a Habit was ensnaring them; that they would be under the dominion of Habit before they perceived their danger; and that those whom a Habit should once subdue, had little hope of regaining their liberty” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 200). The Vision concludes, as Theodore watches the Ambitious, Intemperate, and Indolent all stray, with a warning about the dangers of bad habits: “Remember, Theodore, and be wise, and let not Habit prevail against thee” (vol. xvi, 212). While not quite a “conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” the Vision ends on a cautionary note born out of Johnson’s sympathy with the challenges of staying on the proper path as we journey up the Mountain of Existence. The Vision of Theodore, then, concludes Johnson’s longest and most explicit commentary on education. In the Vision, as well as in the preface, he demonstrates psychological insight into the sources of our weaknesses and offers a practical path for life learning. While the model of education he outlines bears no resemblance to his own, it is inspired by his extracurricular experiences both as a voracious reader and as a person who struggled with temperamental indolence and inattention. The philosophy of education that he outlines in The Preceptor, informed by his psychological astuteness and his reading habits, shapes much of the rest of his writing career.

Reading, Education, and Johnson’s Later Writing While Johnson did not write any more works explicitly designed for the market in educational texts after his involvement in Dodsley’s Preceptor, he understood all his writing to have didactic purposes, from his periodical essays in the Rambler, to the Lives of the Poets, to the moral tale of Rasselas, to the illustrative quotations in the Dictionary and more. Not only do these and other works teach moral lessons, but they are also structured according to his experience as a reader and his philosophy of learning as outlined above. His youthful experience of the power of the chance encounter with texts continued throughout his adult reading life and shaped the form of much of his work.

46 

Some Thoughts, 121.

492   Jessica Richard Johnson’s comments on adult reading and learning are consistent with his approaches to children’s reading. Just as children resist set tasks, so do adults: “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 428). Adults, like children, need their interests to be engaged for effective reading: He said, that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to, though to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. He added, “what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” (Life, vol. i, 428)

Johnson makes the important distinction that when one is learning a particular discipline (a “science” of any sort, including literature) one must read methodically through the major works in the field, but he describes so poignantly the wasted mental effort of trying to focus the mind on required reading. He goes so far as to say that you must seize the precious moment when your attention is captured, no matter what: “if a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it, to go to the beginning. He may, perhaps, not feel again the inclination” (Life, vol. iii, 43). Furthermore, Johnson believed that no one was obligated to read more of a book than captured his attention. Boswell describes his reaction to an instructor’s advice that his pupil “read to the end of whatever books he should begin”: “ ‘This is surely strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’ ” (Life, vol. iv, 308). On another occasion, a friend asked Johnson his opinion of a recent and much-​admired book. “I have looked into it,” said Johnson. “What,” said his friend, “Have you not read it through?” According to Boswell, “Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do you read books through?’ ” (Life, vol. ii, 226). To Hester Thrale he lamented, “Alas, Madam! . . . how few books are there of which one ever can possibly arrive at the last page!”47 Few books could hold his attention to the end. Robert DeMaria argues that Johnson engaged in studious or “hard” reading, particularly in his teen and young adult years (Johnson himself “told Bennet Langton that his great period of study lasted from the age of twelve to that of eighteen”)48, but that much of his reading throughout his life could be described as more desultory: in DeMaria’s scheme, “perusal,” “mere reading,” and “curious reading.”49 I suggest that Johnson’s 47 Hill, Miscellanies, vol. i, 332.

48 Robert DeMaria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 71. 49  DeMaria, 4.

Education   493 habits of “perusal,” “mere,” and “curious” reading shaped not only his ideas about how reading functions in education, but also shaped his writing. DeMaria defines perusal as an intensive kind of reading, and thus similar to “hard” or “studious” reading, but perusal is selective. The point is not to digest a complete text, but to read it with a particular and definite purpose, “to improve oneself in specific ways or to find the answer to a particular problem.” A famous example of Johnson’s perusal of a book is his reading of William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which, according to DeMaria, he read “for the sake of taking away what was valuable to him and leaving the rest.”50 Johnson’s friend Mary Knowles described his approach to reading as “tearing the heart out of it” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 285). Johnson was known to be careless with books and did not have any particular reverence for them as physical objects (while as a bookseller’s son he did appreciate typography, binding, and paper), subjecting them to what he described to Hester Thrale as his “Scholar’s talons.”51 Isaac Watts, whose work Johnson admired and from which he quoted extensively in the Dictionary, “urged students to mark up their books so that they could review the important parts at any time, and not to worry about marring the objects”;52 Johnson’s approach to reading as a task of digestion and selection follows this tradition. Yet Johnson did not advocate intensive scholarly note-​taking on one’s reading, arguing that such a practice “repress[es] the vehemence of curiosity by useless deliberation” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 231). The curiosity that motivates reading and secures attention is so sacred for Johnson that it must not be disturbed by extensive note-​ taking. But personal “minutes” in the form of commonplace entries or lists of reading could be a way of tracking reading that was personally significant; as DeMaria shows, “most of Johnson’s records of his reading provide less an intellectual than a spiritual and emotional history of his mind.”53 These records, particularly in his diaries, indicate that “Johnson was always picking books up and reading them for a relatively brief time before moving on to something else. He probably did this even with books that he eventually read through, and even with those that he had read many times.”54 Such minutes could be seen as early drafts of later works as he notes a passage or idea that he may return to in an essay. Not only did Johnson take a digest approach to reading, but DeMaria argues that throughout his life Johnson also was most attracted to reading books that themselves digest and comment on other books, particular favorites being Macrobius’s Dream of Scipio and Saturnalia.55 Such works contain snippets of information from, and commentary on, other sources. I suggest that this genre perfectly suited Johnson’s preferred reading style, in which he dips into a book looking for wisdom that will

50 

DeMaria, 11. Johnson to Hester Thrale, October 15, 1778, in Letters, vol. iii, 127. 52  DeMaria, 24. 53  DeMaria, 61. 54  DeMaria, 62. 55  DeMaria, 89. 51 

494   Jessica Richard arrest his attention; this genre also inspires much of his own writing, from tales to essays to dictionary entries. Macrobius describes his project in a preface to his son: “I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading, to reduce it thereby to order and to give it coherence.”56 As DeMaria notes, Johnson “liked to read in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference works of all kinds, and he made a great many of his books out of these sources.”57 He also structured many of his books on this model. So much of Johnson’s writing assumes an easily distractible reader that this must be understood as foundational to his thinking about how his readers learn. This is why much of his didactic writing is in short form. While the didactic periodical essay was well established by Addison and Steele, Johnson’s reputation as a moral writer was fostered by his Rambler essays, short pieces that meander elegantly from one topic to another, teaching through anecdote and example rather than linear logic or argument; Johnson uses a quotation or idea as a point of departure for a small excursus. As DeMaria notes, “Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare and many illustrative quotations in the Dictionary also show that Johnson read with an eye to the extractable, complete thought. In his Shakespeare, as has often been shown, he dilates these crystals, making them into small Ramblers, thus completing the work that Shakespeare, according to Johnson, had left undone.”58 The Dictionary can be understood to foster the learning of the distractible reader, offering in its illustrative quotations passages that would provide moral instruction in short, digestible bites. Rasselas proceeds through a series of discrete chapters that offer succinct moral lessons, often summarized in a sentence in a chapter heading, and full of quotable aphorisms that may be complex in context but that can be extracted for moral guidance. In conclusion, I argue that Johnson’s sensitivity to the vagaries of attention structures his approach to education in most, if not all, of his educational writing. Despite his conventional experiences as a student and teacher, his extracurricular reading, his insights into the psychology of learning, and his unusual sympathy for those who have difficulty learning, all inform the progressive pedagogy and curriculum that he champions in his preface to Dodsley’s popular and innovative textbook The Preceptor. This preface may well have played a significant role in the learning experiences of the many children whose parents bought Dodsley’s book as it framed their encounter with the contents. As a sometimes-​indolent reader who looked for pearls of knowledge that he could seize and ponder, Johnson imagines readers—​both of Dodsley’s textbook and of Johnson’s own later writing—​who similarly lapse into inattention but who can be arrested by a choice phrase and led toward moral good.

56 

Quoted in DeMaria, Life of Reading, 90–​1. DeMaria, 108. 58  DeMaria, 83. 57 

Education   495

Further Reading DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Hazen, Allen T. “The Beauties of Johnson.” Modern Philology 35, no. 3 (1938): 289–​95. Johnson, Claudia L. “Samuel Johnson’s Moral Psychology and Locke’s ‘Of Power.’ ” SEL 1500–​ 1900 24 (1984): 563–​82. Lipking, Lawrence. “Learning to Read Johnson: The Vision of Theodore and The Vanity of Human Wishes.” ELH 43, no. 4 (1976): 517–​37. Lipking, Lawrence. “Johnson and Genius.” In Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, edited by Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, 83–​94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sharma, Vinod C. “Johnson’s Criticism of Milton’s Scheme of Education.” University of Rajasthan Studies in English (1969) 32–​43. Wellington, Charmaine. “Dr. Johnson’s Attitude Towards the Education of Women.” The New Rambler 18 (1977): 49–​58.

Chapter 27

Scien c e Joseph Drury

That sort of writing which has been so successfully cultivated in this country by our periodical Essayists . . . is the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy. —​William Hazlitt, “On the Periodical Essayists” As man is a being very sparingly furnished with the power of prescience, he can provide for the future only by considering the past; and as futurity is all in which he has any real interest, he ought very diligently to use the only means by which he can be enabled to enjoy it, and frequently to revolve the experiments which he has hitherto made upon life, that he may gain wisdom from his mistakes and caution from his miscarriages. —​Adventurer 137

In July 1763, two months after their first meeting in Thomas Davies’s bookshop, Boswell called on Johnson in his rooms across from the Inner Temple in London. During his visit, Johnson’s friend and housemate Dr. Robert Levet took Boswell up to see the great man’s library, which then occupied two garrets previously used as a bookseller’s warehouse. The spectacle of Johnson’s sanctum sanctorum delighted the young acolyte: dusty books lay scattered “in great confusion,” he recalled, and strewn across the floor were manuscript leaves “in Johnson’s own hand-​writing”—​sacred relics that Boswell looked upon “with a degree of veneration, supposing they perhaps might contain portions of the Rambler, or of Rasselas.” In amongst these instruments of literary labor, however, he also noticed a set of objects that might now seem out of place in the study of a celebrated man of letters: “an apparatus for chemical experiments,” of which, he explained, “Johnson was all his life very fond” (Life, vol. i, 435–​6).

Science   497 Johnson’s passion for chemical experiments puzzled his friends, who regarded it as a comical, and sometimes rather alarming eccentricity. Hester Piozzi recounted the story of Johnson’s first meeting with Arthur Murphy, who found him “covered with soot like a chimney-​sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the Alchymist, making æther,” a liquor distilled from a mixture of spirit of wine and oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid). Piozzi also recalled the summer when she and Johnson had set up a laboratory together at her house in Streatham and amused themselves by “drawing essences and colouring liquors.” Her then-​husband, the brewer Henry Thrale, eventually put a stop to it, fearing their notoriously shortsighted friend might do himself a mischief: “future experiments in chemistry . . . were too dangerous,” she lamented, “and Mr Thrale insisted that we should do no more towards finding the philosopher’s stone.”1 Boswell traced Johnson’s interest in chemistry to his short biography of the Dutch physician and natural philosopher Herman Boerhaave, written for the Gentleman’s Magazine not long after his arrival in London in the late 1730s. But according to John Hawkins, Johnson did not start performing experiments until the years of the Ivy Lane Club, which first began meeting in 1749. Inspired by fellow Club member Samuel Dyer’s dramatic accounts of the chemistry lectures he was attending at Gresham College, Johnson acquired “an alembic, with retorts, receivers and other vessels adapted to the cheapest and least operose processes.” Hawkins did not think much of the experiments he conducted with these instruments, which he claimed soon “dwindled down into mere distillation, and that from substances of the simplest and coarsest sort, namely, peppermint, and the dregs of strong beer, from the latter whereof he was able to extract a strong but very nauseous spirit, which all might smell, but few chose to taste.” Like Piozzi he also enjoyed joking about the idea of Johnson as an alchemist, cautioning his readers with mock solemnity not to conclude that the great man’s view in performing these operations was “suddenly to become the possessor of immense riches.” His motive, he assured them, “was only curiosity, and his end mere amusement.”2 Modern scholars, however, have found Johnson’s knowledge of experimental science—​and chemistry in particular—​to be both more involved and less marginal to his core literary interests than these contemporary accounts would suggest. In the 1940s, W. K. Wimsatt sought to demonstrate the importance of the new scientific diction to Johnson’s distinctive prose style. Though not the largest or most technical of its time, Johnson’s Dictionary was unique in its systematic definitions of technical and scientific “hard” words and unprecedented in its use of illustrative quotations, a substantial number of which were drawn from scientific works. Wimsatt estimated that as many as one-​fifth of the 50,000 quotations included in the first of the two volumes of the Dictionary’s first edition were taken from works that eighteenth-​century readers would 1  Hester Lynch Piozzi, “Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,” in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 306–​8. 2  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 249.

498   Joseph Drury have deemed “philosophic”—​that is, works “pertaining to, or used in the study of, natural philosophy, or some branch of physical science”—​and that as many as 5,000 of the 40,000 words defined in the Dictionary as a whole were of either “general philosophic” or “technical” import. Many of these words then made their way into the Rambler, which Johnson composed concurrently with the Dictionary and which he envisioned as an opportunity to explore the figurative and stylistic possibilities of scientific diction when abstracted from its technical contexts and applied to the broader ethical and psychological concerns of the moralist.3 Wimsatt thus made a compelling case for the extent of Johnson’s interest in the natural sciences, which, as he pointed out, continued well beyond the early 1750s and was not limited to the major seventeenth-​century authors that feature most prominently in the Dictionary.4 Yet, perhaps because he confined himself to Johnson’s use of scientific words and refused characteristically to speculate about “what the author intended to write,” Wimsatt did not consider whether Johnson might have engaged with scientific ideas in any substantive way. Johnson’s writing, he insists, suggested no “more than a general—​at times vague—​and literary comprehension of science, sufficient for his purposes.”5 His assumption throughout is that Johnson should not be viewed as a man of science occupied in significant scientific projects of his own, and that his moral philosophy developed independently of the natural philosophy he occasionally mined for vivid illustrative imagery. One finds the same reluctance to view Johnson as an active producer of scientific knowledge in the only other major study of Johnson’s scientific interests, Richard B. Schwartz’s Samuel Johnson and the New Science (1971). Although Schwartz did at least make a concerted effort to situate Johnson’s life and work in the context of the Enlightenment’s Baconian empiricism, which, as he notes, did not view experimental philosophy as a “safely compartmentalized activity,” divorced from other areas of human experience, he also concluded that Johnson was not a significant agent in that context. Johnson is to be seen as a “commentator, not an experimenter,” and his writing should be understood as belonging to the “tradition of scientific ideology and polemic” rather than that of science proper.6

3 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 34, 82. 4   Johnson’s first assignment following the Dictionary’s publication in 1755 was an editorial position at the newly founded Literary Magazine, for which he reviewed several contemporary scientific works, including a volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Charles Lucas’s Essay on Waters, and An Account of a Useful Discovery by the naturalist and inventor Stephen Hales. At his death, Johnson’s library contained hundreds of science books, from older works on chemistry by Paracelsus, Jan Baptiste van Helmont, and Robert Boyle, to more recent ones by Boerhaave, William Lewis, Robert Dossie, and Pierre Joseph Macquer. For a comprehensive overview of Johnson’s lifelong chemical interests, see Frederick Kurzer, “Chemistry in the Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” Bulletin of the History of Chemistry 29, no. 2 (2004), 65–​88. 5  Wimsatt, ix, xiii. 6  Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 15, 9.

Science   499 Such conclusions are almost inevitable if one assumes, as both these scholars do, that eighteenth-​century “science” was limited to the study of physical nature, to the exclusion of moral or spiritual phenomena. Yet recent work in the history of science has shown that this was not the case: “the distinction between ‘science’ and theology,” observes Andrew Cunningham, “is a modern-​day distinction which cannot legitimately be applied to the practice of natural philosophy in the seventeenth and other centuries.”7 Natural philosophy’s connections to theology date back to its origins in the medieval period, when it emerged from commentaries on a group of works by Aristotle covering everything from physics to the soul—​what Johnson in his Life of Milton calls “intellectual nature”—​and it survived largely intact through the Scientific Revolution into the eighteenth century (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 117–​19). In the “General Scholium” appended to the second edition of the Principia Mathematica (1713), Isaac Newton insisted that “to treat of God from phenomena is certainly part of natural philosophy,” before reflecting at length on the knowledge of God that could be derived from the study of his works.8 As Scott Evans has shown, Johnson shared this orthodox conviction. Like Newton and other eighteenth-​century natural philosophers, he viewed nature as “essentially formal and teleological” and considered “the knowledge of nature to be valuable and accurate insofar as it represents purpose and metaphysical form along with the appearance and function of things.”9 What changed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was that philosophers began to insist on the experimental basis of all truly philosophical knowledge, natural and moral. Hailing the achievements of modern experimental science in Query 31 of the final edition of the Opticks (1730), Newton confidently predicted that “if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged.” By revealing new truths about God and his creation, natural philosophers had laid the foundations for new truths about religion and morality: “for so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.”10 Though Newton himself never pursued these matters in print, contemporary physico-​theologians such as Samuel Clarke and Richard Bentley did, with his approval. Johnson borrows one of the metaphysical arguments Clarke derived from

7  Andrew Cunningham, “How the Principia Got Its Name; or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously,” History of Science 29 (1991), 389. 8  Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, ed. I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, and Julia Budenz (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 943. 9  Scott D. Evans, Samuel Johnson’s “General Nature”: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-​Century Discourse (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 103–​4. 10  Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 405. This is a translation from the Latin: “Et haec de Deo: de quo utique ex phaenomenis disserere, ad Philosophiam experimentalem pertinet.” Cunningham, however, thinks it would be legitimate to translate this more strongly as, “it is the role of experimental (natural) philosophy to discourse of God from the phenomena” (384).

500   Joseph Drury Newton’s Principia at the end of Rasselas, when he has Imlac defend the immateriality of the soul on the grounds that matter is “inert, senseless, and lifeless” and therefore incapable of thought or consciousness (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 170). Likewise, in his account of Boerhaave’s last illness, Johnson reports admiringly that the great philosopher ultimately became convinced of the “experimental certainty of the distinction between corporeal and thinking substances” (vol. xix, 49).11 Far from excluding the weightiest questions, Johnson understood Newtonian science to offer inspiration and methodological tools for a new kind of metaphysical inquiry. In what follows, then, I begin from a different premise, which is that the “science” of Enlightenment Britain was characterized by a broad effort to extend a variously understood Newtonian method into new areas of knowledge. Many of these projects can be found in modern histories of science: John Theophilus Desaguliers’s hydrostatic experiments, for example, Stephen Hales’s studies of the chemistry of plants, or the physiological theories of James Keill and George Cheyne, were all directly inspired by one or both of Newton’s two major publications and were presented as applications of his methodology to new objects. Less likely to feature in such histories, however, though no less central to Newton’s legacy in the eighteenth century, was the field of inquiry that Mary Poovey has called “experimental moral philosophy.” Experimental moral philosophers assumed that “subjective ‘events’ are as particularized and observable as phenomenal events,” that it was therefore possible to “conduct ‘experiments’ on subjectivity, and that the results would simultaneously describe particular events and contribute to systematic knowledge.” Taking their cue from the methodological reflections in Newton’s Opticks, experimental moral philosophers sought to develop “a science of subjectivity” that applied the techniques of analysis and synthesis that Newton had used to establish the laws governing the external, sensible world to the study of “the regularities of the moral universe.”12 As a periodical essayist and lexicographer who drew on the Opticks for many of the scientific terms he defined in the Dictionary, Johnson was well placed to contribute to this project, which Poovey rightly views as one of the antecedents of modern psychology. The intimate relationship between literary and scientific labor suggested by Boswell’s description of Johnson’s library, therefore, was no aberration: retorts, alembics, and other chemical instruments could mingle with the manuscript leaves of his periodical essays because in this period, natural and moral philosophy—​though they studied different objects—​shared a common methodology and conceptual repertoire. As we shall see, Newton’s reinvigoration of chemistry provided Johnson with an epistemological model for his experimental “anatomy” of human nature and an ontological warrant for his preoccupations with the restless activity of the human mind and the dangers of “vacuity.” 11 On

the role of the new science in the materialism debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, see Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12  Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148.

Science   501

The Science of the Human Mind The effort to extend the method Newton had devised for the study of gravity and light to moral phenomena was taken up most enthusiastically in Scotland. George Turnbull, professor of moral philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen, adopted Newton’s comment about moral philosophy in Query 31 of the Opticks as one of the epigraphs for his Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy (1740), which he presented as an attempt “to account for Moral, as the great Newton had taught us to explain Natural Appearances.” Although natural and moral philosophy had different objects of study—​ the former dealt with “sensible, or corporeal” phenomena, the latter with “intellectual or moral objects” perceived only by “reflexion on the mind itself and its inward operations”—​Turnbull argued that they ought to “set out from the same first principles, and be carried on in the same method of investigation, induction, and reasoning; since both are enquiries into facts or real constitutions.” If the knowledge of moral phenomena was underdeveloped in comparison to the knowledge of sensible nature, and the human mind as a result “still too little known,” this was because moral philosophers—​not just the ancients and the schoolmen, but modern rationalists such as Descartes and Hobbes too—​had been led further astray than naturalists by “fictitious hypotheses and romantic, visionary theories.” The solution was to subject moral philosophy to the same methodological discipline that had transformed the study of sensible nature: “it is only in the way of experiment, that either the science of the human mind, or of any material system can be acquired.”13 In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–​40), David Hume argued similarly that, “the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations.”14 Unlike Hume, Turnbull was careful to note that studying moral phenomena with the same method used in the study of the sensible world did not presume any ontological continuity between mind and matter, only that meaningful knowledge of either consisted in the discovery of “good general laws” to which particular phenomena were reducible.15 At the core of the method employed by mid-​ century experimental moral philosophers were two key procedures: “analysis” and “synthesis” or “composition” (all words Johnson illustrated in the Dictionary with quotations from Query 31). Analysis, Newton had explained, involved the process of “making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction.” In the Principia, this had meant moving from “Motions to the Forces producing them”; in the Opticks, from 13 

George Turnbull, The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Broadie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. i, 5, 47, 98. 14  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol. i, 5. 15  Turnbull, vol. i, 56

502   Joseph Drury “Compounds to Ingredients”—​that is, from white light to the seven primary colors of which it was composed. Synthesis, on the other hand, consisted in “assuming the Causes discover’d and establish’d as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.”16 The critical point for Newton was that analysis should always come before synthesis; general laws could not be used to explain particular phenomena until those laws had themselves been established empirically from the comparison of key experiments and observations. Enlightenment philosophers argued that these procedures were just as applicable to moral as they were to natural philosophy. In both forms of inquiry, Turnbull insisted, “we may proceed in the double method of analysis and synthesis: by the former endeavouring to deduce from some certain select effects, the simple powers of nature, and their laws and proportions; from which, by the latter method, we may infer or resolve the nature of other effects.” One advantage of this double method, for moral philosophers as for Newton, was the discipline it imposed on the use of “mere hypotheses,” which could only be introduced after a rigorous process of data collection and comparison, in the proper Baconian fashion. On the other hand, the requirement to try and derive general principles from that data also ensured that philosophy would be more than just “a system of facts discovered by experience.” Just as the best natural philosophy was a “mixture of experiments, with reasonings from experiments,” Turnbull argued, so the “true moral philosophy” was “a mixed science of observations, and reasonings from principles known by experience to take place in, or belong to human nature.”17 The experimental data from which the general laws of the moral world were to be established did not consist of observations alone. Although Turnbull, like other eighteenth-​century moral philosophers, did not think it possible to conduct experiments on the human mind in the same way as the body or the sensible world, he believed that histories of civil history, ancient and modern, provided them with rich “experimental registers” far superior to what was available to natural philosophers, who had little more than a century of reliable natural history to call upon.18 According to Hume, “These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science; in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments, which he forms concerning them.”19 Of course, the experimental data gathered from history could not be purposely contrived in the same way as the material collected from experiments on physical phenomena, but it was no different in this respect from the centuries of astronomical observations Newton had consulted for 16 Newton, Opticks, 404-​5. 17 

Turnbull, vol. i, 62–​3. Turnbull, vol. i, 452–​3 19  David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 64. 18 

Science   503 the Principia or the experimental reports by Boyle and Hooke he had drawn on for the Opticks. The moral philosopher could also use a particular historical event as a kind of Baconian experimentum crucis—​a crucial or critical experiment that conclusively demonstrated the superiority of one hypothesis over another. As Turnbull put it, history has “a right to be applied to, to confirm or refute any political reasonings, as we do in philosophy by experiment,” and is thus “the best, the most useful of all studies.”20 What was experimental about historical data was not so much the way it was acquired, but the use philosophers made of it to establish general laws and theories.

Abroad in the Living World: Johnson’s Experimental Essays Although the empiricist orientation of Johnson’s essays has been well documented, what has not yet been recognized is the specifically experimental method that motivates many of their most characteristic rhetorical gestures and formal features.21 Like Turnbull and Hume, Johnson was contemptuous of dogmatic, a priori hypotheses about human nature and behavior, noting that “those that study either the body or the mind of man, very often find the most specious and pleasing theory falling under the weight of contrary experience; and instead of gratifying their vanity by inferring effects from causes, they are always reduced at last to conjecture causes from effects” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 69). He questioned the authority of men “not versed in the living world, but accustomed to judge only by speculative reason” (vol. iv, 4) and criticized moralists who, instead of “endeavouring to form maxims of practice and new hints of theory, content their curiosity with that secondary knowledge which books afford, and think themselves entitled to reverence by a new arrangement of an ancient system, or new illustration of established principles” (vol. iv, 321). Like other experimental moral philosophers, moreover, Johnson viewed history as a store of experiments from which principles of prudence and justice might be established. Rambler 49, for example, challenges the ancient moral philosophers who speculated that the love of fame ought to be encouraged because it “implies a resolution to deserve praises.” To refute it, he turns to the testimony of “history,” which shows that, on the contrary, a “blind and undistinguishing appetite of renown has always been uncertain in its effects.” Although Thermistocles, in Plutarch’s account of his life, was inspired by the fame of Militiades to try and match his services to the state, the same author tells us that “Caesar, when he wept at the sight of Alexander’s picture . . . let his ambition

20 

Turnbull, vol. i, 453. On the empiricism of Johnson’s essays see, for example, Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1–​21; and Robert D. Spector, Samuel Johnson and the Essay (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 4–​5. 21 

504   Joseph Drury break out to the ruin of his country” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 267). History’s experimental register thus leads Johnson to conclude that “the love of fame is to be regulated, rather than extinguished” and that people should be taught “to endeavour that they may be remembered chiefly for their virtues” (vol. iii, 266). Johnson thought particularly highly of biography, a species of history that he felt had a special capacity to “diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition.” Despite accidents of time, place, fortune, and temper, human experience was uniform enough that alert readers would find in accounts of every life “the same causes still terminating their influence in the same effects” (vol. iii, 320). The more “minute” the details the biographer could supply the better, since, “whether we read as enquirers after natural or moral knowledge, whether we intend to enlarge our science, or increase our virtue,” we often find that “invisible circumstances” (vol. iii, 321) prove more valuable than sensible ones. Johnson’s regard for biography’s power to reveal the inner workings of the moral world also informs the use he makes of fictional narratives in his periodical essays. Bacon had argued that poets were the equals of writers of histories as “doctors” of moral knowledge; in the works of both one found “painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; how pacified and restrained.”22 Johnson echoes this view in his own critical writing, typically when he is arguing for the importance of verisimilitude. He praises Shakespeare for observing the “living world” so exactly that “maxims of theoretical knowledge,” “rules for practical prudence,” and even a whole “system of social duty” might be derived from his works (Yale Works, vol. vii, 88, 63, 89, 71). And in the Rambler he commends modern novelists for acquiring their learning not only from books, as he claims authors of romances do, but also from “accurate observation of the living world” (vol. iii, 20). As a result, modern fiction is able to “convey the knowledge of vice and virtue,” and generally “with more efficacy than axioms and definitions.” Authors of realistic fictions actually had an important advantage over biographers, he thought, in their “liberty, tho’ not to invent, yet to select objects, and to cull from the mass of mankind, those individuals upon which the attention ought most to be employ’d” (vol. iii, 22). To Johnson, the best modern fiction was experimental data that had already undergone an initial process of analysis that extracted from the historical record the particulars most relevant to the formation of general principles. The fictional “pictures of life” that are such a distinctive feature of the Rambler reflect these priorities and assumptions. Like his favorite writers, Johnson is careful never to be “so studious of novelty or surprize, as to depart wholly from resemblance,” since the further any fictions “deviate from reality, they become less useful, because their lessons will fail of application” (Yale Works, vol. v, 319–​20). Rather than appealing to history, Johnson in these numbers employs a micro-​genre that Lisa Berglund has aptly called “exemplary autobiography.”23 A fictional correspondent writes in with a brief history of his or her life’s adventures, each episode of which functions as an “experiment” (vol. v, 22 

Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 259. Lisa Berglund, “Writing to Mr. Rambler: Samuel Johnson and Exemplary Autobiography,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture 29 (2000), 241–​59. 23 

Science   505 52) that reinforces a previously established moral maxim in a manner that resembles the Newtonian practice of synthesis. The anonymous correspondent in Rambler 153, for example, explains that the tendency of his narrative is to “illustrate and corroborate” (vol. v, 48) one of the Rambler’s own previous observations, probably his claim in Rambler 150 that “distress is necessary to the attainment of knowledge” (vol. v, 35). In his letter, he writes that he was born the second son of a gentleman of modest means, but that his prospects had suddenly improved when a rich friend of his father took a liking to him and promised to leave him his estate; as the acknowledged heir of a wealthy man, he starts attending fashionable parties and “conferences of learning” until he imagines that he has “acquainted himself fully with human nature.” But a sudden reversal of fortune convinces him that he has “hitherto seen the world but on one side” (vol. v, 51): his friend dies suddenly and when the will is opened, he discovers he has been left with a fraction of the legacy he had been expecting. Forced back upon his own resources, a series of failed attempts to win either the patronage of statesmen or the attention of ladies leads him to a final Johnsonian reflection on the indignities of poverty. The power of wealth, he concludes, is such that it “leaves him from whom it departs, without virtue and without understanding, the sport of caprice, the scoff of insolence, the slave of meanness, and the pupil of ignorance” (vol. v, 54). In another, related class of essays in the Rambler, Johnson establishes the template for the oriental tale that he would return to and expand in Rasselas, a work that Adam Potkay has described as “a philosophical fable on the value of experimental over a priori reasoning.”24 Rambler 120 recounts the history of Almamoulin, the son of a rich but miserly merchant of Samarkand who has raised him frugally. When his father dies leaving him a vast fortune, he is convinced that “happiness was now in his power, since he could now obtain all of which he had hitherto been accustomed to regret the want” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 277). A series of “experiments upon life” (vol. iv, 279), however, soon disabuses him: his political ambitions are thwarted by the envy of other rich and powerful men and the contempt of a princess to whom he proposes marriage; building palaces and extravagant gardens amuses him for a while, as does travel to distant lands, but the novelty of each enterprise quickly wears off, leaving him bored and weary of life; a period of lavish hospitality appears to win him a circle of glamorous, agreeable companions, but he discovers the emptiness of their friendship when the emperor threatens to confiscate his property and they abandon him without a murmur. Frustrated by his repeated failures to find happiness, he goes to consult a sage, who finally convinces him that the only value of money is the power it gives us to help others. Culled from the general experience of humanity, Johnson’s fictional experiments lend vivid experimental authority to the Rambler’s moral maxims. Although Johnson was critical of dogmatic system-​ builders and speculative hypotheses, his frequent recourse to exemplary fictions suggests he was no less impatient

24  Adam

Potkay, The Pursuit of Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 48.

506   Joseph Drury with those who failed to proceed beyond the gathering of observations to the formulation of general principles. This was a particular concern for him because of the nature of the essay as a genre (see Chapter 8, “Essays”). In the Dictionary, he defines essay n.s. in terms that suggest a broadly empiricist, rather than specifically experimental, epistemology: an essay, he says, is “a trial; an experiment,” but also “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” The second definition is probably meant to recall Montaigne, the great pioneer of the essay form. But Montaigne’s notorious preoccupation with his own personal impressions and bodily functions has little in common with Johnson’s rigorous experimentalism; rather, as Kathryn Murphy has noted, it reflected his “utter scepticism about the human capacity to abstract from the particular to the general.”25 In Montaigne, abundant, first-​hand experience is presented not as foundational but as a stubborn obstacle to the making of general knowledge of human nature. For Theodor Adorno, the built-​in skepticism of the essay was precisely what made it such a valuable genre. Since the seventeenth century, he claimed, “doubt about the unconditional priority of method was raised almost exclusively by the essay,” which he celebrates as “radically un-​radical in refraining from any reduction to principle, in accentuating the fragmentary, the partial rather than the total.”26 It has been suggested that Johnson’s reflections on system-​builders and speculative dogmas expresses a similarly “skeptical” attitude toward the impulse to generalize (see Chapter 31, “Doubt”).27 But this is to confuse his criticism of a particular kind of generalization with a rejection of generalization as such. As William Hazlitt shrewdly remarked, Johnson rarely offers the profusion of observed particulars in which Addison and Steele specialized, his essays appearing rather “the produce of the general intellect, labouring in the mine of knowledge and reflection, than dug out of the quarry, and dragged into the light by the industry and sagacity of a single mind.”28 Rather than a betrayal of the essay’s empiricism, as Hazlitt sees it, however, Johnson’s preference for principles over particulars and collective over individual experience was an expression of his faith in the whole sequence of procedures that constituted Newton’s experimental method. Unlike Adorno, he viewed the recalcitrant irregularity of the essay as a weakness rather than a strength, casting it as a kind of dilettanteish, pre-​Enlightenment barbarism that needed reforming. He praises Montaigne’s “vivacity,” but he also censures him for having accustomed readers to “licentiousness in short dissertations,” such that an author “who wants skill to form a plan, or diligence to pursue it, needs only to entitle his performance an essay, to acquire the right of heaping together collections of half his 25 

Kathryn Murphy, “Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment,” in On Essays, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 82. 26  T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique 32 (1984), 157. 27 Patrick Müller, “  ‘But Philosophy Can Tell No More’: Johnson’s Christian Moralism and the Genre of Rasselas,” in Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S.J., eds., Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 114–​16. See also Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), 60. 28  William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, 1819), 196.

Science   507 life, without order, coherence, or propriety” (Yale Works, vol. v, 77). The trouble with Montaigne and his imitators was that they gathered observations but made no attempt to subject them to the rigorous analysis required to elicit useful general principles. The methodical approach Johnson adopts in his own essays, by contrast, resembles the “mixed science of experiments, with reasonings from experiments” recommended by the Enlightenment’s experimental moral philosophers. Johnson’s attempt to bring experimental rigor to the essay form in the Rambler through the adoption of Newton’s double method also explains the difficulties that Johnson’s readers had with it when it first appeared. Accustomed to the looser, more observational style popularized by the Tatler and the Spectator, they were not prepared, it seems, for his sober philosophical ruminations. In one early number, the Rambler hears from a reader who claims to be “very much offended whenever he meets with a speculation, in which naked precepts are comprised, without the illustration of examples and characters.” Others complained that Johnson had not written a series of “unconnected essays” in the manner of other periodical essayists and regretted that the Rambler, unlike his predecessors, “did not introduce himself to the acquaintance of the public, by an account of his birth and studies, and enumeration of his adventures, and a description of his physiognomy” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 128–​9). Opting for coherence over variety and eschewing self-​revelation and introspection, Johnson assumes a tone of “solemn,” even “dictatorial” (vol. iii, 129) impersonality that expresses his confidence not just in the universality of human experience but the epistemological value of philosophical generalizations founded on experiment and the inductive method. One can see why Boswell, before meeting him, imagined Johnson living amid the bustle of an “immense metropolis” in “a state of solemn elevated abstraction” (Life, vol. i, 384). The combination of physical immersion and mental detachment, the suggestion of a mind able to draw sound general conclusions from direct experience of a mass of experimental particulars—​these were precisely the effects Johnson was aiming for. Johnson’s essays, therefore, are better understood as belonging to a tradition derived not from Montaigne, but from Francis Bacon and the experimental philosophers of England’s Royal Society. Taking inspiration from Bacon’s Sylvana Sylvarum (1626), Robert Boyle had argued that the great advantage of the essay was that it freed authors from the obligation to construct complete “Systems,” which required them to cover every part of a subject, including those they did not understand or about which they had nothing new to say. Much useful knowledge was lost as a result, he claimed, either because original ideas were buried among those borrowed from other authors or, worse, because authors were put off from trying to write at all. Systems also deceived “unwary Readers” into thinking that a subject had been “sufficiently explicated” and that there was nothing left for them to do but learn what had already been discovered. But Boyle’s distaste for system-​building did not imply skepticism about all forms of general knowledge; rather, he hoped to remove the obstacles to producing useful general knowledge by persuading authors to “cast their Physiological Observations and Reflexions into Experimental

508   Joseph Drury Essayes,” as he called them; for so long as “such Essayes be but as they should be competently stock’d with Experiments,” he argued, “’tis the Readers own fault if he be not a Learner by them.” Even if the philosophical principles authors derived from reflecting on their experiments did not ultimately hold up, the cause of “real Learning” would still be served, Boyle thought, because “the foundation being solid, a more wary builder may be very much further’d by it in the erection of more judicious and consistent Fabricks.”29 Unlike systems, which discouraged further inquiry by pretending to definitiveness, the partial, professedly provisional truths Boyle proposed in his essays invited readers to conduct further experiments and draw their own conclusions. As Scott Black puts it, “Boyle’s adoption of the essay as the genre for his natural philosophy” was a way to solicit “a practice of thinking through trials that, in turn, encourages and enables further thinking.”30 Rather than a loose collection of personal observations that resist any scaling up to general principles, Johnson’s essays ask readers to reflect on and participate in that process themselves: “it is only from the various essays of experimental industry, and the vague excursions of minds sent out upon discovery, that any advancement of knowledge can be expected,” he urged, “and though many must be disappointed in their labours, yet they are not to be charged with having spent their time in vain; their example contributed to inspire emulation, and their miscarriages taught others the way to success” (Yale Works, vol. v, 183–​4).

Johnson’s Tragic Vitalism Ironically, one consequence of Johnson’s expansion of generalization’s role in the periodical essay was his recuperation of the very commonplaces that the experimental essay was supposed to spare readers. Whereas the essayist of the Tatler and the Spectator, Hazlitt observed, “brings home little curious specimens of the humors, opinions, and manners of his contemporaries, as the botanist brings home different plants and weeds, or the mineralogist different shells and fossils, to illustrate their several theories,” the Rambler is “a collection of moral Essays, or scholastic theses, written on set subjects,” with “hardly a reflection to be found in it which had not been already suggested and developed by some other author.” Hazlitt’s explanation for this backward-​looking scholasticism, as he saw it, is partly psychological, partly political. Johnson, he claims, is a timid reactionary who “dares not trust himself with the immediate impressions of things, for fear of compromising his dignity; or follow them into their consequences, for

29 Robert Boyle, “A Proemial Essay,” in Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts Written at Distant Times and on Several Occasions (London, 1669), 9–​11. 30  Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 71.

Science   509 fear of committing his prejudices.” As a political radical committed to the idea that new facts necessarily challenge conventional wisdom, Hazlitt accuses Johnson of excluding original observations based on personal experience lest he find himself venturing beyond “the pale of established authority and received dogmas.”31 Yet Johnson himself suggested a somewhat different explanation for his recourse to well-​known truths and commonplaces. Rather than evidence of prejudice or dogmatism, Johnson saw the tendency of the best moralists to echo each other as a natural consequence of their empirical examination of the living world. As he argues in a revealing essay for the Adventurer, “the anatomy of the mind, as that of the body, must perpetually exhibit the same appearances” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 427). Nothing, therefore, is more unjust than accusing a writer of “tedious repetitions of common sentiments” (vol. ii, 425) merely because “he assigns to every cause its natural effect; and makes personages act, as others in like circumstances have always done” (vol. ii, 427). Just as the Newtonian natural philosopher proceeds from unfamiliar compounds to well-​known ingredients and from obscure appearances to regular principles, so the analysis of the experimental moralist leads beyond “unessential and casual varieties” to the familiar primary elements from which they are composed: It has been discovered by Sir Isaac Newton, that the distinct and primogenial colours are only seven; but every eye can witness, that from various mixtures in various proportions, infinite diversifications of tints may be produced. In like manner, the passions of the mind, which put the world in motion, and produce all the bustle of the busy crouds that swarm upon the earth; the passions, from whence arise all the pleasures and pains we see and hear of, if we analize the mind of man, are very few; but those few agitated and combined, as external causes shall happen to operate, and modified by prevailing opinions and accidental caprices, make such frequent alterations on the surface of life, that the show while we are busied in delineating it, vanishes from the view, and a new set of objects succeeds, doomed to the same short duration with the former. (Yale Works, vol. ii, 428–​9)

Elsewhere Johnson introduces an analogy from a different branch of natural philosophy to make a similar point: “as the chemists tell us, that all bodies are resolvable into the same elements, and that the boundless variety of things arises from the different proportions of a few ingredients; so a few pains, and a few pleasures are all the materials of human life” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 359–​60). If, therefore, unlike Addison and Steele, Johnson prefers to emphasize the insensible “primogenial” ingredients of the mind rather than the mixtures in which they appear to the senses, this does not reflect his fear of immediate impressions so much as his understanding of the experimental essayist’s obligation to propose causal explanations for them. And in the moral as in the natural world, new experimental data often reinforces rather than refutes the wisdom of the ages. 31 

Hazlitt, 195–​6, 200–​1.

510   Joseph Drury Far from a retreat into scholasticism, in fact, Johnson’s allusions to the analytical methods of chemistry and the Opticks here and elsewhere reveal his acute sensitivity to the philosophical trends of the mid-​eighteenth century.32 According to historians of science, this period saw the emergence of a new kind of Newtonianism, influenced not by the rigorous “mathematico-​deductive” method of the Principia that had dominated the first four decades of the century but by the more qualitatively oriented, “speculative-​ experimental” approach of the Opticks.33 Where early eighteenth-​century Newtonians had avoided feigning hypotheses about the causes of natural forces in favor of mathematical descriptions that merely measured their effect on other, quantifiable physical phenomena (such as mass or velocity), mid-​century Newtonians increasingly opted for qualitative, descriptive accounts of forces and “fluids” (such as heat or electricity) they assumed to be immeasurable. This methodological shift ultimately produced an ontological one: instead of a largely empty universe populated by a few inert, undifferentiated material particles acting on each other at a distance, a new generation of “vitalist” philosophers envisioned a cosmos filled with unique material substances, each with the power to convey some distinctive quality. Johnson’s interest in chemistry, the branch of natural philosophy devoted to the qualities of matter, would have made him especially alert to these developments. Since the mid-​seventeenth century, mechanical philosophers had tried to demonstrate that many of the qualities of matter resulted from strictly quantitative differences in the size, shape, texture, and motion of homogeneous particles. As early as the 1680s, however, Newton had deviated from this approach by arguing for the role of short-​range attractive forces in chemical phenomena such as fermentation, putrefaction, heat, cohesion, and the behavior of acids and salts, which continued to elude precise quantification. But these ideas were not immediately published, and he eventually set them aside to work on the Principia. Only when his initial goal of producing a mathematical theory of colors akin to the one he had established for gravity foundered on the sheer complexity of optical phenomena did he return to his chemical theories: studying the role of refraction and reflection in the production of colors required an analysis of the density of bodies and thus the attractive forces involved in the packing together of a substance’s constituent particles. But Newton’s speculations about these attractive forces in the Opticks would not have had the impact they did had he not gone on to speculate expansively on their ontological implications in the queries he added to its second and third editions: “It seems to me,” he ventured, “that these Particles have not only a Vis Inertiæ, accompanied with such passive Laws of Motion as naturally result from that Force, but also that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as is that of Gravity, and

32  For Johnson’s use of the Opticks in the Dictionary, a work he quotes 461 times, see A. D. Atkinson, “Dr. Johnson and Newton’s Opticks,” Review of English Studies 11, no. 2 (1951), 226–​37. 33 I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1956), 179. See also Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 94.

Science   511 that which causes Fermentation, and the Cohesion of Bodies.” Rather than attributing gravity to action at a distance, as he had done in the first edition of the Principia, moreover, Newton now proposed that a subtle, elastic but ultimately material “Æther” served as a medium for transmitting all such forces between bodies.34 In the second half of the century, vitalist experimental philosophers would break up Newton’s single, universal medium into several unique fluids—​and ultimately elements—​each with their own distinctive properties.35 The Newtonian science of man evolved in similar directions in the same period: a pseudo-​mathematical, deductive method modeled on the Principia which had prevailed in the first part of the century gave way to a more qualitative, inductive method inspired by the Opticks. One can see this generational shift in the differences between the experimental methods of George Turnbull and David Hume. Turnbull did not, like his contemporary Francis Hutcheson, attempt to provide algebraic axioms for calculating the value of moral actions. Nonetheless, the influence of the Principia is evident in the place he reserves for deductive reasoning in his “mixed moral philosophy,” which he compares to the part played by mathematics in Newton’s natural philosophy.36 In Hume’s Treatise, by contrast, as Tamás Demeter has shown, the “axiomatic-​mathematical-​deductive outlook” has been eliminated entirely in favor of the kind of qualitative analysis and analogical reasoning characteristic of the Opticks.37 Rather than trying to quantify moral phenomena, Hume set out to provide purely descriptive accounts of cognitive faculties such as perception, imagination, and reason, which he presents as active, qualitatively distinct principles whose interaction produces impressions, ideas, and ultimately behavior that cannot be measured or represented in mathematical terms. In describing the way these principles function, Hume incorporated images drawn from optics and chemistry. Like Johnson, he used the blending of colors as an analogy for the way the passions mingle and he compared the tendency of contrary passions to neutralize each other when caused by similar objects to the effect of mixing an acid and an alkali.38 To alert his readers to the narrowly descriptive purposes of the Treatise, moreover, Hume, like Johnson, framed his project as an “anatomy of human nature.” And rather than treating them as external forces that attract one mind to another at a distance the way gravity draws bodies to each other in the Principia, as Hutcheson had suggested, Hume presented the principles of love and benevolence that secure social relations as active properties inherent to the human mind: “I own the mind to be insufficient, of itself, to 34 Newton, Opticks, 401, 352.

35  On the importance of Newton’s Opticks to the mid-​century vitalist revival, see Theodore M. Brown, “From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-​Century Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, no. 2 (1974), 179–​216; Anita Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology, 1690–​1740,” Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 2 (1985), 247–​66; and Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 79. 36  Turnbull, vol. i, 65. 37  Tamás Demeter, David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 38. 38 See Hume, Treatise, vol. i, 236, 283. On Hume’s use of physiological, optical, and chemical metaphors, see Demeter, David Hume, 85–​90, 136–​43.

512   Joseph Drury its own entertainment,” he wrote, “and that it naturally seeks after foreign objects, which may produce a lively sensation, and agitate the spirits.”39 In short, Hume’s moral philosophy was “congruent in its outlook and language with the philosophical chemistry and vitalistic physiology that were the prominent orientations of natural inquiry in the Scottish Enlightenment.”40 The context of Enlightenment vitalism shapes some distinctive features of Johnson’s moral philosophy. Like Hume, Johnson distinguishes between mathematics, “which has to do only with ideas,” and “the application of its laws to the use of life” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 75), invoking the difference between them as an analogy for the gap between theory and practice in “moral discussions.” A man often writes better than he lives, he observes in Rambler 14, because even though he knows in theory what he ought to do, he always has “his own passions, and those of others, to encounter, and is embarrassed with a thousand inconveniences, which confound him with variety of impulse” (vol. iii, 76). The sheer number of different, often opposing passions to which we are subject—​each with their own distinctive qualities and principles of operation—​makes consistency impossible and the appearance of hypocrisy inevitable. Elsewhere Johnson criticizes historians who “suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effect has a proportionate cause.” Newton’s third law may apply in the “inanimate action of matter upon matter,” but “the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit of no such laws.” Experience shows that living bodies act according to principles that cannot be reduced to mathematical formulas: “the caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation” (Yale Works, vol. x, 366). In their readings of Johnson’s essays, scholars have typically emphasized the influence of Locke rather than Hume, and early eighteenth-​century mechanical philosophy rather than late eighteenth-​century vitalism. Paul Alkon, for example, argues that Johnson endorses Locke’s “somewhat mechanical” account of the role of pleasure and pain as “determinants of human motives.”41 Wimsatt likewise claims that the Ramblers “exhibit perhaps the most concentrated use in English literature of mechanical imagery turned inward to the analysis of the soul.” Yet most of the “philosophic” terms he actually points to in support of this claim—​attraction, repulsion, ebullition, effervescence, “primogenial qualities,” “ideas homogeneous and heterogeneous”—​are drawn not from mechanics or physics but the same optical and chemical sciences that inspired Hume’s

39 Hume, Treatise, vol. I, 171, 228. For Hutcheson’s comparison of love and benevolence to gravity, see Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), 149. 40 Tamás Demeter, “The Anatomy and Physiology of Mind: David Hume’s Vitalistic Account,” in Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, eds., Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 218. On Hume’s vitalism, see also Reill, 37–​8; and Andrew S. Cunningham, “Hume’s Vitalism and Its Implications,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2007), 59–​73. 41  Paul Kent Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 13–​14. See also Claudia L. Johnson, “Samuel Johnson’s Moral Psychology and Locke’s ‘Of Power,’ ” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), 563–​82.

Science   513 vitalist anatomy of human nature.42 As one might expect, chemical terms prove especially useful to Johnson when he wants to evoke the mind’s restless activity—​“the spirits of youth sublimed by health, and volatilized by passion,” he observes in Rambler 69, “soon leave behind them the phlegmatick sediment of weariness and deliberation, and burst out in temerity and enterprise” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 365)—​or when he is challenging some theory that he views as dubiously mechanical or deterministic. Against the popular notion that every form of knowledge requires a “peculiar genius” without which all labor is in vain, for example, Johnson insists that “a genius”—​that is, a particular intellectual aptitude—​“whatever it be, is like fire in the flint, only to be produced by collision with a proper subject”; those whose talents we admire “knew their own force only by the event” (vol. iii, 139). One of the Rambler’s correspondents later tries to explain his failure to dazzle all kinds of company with his wit by likening the minds of unresponsive conversation partners to non-​reactive chemicals: “as some bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance, there are minds upon which the rays of fancy may be pointed without effect, and which no fire of sentiment can agitate or exalt” (vol. v, 156). Johnson here invokes the anti-​essentialist, “relational” ontology that Helen Thompson identifies in the corpuscular chemistry of Boyle and Newton. Apparently internal moral qualities such as intellectual aptitude and wit, like physical ones, do not come from within but are “elicited from bodies by relations to other bodies”—​including the human bodies that perceive them—​through “extramechanical” forces of attraction.43 Johnson’s insistence on the constant, tireless activity of the passions also constitutes a significant departure from Locke’s mechanical philosophy of mind. In his famous, much-​revised chapter “Of Power” in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke had argued that most people are content with the succession of “moderate mean Pleasures” they enjoy in this life and are thus generally unmoved by the prospect of more durable ones in the next: “a moderate portion of good serves at present to content Men; and some few degrees of Pleasure in a succession of ordinary Enjoyments make up a happiness, wherein they can be satisfied.” If this were not so, he argues, our wills would not be so easily determined to the “visibly trifling actions” on which we waste so much of our lives. So preoccupied are we with the “fantastical uneasiness . . . which acquir’d habits by Fashion, Example, and Education have setled in us” and the “irregular desires, which custom has made natural to us” that we forget the “attraction of remoter absent good.”44 For Johnson, however, the power that such “artificial passions” have over us is evidence not of the contentment we derive from moderate pleasures, but of our restless dissatisfaction with the pursuit of mere pleasure, which can never provide sufficient

42  Wimsatt, 103–​4. Wimsatt seems to concede as much a few pages later when he marvels at the way Johnson “galvanizes vitality from the rigidities of Latin abstraction” (108). 43  Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 106, 27. 44  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 261–​2.

514   Joseph Drury employment for the mind. Once the necessities of life have been secured, “something more is necessary to relieve the long intervals of inactivity, and to give those faculties, which cannot lie wholly quiescent, some particular direction” (vol. iii, 264). But the new activities with which we fill up the “vacuities of our being” (vol. iii, 221) do not provide us with additional sources of pleasure, as Locke suggested; on the contrary, Johnson claims that any new object to which we direct our efforts “will be found, when it is once gained, to be only one of the means to some remoter end.” Not so much a sign of our capacity to ignore remote absent goods, then, the artificial wants we cultivate so doggedly betray the mind’s compulsive obsession with them: “the natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope” (vol. iii, 10). Johnson observes that we often neglect present opportunities for enjoyment to pursue a more distant object that promises some greater form of fulfillment. Despite his commitment to vitalism, therefore, Johnson was notably ambivalent about the moral implications of the mind’s active powers. On the one hand, he celebrated our ability to detach our thoughts from the present moment and fix them on past events or schemes of “future felicity” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 9) as unique to human beings and the source of our special capacity for “improvement.” A nest built by a bird acting on instinct alone is made with the same materials in the same way every spring; a ship, by contrast, is “the result of experiments compared with experiments,” and thus grows “by accumulated observations, from less to greater excellence.” Johnson’s point here closely resembles Hume’s claim in his essay “Of Interest” (1754) that “there is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment,” and that this desire is the foundation of all the “passions and pursuits” that lead to the flourishing of industry and commerce and ultimately to the rise of civilized nations.45 But he supplements Hume’s argument with his own emphasis on the importance of the mind’s active powers to ethical action and religious faith. In defense of an orthodox Christian dualism that Hume and Locke appeared to question, he argues that “the soul always exerts her peculiar powers, with greater or lesser force” (vol. iii, 42) even when it is not needed, and that this restless mental activity “was undoubtedly given us as a proof of capacity which our present state is not able to fill, as a preparative for some better mode of existence, which shall furnish employment for the whole soul, and where pleasure shall be adequate to our powers of fruition” (vol. ii, 117).46 To this ability to recall the past and imagine the future we owe our status as perfectible “moral agents” capable of religious instruction. Without memory, he argues, “we should be pushed forward by an invincible fatality, without power or reason for the most part to prefer one thing to another, because we could make no comparison but of objects which might both happen to be present” (vol. iii, 223). Without imagination, likewise, we would not 45 

David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 300–​1. 46  See Nicholas Hudson, “The Active Soul and the Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler,” in Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2014), 244.

Science   515 be able to live according to the “precepts of religion,” since these require that we “make the future predominate over the past,” and impress upon the mind “the value of the reward promised to virtue, and the terrors of the punishment denounced against crimes, as may overbear all the temptations which temporal hope or fear can bring” (vol. iii, 37–​ 8). The experimental fact of the mind’s constant activity was thus for Johnson “a strong proof of the superior and celestial nature of the soul of man” (vol. iii, 222). On the other hand, Johnson was also acutely aware of the circumstances in which the mind’s vital powers could become a burden rather than a blessing. In his Rambler essay on procrastination, for example, he takes the counterintuitive position that our tendency to “delay what we know cannot be finally escaped” results not from a lack of foresight or a disregard for remoter pleasures when there are more immediate ones to be enjoyed, but from our susceptibility to the “seducements of the imagination” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 346), which persuade us that a time in the future will afford us some advantage that we currently lack, that the moment to act is still far off, or that the task we keep putting off has become too difficult to accomplish. In such cases, he suggests, the mental vitality that in other circumstances is responsible for the “progress of life” becomes a perverse will to idleness, or what he calls a “vis inertiae, the mere repugnance to motion” (vol. iv, 347), which human beings share with “brute matter” (vol. ii, 31).47 Elsewhere Johnson borrows chemical terms to evoke other pathologies caused by the active principles of the mind turning in on themselves. One “disease of the mind” (vol. iv, 23) to which “men of vigorous imagination” (vol. iv, 27) are especially prone, he observes, is peevishness, which “wears out happiness by slow corrosion,” and so becomes “the canker of life, that destroys its vigour, and checks its improvements” (vol. iv, 23).48 Such men “please themselves too much with futurities,” making themselves fretful “because those expectations are disappointed, which should never have been formed” (vol. iv, 27). Sorrow, by contrast, he defines as a disorder of the memory. Instead of animating us to “future care or activity” or “repentance of crimes,” sorrow is “that state of mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the future” and “a tormenting and harrassing want of some enjoyment or possession we have lost, and which no endeavours can possibly regain” (vol. iii, 254). Johnson describes this condition as a “putrefaction of stagnant life” and “a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away” (vol. iii, 258). In Johnson’s mental anatomy, procrastination, peevishness, and sorrow are all pathological states in which the active

47  See Hudson, 253–​61; James F. Woodruff, “Johnson’s Idler and the Anatomy of Idleness,” English Studies in Canada 6, no. 1 (1980), 22–​38; and Monika Fludernik, “Spectators, Ramblers and Idlers: The Conflicted Nature of Indolence and the 18th-​Century Tradition of Idling,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28, no. 1 (2017), 140–​9. 48  The word canker had a now largely forgotten chemical meaning in the eighteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that it could mean “a corrosion on the surface of a metal.” Johnson illustrates the intransitive verb to canker ( “to grow corrupt”) with a quotation from Bacon: “Silvering will sully and canker more than gilding; which, if it might be corrected with a little mixture of gold, will be profitable.”

516   Joseph Drury principles of the mind retard or even reverse the progress and improvement to which they give rise in healthy minds. Johnson’s remedy for all such disorders was activity or “employment.” In an essay that seems likely to have been inspired by his reading of the vitalist physician George Cheyne, Johnson observes that the health of the mind no less than the body requires an exercise regimen.49 Experience shows that “the vital powers unexcited by motion, grow gradually languid; and that as their vigour falls, obstructions are generated; and that from obstructions proceed most of those pains which wear us away slowly with periodical tortures” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 83). The idle self-​deceptions that lead to procrastination must therefore be “dissipated by useful employment” (vol. iv, 347–​8). To prevent the peevishness to which the learned and studious are susceptible, Johnson prescribes “active employment,” “publick pleasure,” and “that interchange of thoughts which is practised in free and easy conversation” (vol. iv, 107–​8). As for sorrow, “the safe and general antidote” is “exercise and motion,” which accelerate the natural therapeutic effects of time passing by “quickening the succession, and enlarging the variety of objects” (vol. iii, 255–​6). Though Johnson does not always specify the kind of activity required, he is clear that its purpose is to reclaim the mind’s vital powers for the improvement of life: “our amusements should not terminate wholly in the present, but contribute more or less to future advantage” (vol. iv, 108). Even a “mechanical operation” such as carpentry or embroidery will do, so long as “the vital functions are resuscitated and awakened by vigorous motion” and the mind is diverted from “worse employment,” such as “debauchery,” “envy” or “malice” (vol. iv, 85–​6). But even as he proposes such therapies, Johnson’s insistence that the activities they involve can never satisfy the mind’s desire for fulfillment lends his vitalism a melancholy cast that makes it quite different from Hume’s.50 Although he shared Johnson’s sense of the dangers of idleness, Hume had a much more cheerful view of the benefits of activity. In times when industry and the arts flourish, he claimed, people “enjoy, as their reward, the occupation itself as well as those pleasures which are the fruit of their labour” (Essays, 270). In Johnson’s writing, on the other hand, as Arieh Sachs puts it, “all human activity is seen as a futile attempt to fill an aching inner void.”51 Thus Imlac describes the pyramids at Giza, which he visits with Rasselas, as “a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments.” Even a king with unlimited power and more money than he knows how to spend “is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by 49  See Arieh Sachs, “Samuel Johnson on ‘The Vacuity of Life,’ ” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​ 1900 3, no. 3 (1963), 357n. On Cheyne’s vitalism, see Guerrini, 259–​65. On Cheyne’s friendship with and influence on Hume, see John P. Wright, “Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsey, and Hume’s Letter to a Physician,” Hume Studies 29 (2003), 124–​41. Johnson recommended The English Malady to Boswell, though not without expressing some reservations about Cheyne’s tendency to glamourize melancholy. See Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 26–​7, 87. 50  For Johnson’s tragic worldview, see Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 66. 51  Sachs, 347.

Science   517 seeing thousands labour without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 119). Johnson had a similarly dismal view of the various activities of his own friends and acquaintances. Hester Piozzi recalled that the “vacuity of life” was Johnson’s “favourite hypothesis” and the endpoint of his reasoning on every subject: “such things, therefore, as other philosophers often attribute to various and contradictory causes, appeared to him uniform enough”: the profligacy of the libertine and the gambler, the avarice of the miser, even the grief of the wife for the loss of her husband, “all was done to fill up the time, upon his principle.” The same bleak sense of life’s futility colored Johnson’s account of the activities of Mr. Sober in the Idler, which Piozzi says he “intended as his own portrait.”52 Though Sober’s chief pleasure is “conversation,” there are “vacant hours”—​ at night after his friends have gone to bed and in the morning before the time for visiting has begun—​when he must entertain himself. He has therefore acquired a set of carpenter’s tools which he uses on one occasion to mend his coal-​box and on others to practice, with less success, “the crafts of the shoemaker, tinman, plumber, and potter.” But his favorite amusement is chemistry: “he has a small furnace, which he employs in distillation, and which has long been the solace of his life. He draws oils and waters, and essences and spirits, which he knows to be of no use; sits and counts the drops as they come from his retort, and forgets that, while a drop is falling, a moment flies away” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 97–​8). Johnson’s essays thus offer a bracing alternative to the “affirmative” or “celebratory” vitalism characteristic of other eighteenth-​century philosophers as well as modern philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. In his understanding of “the originality of life as pathos,” Johnson belongs to a counter-​tradition that includes Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Canguilhelm. Rather than celebrating the living organism’s drive to assert itself in relation to some external order, argues Thomas Osborne, these tragic vitalists lament it as “something to which we—​as organisms, as humans—​are condemned as fate.” From their perspective, what defines life is “becoming,” creativity, and experimentation, yes, but also error, illness, redundancy, struggle, and the vulnerability to collapse or catastrophe.53 It seems likely that Johnson’s wry depiction of himself as Mr. Sober helped create the impression that he was an author only marginally and superficially interested in science. Nonetheless, his reflections on Sober’s therapeutic practice also demonstrate that as an exponent of experimental moral philosophy, he was methodologically and conceptually at the forefront of Enlightenment science. Alongside other eighteenth-​century authors, he adapted the Newtonian double method of analysis and synthesis to the study of moral phenomena and created, in the Rambler especially, one of the period’s most powerful, varied, and sustained experimental investigations of human subjectivity. By embracing the ontological assumptions of contemporary vitalist chemistry and physiology, moreover, he

52  53 

Piozzi, vol. i, 251, 178, Thomas Osborne, “Vitalism as Pathos,” Biosemiotics 9 (2016), 186.

518   Joseph Drury made an important contribution to a new anatomical science of the mind that would lay the foundations for modern psychology. Not only was his depiction of the mad astronomer in Rasselas cited in several late eighteenth-​century medical works as a model case study of mental illness, but it also remains a source of fascination and inspiration to psychiatrists today.54 As Jackson Bate argued long ago, Johnson anticipated the “clinical exploration of the unconscious” that followed Freud by revealing that “the mind—​far from being a serene, objective, rational instrument, or . . . a sort of recording machine that works in mechanically happy union with whatever outside experiences press the button—​is something unpredictably alive in its own right,” and as such liable to being painfully at odds with its environment.55 The chemical apparatus that Boswell found in Johnson’s study and that Johnson himself described in his portrait of Mr. Sober was therefore an apt emblem of the scientific project Johnson had undertaken in his essays, signifying both its experimental method and its therapeutic value as a source of comfort for the unquiet mind.

Further Reading Demeter, Tamás. David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Drury, Joseph. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Reill, Peter Hanns. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Schwartz, Richard B. Samuel Johnson and the New Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Wiltshire, John. Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948. Wood, James Robert. Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019.

54 See

John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 179–​80. As recently as 2010, the astronomer’s narrative was excerpted and published in the medical journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (now known as BJPsych Advances). 55  W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 300.

Chapter 28

Phil osoph y Brad Pasanek

What is the character of eighteenth-​century philosophy—​and how does Samuel Johnson’s writing partake of it? The question is complicated by the multiple occupations of the philosopher, a title that in the eighteenth century covers metaphysicians, moralists, and men of science. In organizing this investigation of Johnson’s commitments, therefore, I take a hint from Justin E. H. Smith, who attempts in his recent survey, The Philosopher, to approach the question of philosophy characterologically.1 Philosophers come in kinds and family resemblances are many. Indeed, Smith treats six types, ranging from the miscellaneously minded Curiosus to the well-​placed Courtier. In the following, I likewise look into Johnson’s relationship to philosophy by means of Theophrastan examples, gathering characters under headings and sorting them by filiation. Consulting Smith’s extensive but not comprehensive survey, Johnson is readily identified with the figure named the Sage. Johnson also qualifies as a Gadfly, harassing Humeans and other innovators in philosophy; and he is like Smith’s Curiosus, interested in “chymistry,” Newton’s optics, and the shells and insects collected by the natural historian. Smith’s book is a useful one, but I will soon call in more types and will credit Johnson for improvising several of his own in his periodical essays, including the characters Verecundus, Pertinax, and Hermeticus—​characters that ramify patterns of thought and action. Johnson himself is readily identified with his Rambler (his Idler, too). “Boswell’s Johnson”—​so often depicted in dialogue and dispute—​makes still another character. In fact, Johnson’s characterological way with philosophy was not unrecognized by those contemporaries that would draw his character. Sir John Hawkins remarks that Johnson, in writing for a living, was able to “display his talents in the several characters of a moralist, a philosopher, and a poet.”2 Only, this trio proves pat as Doctor or “Dictionary” 1  Justin E. H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2  Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 10.

520   Brad Pasanek Johnson may also be displayed as a kind of satirical laughing philosopher, a sage Christian humanist, a British empiricist (in the mold of John Locke), a philosophical biographer (like Pierre Bayle), or a natural philosopher. My exercise in collection begins and ends with contextualization, at first recovering Johnson’s reading as an indicator of his philosophical concerns. In conclusion, I seize upon an anecdote, and its perverse, cock-​and-​bull-​Shandean logic leads me to philosophy’s lower limit, into nonsense and laughter. I will engage, before I am done, with a style of philosophizing that Johnson identified as the talking of nonsense—​or more colorfully and euphemistically as the milking of bulls. That I encroach on euphemism owes something to the imperatives of my assignment. In finding something new to say about Johnson and philosophy, I seek “novelty,’ identified by Johnson as philosophy’s characteristic vice.

Laughing Philosophy Not to beg the question but, if Samuel Johnson were a philosopher, what sort would he be? Could he be, like Democritus, a laughing philosopher?3 In fact, in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), it is Democritus who is summoned, his cheerful and instructive analysis required in the satiric effort to “pierce each Scene with Philosophic Eye.” Hester Thrale Piozzi, for one, helps us associate Johnson’s laughter and philosophy: “Johnson used to say ‘that the size of a man’s understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth,’ ” and she corroborates, “his own was never contemptible.”4 In company, it is not always an extensive, philosophic view that is required to puncture the pretensions of certain thinkers or put down a paradoxical line of argument, such as that started by Boswell one evening over dinner at the Mitre, when he contended for the superior happiness of “savage life.” Johnson won’t allow the thesis: It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct. Lord Monboddo, one of your Scotch judges, talked a great deal of such nonsense. I suffered him; but I will not suffer you. Boswell. “But, Sir, does not Rousseau talk such nonsense?” Johnson. “True, Sir; but Rousseau knows he is talking nonsense, and laughs at the world for staring at him.” Boswell. “How so, Sir?” Johnson. “Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense. But I am afraid, (chuckling and laughing,) Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense.” (Life, vol. ii, 73–​4)

3  Howard Weinbrot answers my question with a flat no. See “No ‘Mock Debate’: Questions and Answers in The Vanity of Human Wishes,” in Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 105–​24, 108–​10. 4  G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 344–​5.

Philosophy   521 Laughter lightens scorn. A witty turn of phrase or vehement blast will often do in reply to contemporaries like Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and Lord Monboddo who do little more than talk nonsense. In separating knave (Rousseau) from fool (Monboddo), Boswell’s portrait of Johnson delights and instructs, the taunts and gibes here characterized by a kind of infectious laughter. Rousseau laughs at the world; Johnson laughs at Monboddo. Mock debate results in nonsense; beyond philosophy there is laughter. Reflecting on a day spent with Johnson—​he recorded only “much laughing” as a memorandum—​ Boswell reports that humor is the faculty “which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain” (Life, vol. ii, 378). But my way forward is not to be made only by “talking jestingly,” a phrase used by Johnson in a different mood (or another character) to upbraid Boswell before excoriating Rousseau as “a very bad man,” “a rascal to be hunted out of society,” one to be transported to work in the plantations (Life, vol. ii, 11, 12). Rousseau may laugh at the world, but according to Johnson the entertaining of his nonsense is no laughing matter. “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains,” so claims Rousseau famously in the opening of his Discourse on Inequality. Johnson answers Rousseau with a menace of transportation—​real chains, real slavery. These exchanges drawn from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which Johnson speaks to and against the Enlightenment’s most notorious claims, are typical of the evidence made to feature in accounts of Johnson and philosophy. Boswell serves up the philosopher to be attacked; Johnson fires off a decisive opinion. One of the first anecdotes called to mind in any such study will be Johnson responding with alacrity to Boswell’s questions concerning George Berkeley’s idealism, kicking the stone curb outside a church in Harwich, railing against blockheaded philosophizing: “I refute it thus!” (Life, vol. i, 471). Confronted with radicalized principles of the new philosophy, Johnson is typically dismissive; and his first is apparently a physical, not philosophical, response: a jerked knee, a kicked curb. His way with philosophes and infidels may be especially gruff. Introducing Johnson to Monboddo in Scotland, Boswell worried a violent altercation would result. Still, Johnson’s relationship to eighteenth-​century philosophy is more than the sum of the frustrations and confutations or a vividly negative catalog of outbursts. To be sure, Johnson’s relation to the study of philosophy is complicated: critical of skeptics and idealists, he also admitted to being fond of “Metaphysicks” when a student at Oxford, “but he had not read much” in that way (Life, vol. i, 70). He once fantasized, with Boswell, about teaching logic, metaphysics, and scholastic divinity (Life, vol. v, 109). Upon completing his Dictionary, Johnson projected a new course of study in philosophy, “As an Instrument of Living,” with the intent recorded in his Prayers and Meditations as a prayer asking that God “bless his studies and endeavors”—​but then this planned course of study “was not persued” (Yale Works, vol. i, 58). In this last, does Johnson resemble his Polyphilus, the polymathic character in Rambler 19, who cannot settle down in a line of study, or is he more like Omar, the orientalized figure in Idler 101, who is distracted by circumstance from his plan to study? Johnson’s involvement in the philosophical questions of the period was ongoing and sophisticated, and his opinions, especially as recorded by Boswell, can seem

522   Brad Pasanek contradictory, altered in various contexts, dependent on the present debate. Perhaps the character of Boswell’s Johnson is to be developed—​a verb that appears in Johnson’s and Monboddo’s pertinent discussion of Homer’s heroes. My own sense of Johnson’s character as one developed is meant to diminish felt contradiction by emphasizing the ways that writing in different modes and genres produces new characters. In the case of Monboddo, Johnson’s argument with him in Scotland—​whether the savage or the shopkeeper had the better existence—​suddenly seems speculative if not sophistic when Johnson later abandons his position, admitting, “I don’t know but I might have taken the side of the savage equally, had any body else taken the side of the shopkeeper” (Life, vol. v, 83). Boswell may identify Johnson as a Sage, but he exhibits him as a Gadfly.

Philosophical Pairings and Philosophic Words In writing about Johnson and philosophy, one strategy is to establish Johnson’s alignments with the best-​known philosophers of his time and then compare the characters. Many scholars have written parallel lives, marshaling congruent passages, seeking and detailing unstated affinities. Johnson is readily paired with John Locke (by Jean Hagstrum, Paul Alkon, and Claudia Johnson), David Hume (in studies by Adam Potkay, Leo Damrosch, and Fred Parker), or with Rousseau (Richard Sewall or Mark Temmer).5 The instructive exercise is one in which two men are placed in their shared context, both shown responding to the age. In related studies that contrast Johnson’s moral writing in the age of Enlightenment with the prescriptions of classical Stoicism or Pyrrhonism (Potkay and Parker again, or Jack Lynch), the novelty of eighteenth-​ century thought recedes but the discovery of shared concerns remains (see Chapter 31, “Doubt”).6 Investigating the natural law tradition, Robert Voitle chooses the system of Richard Cumberland, a supposed source of Johnson’s ethical outlook, to throw Johnson’s 5  Jean

H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3–​20; Paul Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 85–​108; Claudia Johnson, “Samuel Johnson’s Moral Psychology and Locke’s ‘Of Power,’ ” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 24, no. 3 (July 1984), 563–​82; Leo Damrosch, Jr., Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Richard B. Sewall, “Dr. Johnson, Rousseau, and Reform,” in F. W. Hilles, ed., The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), 307–​17; and Mark Temmer, Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels: Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 13–​76. 6  Gwin Kolb, “The Use of Stoical Doctrines in Rasselas, Chapter XVIII,” MLN 68, no. 7 (November 1953), 439–​47; Fred Parker, “The Skepticism of Johnson’s Rasselas,” in Greg Clingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127–​42; Jack Lynch, “Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever,” Eighteenth-​Century Life 29, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 1–​19.

Philosophy   523 own thinking into relief.7 Many of these Johnsonian juxtapositions work by bringing supposed antagonists near while still holding them apart for inspection. For example, Johnson is found by Potkay to be like Hume in showing a commitment to skepticism and in sharing a psychologized account of belief, but he is opposed to le bon David in his final faithfulness. This analysis is informative and edifying as contrast helps isolate characteristics in Johnson. In comparing Johnson’s writing with that of contemporary divines, a way is opened to follow Nicholas Hudson or Michael Suarez and consider Johnson’s endorsements of theological thinkers.8 In this vein, new studies are readily formulated: variations multiply the antagonists, revising the record, casting Johnson as the foil for the Enlightenment or natural philosophers9—​for example, a monograph that pairs Johnson and James Beattie, who had planned to accompany Johnson and Boswell on their tour of Scotland, remains to be written. Contrastive strategies work as incisively in Johnson as with him. In his periodical essays, Johnson will often set up a counterpoint by attributing it to “some” or some “modern philosophers.” In a few cases, these unnamed thinkers are readily enough footnoted. It is most likely Bernard Mandeville who is, in Idler 4, chief among those “reasoners” who believes compassion “an affection merely selfish” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 13); and “the great philosopher of France” who directs his student “to begin by doubting his own existence” is obviously René Descartes (vol. iii, 235). Throughout the Rambler and Idler, a close reader will also find mentions of seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century philosophers. He cites Francis Bacon, for example, in Rambler 14, recommends Locke’s “System of Education” in Rambler 85, and animadverts upon Nicolas Malebranche, Descartes, and Berkeley in Idler 10. The philosophers Locke and Malebranche—​a kind of odd couple—​are paired in Idler 24, where Locke’s question “whether the soul always thinks” briefly features, and then are paired again in Idler 66. Yet for all the affiliations to and mentions assembled above, it should be remembered that the majority of Johnson’s references are neoclassical or pointed to Renaissance humanists.10 In form, like a character, a lexicon (or this Handbook entry) proves a device for collecting examples of a kind.11 Thus “Dictionary” Johnson’s heroic reading has been 7 Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson, the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 61–​76. 8   Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michael F. Suarez, S.J., “Johnson’s Christian Thought,” in Clingham, ed., Cambridge Companion, 192–​208. 9  Robert Shackleton, “Johnson and the Enlightenment,” in Mary M. Lascelles, James L. Clifford, J. F. Fleeman, and John P. Hardy, eds., Johnson, Boswell, and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell, in Honour of His Eighty-​Fourth Birthday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 76–​92; Fred Parker, “Philosophy,” in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 286–​93; Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). 10  I rely on counts made by the editors of the Rambler (Yale Works, vol. iii, p. xxxii). 11  This formalist understanding of character is defended in Aaron Kunin’s brilliant study, Character as Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

524   Brad Pasanek approximated by the illustrative quotations informing his definitions. William Wimsatt counted over 10,000 quotations from “philosophic” authors (his use of the adjective here covers moral, experimental, and metaphysical pursuits) in the first volume of the Dictionary alone.12 Favored sources include Sir Francis Bacon, George Cheyne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Joseph Glanvill, Richard Hooker, Locke, Henry More, John Ray, Robert South, and Isaac Watts. The compilation indicates a somewhat miscellaneous if latitudinarian middle way with the religious and philosophical controversies of the seventeenth century, mixing empiricist natural philosophers and more rationalist natural lawyers, finding room also for the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. As a set, these may be classed early Enlightenment and anti-​dogmatic thinkers who care about plain language and ordinary experience, many of them advocating religious toleration. The complete character is devout. Hobbes is conspicuously absent, and Johnson has taken care in excluding Deists and Arians.13 If the reading is largely empiricist in its epistemology (these are thinkers readily identified with what John Yolton has called “the way of ideas”), it is also rationalist in its emphasis on physico-​theology and pneumatology. The practice of selective quotation can have unintended effects, causing the divine to “desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system” (Yale Works, vol. xviii, 94). But if Johnson did want to revisit a philosopher’s system, ready to hand were the volumes in his own library.14 Here classical writers are well represented: Aristotle, Cicero, Iamblicus, Lucretius, Diogenes and Epictetus, Plato, and Seneca the Younger. Johnson owned both the works of Aristotle and those moderns who challenged Aristotelian scholasticism, René Descartes and John Locke. The so-​called British moralists are cataloged, including Bishop Butler and Ralph Cudworth. Commentary insulated Johnson from some of the philosophers he did not readily countenance so that he could read Bramhall on Hobbes, Gassendi on Descartes, John Brown on Shaftesbury, and James Beattie on Hume. To be reminded of a range of philosophical positions, Johnson might have referred to the fourth edition of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1748) or his second, enlarged edition of Pierre Bayle’s biographical Dictionnaire (1702). His projected but never completed comparison of philosophical and Christian morality—​to be illustrated with sentences drawn from influential moralists and church fathers—​can also be imagined by consulting book lists. The philosophers listed above might be paired with Ambrose, Anselm, Aquinas, St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, Clement of Alexandria, St. Jerome, and St. Justinus. When Johnson specified a preparatory course of study in his preface to Robert Dodsley’s Preceptor (1748), he pointed the way for the schoolboy mind that would “conform itself to scholastic Modes of Reasoning” by finding a middle way between

12 William K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 34. 13  Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–​1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34. 14  Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Library: An Annotated Guide (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 1975).

Philosophy   525 “the Grossness of vulgar Conception” and “Metaphysical Exactness.”15 The student is brought through an incomplete circle of knowledge in these two volumes, one that departs from reading and writing to end with commerce and government, and is along the way instructed in what is called “philosophy”—​that is, logic and ethics. This curriculum in right reasoning and right acting bulks large in the second volume of the textbook, but in the preface Johnson gives us an indication of further study, making telling recommendations. The student of logic will follow up with Locke and Watts, while the student interested in morality will find supplementary material in Cicero’s Offices, Grotius and Pufendorf, Cumberland’s Laws of Nature, and Joseph Addison’s essays. Johnson plays to type in offering a devout sentiment: “Virtue may owe her Panegyrics to Morality, but must derive her Authority from Religion” (Preceptor, vol. i, p. xxviii). The Preceptor itself returns to moral concerns in its final pages, ratifying the sentiment, but at the conclusion of the preface we glimpse only that mysterious character of print culture, the Editor.

The Characters of Philosophy There is not space to itemize, from Aristotle to Zeno, the philosophers Johnson read, but then again there is no need. Superintending his mentions are a great number of philosophical characters. And, again, a character is a device that collects every example of a kind.16 Thus, the cool character of the Rambler is one who has “studied the severest and most abstracted philosophy,” and is therefore a most generalized and abstracted of characters, the neutral or type of types who collects other characters (Rambler 18, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 99). Perhaps “Boswell’s Johnson” is another character to evince, one belonging to a higher biographical category. Still more superordinate studies will compass Johnson’s Circle or the character system that is the Age of Johnson. Some of the characters Johnson draws, like Ned Drugget or Jack Whirler, are labeled “philosopher” ironically, but a substantial number are philosophers properly understood and are made to feature in moral sketches—​even unhappy marriage plots. The philosopher Melissus in Rambler 18 marries a wife he expects to be “an associate in his studies, and an assistant to his virtues,” only to find her an unsuitable, because dissipated, companion when he takes her from her village retirement and brings her to town (Yale Works, vol. iii, 102). The deep-​read Misothea in Rambler 113 is an eminent she-​philosopher who treats “every argument with contempt that could not be reduced to regular syllogism.” Locked in disputation with this scholar, her husband to be, Hymenaeus, is overmatched until he discovers her to be a fatalist who would “demonstrate the folly of attributing choice and self-​direction to any human being” (vol. iv, 403).

15 

The Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education, 2 vols. (London, 1748), vol. i, p. xv.

16 Kunin, Character as Form, 7. See also Schwartz, New Science, 109.

526   Brad Pasanek Her denial of free will provides the vexed suitor an excuse to break off the engagement, as he is afraid of a wife who might fall back on determinism as an excuse for infidelity. Perhaps Hymenaeus could talk to Hermeticus, who appears in Rambler 199. One of “the present race of philosophers” interested in electricity and magnetism, he uses magnets to repel faithless women (vol. v, 272). Most of these philosophical characters are faulty, figures of fun—​ making not Plato’s but Aristophanes’s sketch of Socrates the more pertinent underlying archetype. Several of them are social failures. Nugaculus’s study of human nature soon turns to mere gossip-​mongering until he has become hated and feared, “a general master of secret history” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 188). The scholar Verecundulus—​loaded with laurels and “fraught with criticism and philosophy”—​is alienated in company (vol. v, 72). He appears timid and imbecilic in front of his audience, the study of philosophy having in no way fortified him against mockery and the felt shame that informs his Latinate name. In a similar vein, after the scholar Gelasimus in Rambler 179 has trouble joining in conversation, he resolves, unsuccessfully, to take on the character of the wit. More characters crowd in. Nigrinus in Rambler 10 is a sophist or casuist, who strengthens dubious claims in the cause of minute philosophy. Polyphilus, already introduced, is the pedant and brilliant but restless virtuoso who cannot settle on a profession. Gelidus in Rambler 24, is so invested in his researches that he fails to connect morally and humanely with his family and friends. Pertinax, introduced in Rambler 95, is a sophistic logician, who perversely takes the false side of any controversy in school. Ever willing to argue for and against (Newton or Descartes, Ptolemy or Copernicus, what have you), he ultimately finds his skeptical exertions have left his ideas confused and his “intellects distorted” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 147). In his representative aporia, Pertinax is one of two creatures of “equipoise” in Johnson’s periodical essays. Sim Scruple in Idler 83, is another skeptic or Pyrrhonist who converses on prejudice, the narrowness of the mind, and the error of our senses. Like Pertinax, he lives in “a continual equipoise of doubt.”17 If we carry this characterological interest from the periodical essays to Rasselas, we may recruit at least five more types for our taxonomy and arrange them in a sequence of injury, grief, inanity, senescence, and madness. The first figure is the failed inventor of a flying apparatus based on the structure of bat wings. Denominated in the passage a “workman” or “artist,” he imagines himself a philosopher “furnished with wings, and hovering in the sky,” surveying the countries below—​China, Peru?—​as the earth rolls beneath him (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 26). The second of these characters is a “sage” or “philosopher” that Rasselas pursues into his home, only to find him grieving for his daughter and inconsolable, the episode a demonstration of the distance between precept and experience. The third, another sagacious figure, is introduced among a crowd of voluble controvertists. Where the second shows the emptiness of “polished periods” and betrays Johnson’s style, the third gathers and insults a number of eighteenth-​century

17 

See Parker, Scepticism and Literature, 9, 233–​4, and Lynch, “Unbeliever,” 11–​12.

Philosophy   527 thinkers—​including Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau—​who would have men live free of precept and according to nature (vol. xvi, 76). This latter proves “one of the sages” whom one “should understand less” as one hears him longer (vol. xvi, 88). The fourth is a world-​weary man who speaks something like the dark truth of the Rambler or Idler. In retrospect are this wise man’s regrets, “opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy”; at present, he is still plagued by hopes and cares, “which, though reason knows them to be vain, still try to keep their old possession of the heart” (vol. xvi, 156). His only prospect is death. Finally, the famous mad astronomer, the fifth in the quintet and the most developed, is led into his affliction by his own contemplations but recovered by the attentions of Pekuah.

Anti-​P hilosophy Given his talent for caricature, it is tempting to deny that Johnson is a philosopher and bracket him as an anti-​type. (I’m not a philosopher, but I play one on TV.) A more irreverent case has been made that we take Johnson too seriously when we read him for philosophical insight. Murray Pittock, in looking into competing accounts of Johnson’s life and character, identifies several philosophical scenes in Boswell’s Life and reminds us that they were remembered otherwise—​as episodes of rudeness—​in the accounts of Mrs. Thrale or Thomas Campbell.18 Similarly, Johnson’s first major biographer, Sir John Hawkins, warns that the greediness with which Johnson ate “shewed him more a sensualist than a philosopher” (Hawkins, Life, 354). In these accounts that rival Boswell’s biography, the focus is on Johnson’s embodiment. His interest in Locke’s or Cheyne’s regimens and diets notwithstanding, Johnson is no ascetic. He appears less Democritus than Diogenes. Bennet Langton’s first impression of Johnson is exemplary: like many on first meeting the man, he expected a “decorous philosopher,” and was therefore surprised at the “uncouth figure” that greeted him (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 247). William Hogarth, Mrs. Porter, and other memoirists confirm Langton’s experience of author and person at odds. The mismatch suits even those commentators who depict Johnson as a kind of English Socrates, an ugly but sage, upsetting but truth-​speaking buffoon. Johnson, too, recognized a gap between word and action in himself but gave the disparity a moral turn. Hawkins, visiting Johnson, found him suffering from dropsy and gripped with horror by the prospect of his own death. Surprised that Johnson’s characteristic piety seemed to have deserted him, Hawkins questioned his friend, who explained “that he had written as a philosopher, but had not lived like one” (Hawkins, Life, 563). Beware the teachers of morality, Imlac warns Rasselas, because “they discourse like angels, but they live like men” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 74).

18 

Murray Pittock, “Boswell and the Making of Johnson,” in J. C. D. Clark and Howard Erskine-​Hill, eds., The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 72–​83, 78.

528   Brad Pasanek Insofar as Johnson belittles philosophical discipline, he acts in the character of an anti-​philosopher. Idler 41, written one week after the death of Johnson’s mother, is often quoted as an epitome of resignation: “Philosophy may infuse stubbornness, but religion only can give patience” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 231). Epicurus and Zeno are both mentioned earlier in the essay: the first may “silence but not content us,” the second “may dispose us to conceal our sorrow, but cannot assuage it” (vol. ii, 231). Is philosophy good for nothing else? Comparing artisans and manufacturers with scholars and theorists, Mr. Rambler entertains the self-​abnegating conjecture that “the publick would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade” (vol. v, 8). Diametric to this exile of the philosophers is Plato’s famous way with the poets in his Republic, in light of which I recollect Johnson’s fantasy of having Rousseau transported. In one aside, Johnson complains of the “bigot of philosophy,” a type, one who is entangled in his own hypotheses and systems and “undertakes to talk on subjects, which nature did not form him able to comprehend” (Idler 10, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 33). These bigots include Cartesians who assert that animals are hydraulic machines that do not feel pain, and the follower of Berkeley who sits writing at his table but denies the substantiality of his table and paper, even his own fingers. Such scholars are faulted with errancy, “wandering after the meteors of philosophy” when they should fix upon “moral and religious truth” (Rambler 180, in Yale Works, vol. v, 186). Seeking after novelty, talking for victory, given over to “extravagance” and sapientia insaniens, they don’t know when to quit (vol. iii, 30). For all Johnson’s disparagement of philosophy, he shows himself to be the better student of Zeno when on his Highlands tour with Boswell by braving cold, food, and bedbugs without complaint. Forced to spend an especially bad night in a hovel in Glenelg, Boswell is unhappy and fretful, but Johnson remains calm. Boswell, as if to pique his companion, asserts that Johnson’s composure is owing to vanity. Johnson returns, “No, Sir, it is from philosophy” (Life, vol. v, 146). Reviewing the night, Boswell collapses his characterization of Johnson with his author function and is pleased that “the Rambler could practice so well his own lessons” (vol. v, 146). The moral is ambiguous when we recall Johnson’s impatience with Stoicism in other contexts. Could Johnson’s composure nevertheless be the result of vanity, a performance?—​or is it genuine in its stubborn concealing of sorrow? Is there a meaningful difference for the Boswellian, ever staging scenes and goading his characters, or, for that matter, for the reader of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, who likewise understands self-​command in terms of theatricality?

Johnson Is (Not) a Philosopher If the rebuttals, negations, and caricatures discussed thus far seem to oppose Johnson to the work of philosophy, it should be remembered that placing limits on human

Philosophy   529 knowledge, from Locke and Immanuel Kant on to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, is a project of philosophy itself. One reading of Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil shows Johnson armed against dogmatic metaphysics, like Kant, making room for faith. Johnson’s summary judgment is that the author “decides too easily upon questions out of reach of human determination” (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 397). And in this handling of Jenyns, Johnson might also sound like Locke, asking for determined and determinate conceptions and complaining of the imposition of “words for ideas” (vol. xvii, 418). While Johnson detects something callow in newfangled, modern philosophy, he remains sympathetic with earlier figures of Enlightenment (with Bacon and Locke).19 And although Samuel Johnson is not readily associated with eighteenth-​century French thought, he was also interested in many of the preceding century’s thinkers, including Blaise Pascal, Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux, and Pierre Bayle.20 Stationed among the new bigots of philosophy, he grumpily hearkens back to the earlier generation. When he sees Rousseau and like philosophers dealing in “paradoxes,” he charges them with “a childish desire for novelty,” and in a takes-​one-​to-​know-​one moment he admits, “When I was a boy, I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it” (Life, vol. i, 441). The infidelity of Hume he has thought up, through, and past: “Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote” (vol. i, 444). In these much-​quoted passages, philosophy is associated with a refractory youth. Johnson’s relationship to philosophy is readily fitted to a story of maturation or the story of Enlightenment as such, that is (in Kant’s formula) the emergence from self-​incurred minority or nonage.21 We might retrench and follow the opinion of contemporary scholars of Johnson by stipulating that although Johnson is not a systematic philosopher, he is still much immersed in the empiricist thinking of the period.22 Or we might allow, with Leo Damrosch, that “Johnson is a moralist, not a philosopher.”23 In place of “abstract reason” and argument, Johnson offers the balanced syntax of the humanist periodic sentence; he provides “poetry, rather than proof.”24 Where Bertrand Bronson suggests “philosophy was too narrow a room for his humanity,” Macaulay inverts our subject’s scope, frowning at Johnson’s London-​centric perspective on human nature and juxtaposing an image of the clubman snug in his room, pent within the city’s limits: “his philosophy

19 

Shackleton, “Johnson and the Enlightenment,” 92.

20 Temmer, Three Infidels, 9. 21  Kant,

“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarüng?” in Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1910), vol. viii, 35. 22  Parker, “Philosophy,” 286. 23 Damrosch, Fictions of Reality, 23. 24  Philip Davis, “Johnson: Sanity and Syntax,” in Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, eds., Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 52; Basil Willey, English Moralists (London: Chatto & Windus 1964), 177.

530   Brad Pasanek stopped at the first turnpike-​gate.”25 Others would remove Johnson to a neighboring discipline. The British metaphysician Samuel Alexander describes him “rather the wise man or sage than the philosopher,” while Johnson’s acquaintance Arthur Murphy labels him a “philosophical critic.”26 Fields of study were expansively conceived in the period; and whether more moralist or Aufklärer, many of Johnson’s contemporaries believed him a philosopher. Attestations are readily produced from Boswell, who hopes before their tour of Scotland that Johnson will descend “from his elevated state of philosophical dignity” and join him as a traveling companion (Life, vol. v, 14). Hester Thrale Piozzi several times figures him, with a kind pert irony, as “our philosopher” in her Anecdotes, summing up his peculiar system in his insistence on the vacuity of life; so that “all was done to fill up the time” (Miscellanies, vol. i, 251). Oliver Edwards, Johnson’s contemporary at Pembroke College, assures us of Johnson’s bona fides by offering himself as a contrasting example: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in” (Life, vol. iii, 305). Subsequent qualifications follow and are readily assembled. Walter Jackson Bate nominates Johnson “a Christian and a very English Socrates.”27 He is, for other commentators, a Cicero or Seneca; and he is by still others, much to Donald Greene’s consternation, designated a Christian Stoic.28

Natural Philosophy Johnson, in the character of Mr. Rambler, praises Socrates for drawing wits from the “vain persuit of natural philosophy to moral inquiries,” distinguishing fact and value, cleaving is from ought (Yale Works, vol. iii, 132). The dichotomy—​an eighteenth-​century distinction now associated with Hume—​registers also in Johnson’s definition of philosopher as “A man deep in knowledge, either moral or natural,” with precedence given to the moral branch of knowledge not the natural (see Chapter 27, “Science”). Robert Voitle, for one, finds the distinction defining of Johnson’s outlook; he is a rationalist in his moral philosophy but an empiricist in epistemology.29 The rationalism in this scheme is residual; the Lockean way of ideas, emergent.

25 Bertrand

Harris Bronson, Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), 8; The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London: Longmans, 1875), 533. 26  Samuel Alexander, “Dr. Johnson as a Philosopher,” in Philosophical and Literary Pieces (London: Macmillan, 1939); Murphy, Essay, 160, 167. 27  Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 59. 28  Donald Greene, “Johnson, Stoicism, and the Good Life,” in John J. Burke and Donald Kay, eds., The Unknown Samuel Johnson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 18–​9. 29 Voitle, Samuel Johnson, 12.

Philosophy   531 In Cosmopolis, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin imagines a counterfactual history of modernity, one that originates with Montaigne and not Descartes and privileges an anti-​ foundationalist, counter-​Enlightenment canon.30 One might think to install Johnson in place of Boyle and Newton in this revisionist narrative, except it is a mistake to oppose Johnson and the experimentalists, many of whom he regarded highly. Richard Schwartz calls these thinkers “scientific philosophers” and situates Johnson among them as one well versed in the new philosophy and its terminology. Johnson, of course, compiled a biography of Boerhaave in 1739 and took a lifelong interest in chemistry, sketching in the character of Sober (Idler 31) a kind of self-​portrait of the chemist among his apparatus of furnaces, retorts, and pumps.31 In fact, if Johnson’s idea of the philosopher is defined more by the moral than natural sciences, turnabout comes under the head of philosophy, the discipline, which is defined as “Knowledge natural or moral.” Arthur Murphy’s initial impression of Johnson, covered in soot, experimenting with aether, catches him this new character.32 His philosophical hobbies, which fill up the vacant hours in which he is alone, keep him occupied in the garret above his apartments in the Inner Temple or in Streatham, where the Thrales installed a laboratory in 1771. Experiment keeps vacuity at bay and may prevent Johnson from pursuing lines of thought that end in self-​harm or madness. Nevertheless, “modern philosophers” disclose universal vacuity in teaching “that not only the great globes are thinly scatter’d through the universe, but the hardest bodies are porous” and, if compressed “to perfect solidity,” all existing matter might be “contained in a cube of a few feet.” Connecting fact and value through analogy, Johnson draws his moral thus: “In like manner, if all employment of life were crowded into the time which it really occupied, perhaps a few days, or hours, would be sufficient for its accomplishment” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 41). I would enlist Boyle’s air pump as an emblematic apparatus in this context. Writing to Boswell, Johnson revisits his recurrent theme of vacuity. He warns, talking as much to himself as to Boswell, that by keeping busy one may avoid habitual gloom: “Whatever philosophy may determine of material nature, it is certainly true of intellectual nature, that it abhors a vacuum: our minds cannot be empty; and evil will break in upon them if they are not pre-​occupied by good” (June 20, 1771, in Letters, vol. i, 363). Less obviously, I might reference a passage in Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns that imagines several cruel higher beings delighting in operating an asthmatic philosopher like an air pump and swelling a man up like a tympany bladder. The pump, its chamber evacuated or overcharged, proves a ready image of philosophical vanity, one that Johnson may borrow from Jonathan Swift’s satire of the Aeolists in the Tale of a Tub.

30 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 31 Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 160; and Schwartz, New Science, 47. 32  The character is, in fact, Lungs, from Ben Jonson’s Alchemist. See Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 306–​7.

532   Brad Pasanek Natural philosophy supplies Johnson with metaphors, but its distractions cannot prepare him for death, since “the whole of life is but keeping away thoughts of it’ (Life, vol. ii, 93). If Johnson studies to escape himself—​as Sir Joshua Reynolds would have it—​that indicates that the Socratic ideal of self-​knowledge does not belong to Johnson’s tenets. As if to provide a case in point, he composed a hexameter poem in Latin, titled with the Delphic injunction to know thyself, “ΓNΩΘI ΣEAYTON” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 271–​2). Having completed his revision of the fourth edition of the Dictionary he is restored to idleness, filled with care, full of fear and “the bad dreams of an empty mind” (vacuae mala somnia mentis). A few lines later in the poem, he looks inward upon a desolate mental landscape and sees only empty visions, fleeing shadows, and thin forms (vanae species, fugaces umbrae, and rarae figurae). The first of these three phrases is likely drawn from the opening of Ars Poetica (lines 7–​8), which mentions the empty shapes or semblances that haunt a sick man’s dreams; the second and third recall those images of things in book 4 of Lucretius’s De Rerum natura (line 32) that float through the air (volitant per auras) like shades escaped across the Acheron and terrify us when we would sleep (lines 37–​8, compare Johnson’s line 51). If Hume’s skepticism woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, its effects on Johnson seem more insomniac. And whereas Hume can never catch himself in introspection, Johnson turns inward and glimpses something like the self ’s volatile selves: shades and characters.33 Johnson’s sleeplessness has famously been connected with his fear of reason’s desertion “at the brink of the grave” (Idler 41, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 130). His thought struggles to avoid the rift between faith and knowledge, the void and hell. Walter Jackson Bate, like Arthur Murphy, reads the Latin poem as very personal, and Bate further associates Johnson’s fear of death and his fear of insanity with chemical experiment (identifying the loss of self with what Johnson once described as “a fall into annihilation”).34 Alternatively, Kenneth Reckford identifies the scene painted in the poem with the pagan underworld, connecting “Johnson’s two deepest fears: of being sent to Hell, or falling into nothingness.”35 I understand the Latin poem as confessional but ironized, stuffed more with classical allusion than with personal insight. Johnson’s picture of idleness is paradoxically full of empty shapes. The Latin vanus and vacuus (adjectives meaning empty) and inane (a technical Lucretian term for the void in which atoms swerve) signify in allusions that activate Johnson’s secret horror of vacuity and show him coping by means of translation and imitation. Even Johnson’s vacuae mentis, or “empty mind,” can be traced. It belongs to Ovid’s Heroides XV, Phaon to Sappho—​a phrase Alexander Pope translates, with marked difference, as “peaceful mind.”

33  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. i, 165. 34 Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 447–​ 8; also Bate, Achievement, 160–​3. 35  Kenneth Reckford, “Horace through Johnson (I): The Skye Odes,” Arion 18, no. 3 (Winter 2011), 47–​82, 73.

Philosophy   533

Milking the Bull The eighteenth century is credited with bringing philosophy down from on high to inhabit among men, making rational critical debate a new feature of clubs and coffee houses. In the last Rambler, no. 208, Johnson sums up his own purpose in putting hard words before common readers: “I have familiarized the terms of philosophy by applying them to popular ideas” (Yale Works, vol. v, 319). Johnson often lowers philosophy still further, and in one telling moment he even jokes about writing a book of cookery on philosophical principles (Life, vol. iii, 285). My concluding anecdote, which sets us not in the coffeehouse but on the farm, is another pungent statement of Johnson’s relationship to philosophical thinking and will serve in further lowering the tone: Hume, and the other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. (Life, vol. i, 444)36

I find this jest reminiscent of the jokes of Hierocles that Johnson translated for the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1741 (Yale Works, vol. xx, 59–​62). In fact, the wit is not original to him, and the topos of the milked bull (sometimes a milked billy goat) is available in Erasmus, Hudibras, Addison’s Spectator, and classical sources.37 One such source is Lucian’s Demonax, in which two philosophers are described holding a pointless debate. The eponymous Demonax asks, “Doesn’t it seem to you, friends, that one of these fellows is milking a he-​goat and the other is holding a sieve for him!”38 The eighteenth-​ century version in Spectator 138, which may or may not have been closer to Johnson’s hand, converts the billy goat to a ram and the sieve to a pail. On a first reading, the anecdote reduces to insult, but Johnson’s terms—​which stand out against his sources—​also recall the Bible on “philosophy and vain deceit.”39 Of significance is the ad hominem naming of names: Hume is chief among the “sceptical innovators,” a profession named in oxymoronic periphrasis, skeptical and innovative, dull in a new way, and plural, moreover, as if the project of bull-​milking requires several freethinkers or minute philosophers. The restless and vain pursuit of further food for thought is by now familiar, but the specific grotesquerie of the milked bull may signal

36  In

Boswell’s London Journal, Johnson’s language is less epigrammatic. See London Journal, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York, London, Toronto: McGraw-​Hill, 1950), 317. Observed by Pittock, “Making,” 79. 37  Edgar Wind, “Milking the Bull and the He-​Goat,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943), 225. 38  Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), vol. i, 159. 39  Colossians 2:8.

534   Brad Pasanek a darkening of Johnson’s mood, with the sharper sarcasm and impatience that Boswell records validating Nicholas Hudson’s characterization of a change in tone in Johnson’s writing in the late 1750s and early 1760s.40

A Pint of Bull Milk Certainly there is a barnyard element in the way Johnson has come down to us. Often rough and crass, Johnson’s can be a bow-​wow way of philosophizing, bearish or bullish by turns. After a night of debate, to take one example, Boswell tropes Johnson explicitly as a raging bull, maintaining that he “tossed and gored several persons” (Life, vol. ii, 66). Johnson’s dismissal of Rousseauian celebrations of natural life comes next to mind—​“If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim—​‘Here I am with this cow and this grass, what being can enjoy greater felicity’ ” (Life, vol. ii, 228). The line is notable for its absurd picture of bovinity, but perhaps also in its anticipation of an equally famous line from Wittgenstein: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”41 I represent Johnson in this last character as one part ordinary-​language philosopher and one part insult comic. Wittgenstein did once propose writing a work of philosophy consisting entirely of jokes, and the Hieroclean jests in the Gentleman’s Magazine are both funny and philosophical: one of the philosophers stands before a mirror with his eyes closed to see how handsome he is when asleep and another, who meets a man who has buried his twin brother, asks him “whether it was he or his brother that was lately buried” (Yale Works, vol. xx, 61). I, too, appreciate a good punchline, and so conclude by letting the natural philosopher, our Curiosus, have the last word—​rather the last laugh. As Johnson teaches, “experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth” (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 454), and in researching Johnson’s quip and its sources, I discovered an eighteenth-​century account of a bull milked—​in the Philosophical Transactions, of course. The “most rare” milkable bull in question, a so-​called “free-​ martin,” features near the close of a discussion of sex anatomy, written by Sir Everhard Home, a student of John Hunter and Fellow of the Royal Society. His pamphlet, which neither Johnson nor Boswell could have read, was reprinted in 1799 and is titled An Account of the Dissection of a Hermaphrodite Dog. The intersexed animal in question, we are told, partakes “so much of the bull as to have male organs capable of propagating the species, and an udder capable of secreting milk.”42 Home—​the name is too close to “Hume” for comfort—​verifies the existence of a particular bull procured in Grodno,

40  Hudson, “The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler,” in Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (2014), 241–​61. 41  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 190. 42  Everhard Home, An Account of the Dissection of an Hermaphrodite Dog (London, 1799), 17.

Philosophy   535 Poland, in the year 1796, which was brought to St. Petersburg, where two doctors—​a Rogerson and a Rogers—​“had opportunities of examining it with a considerable degree of accuracy” (17). Rogers and Rogerson! A friend who read an early draft of this chapter scoffed, “Those are not real doctors!” But Home gives all the measures, as a man of science must. This bull was milked, although not plentifully, at one time producing an ounce, at another a “tea-​cupful.” And in point of fact, a Mr. Brookes, who originally purchased the bull (a proud owner), avers, “he once saw an English pint milked at one time” (18). The import twists first Scriblerian, then Shandean. Somehow I am to remain straight-​faced in delivering the news. I will not let cheerfulness break in. It is only philosophy that can keep me sober and grim, shoulder to shoulder with Doctors Rogers and Rogerson, working this chapter to its happy ending.

Further Reading Alkon, Paul K. Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Hudson, Nicholas. Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Parker, Fred. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Parker, Fred. “Philosophy.” In Samuel Johnson in Context, edited by Jack Lynch, 286–​93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Potkay, Adam. The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Smith, Justin E. H. The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Wind, Edgar. “Milking the Bull and the He-​Goat.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 225.

Chapter 29

Sufferi ng Adam Rounce

It will be recalled that Rasselas, at the start of his circular and unresolved journey, already has a sense of suffering as an inherent part of the peculiar burden of humanity: I fear pain when I do not feel it; I sometimes shrink at evils recollected, and sometimes start at evils anticipated: surely the equity of providence has ballanced peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments.

The degree of certainty of the last claim has taxed innumerable minds, not least that of Rasselas’s earthly author, but the prince’s ruminations are not as heartfelt as they seem: With observations like these the prince amused himself as he returned, uttering them with a plaintive voice, yet with a look that discovered him to feel some complacence in his own perspicacity, and to receive some solace of the miseries of life, from consciousness of the delicacy with which he felt, and the eloquence with which he bewailed them. (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 14)

Rasselas’s sympathy with the suffering of the world is undermined through his self-​ conscious enjoyment of his own melancholy; he is complacent (in the modern sense) because he is viewing such sufferings at a distance—​at this point in the narrative he has not witnessed any in the world outside, merely being warned of them by the authorities of the Happy Valley as further evidence of the superiority of their guarded realm (another protective measure to keep its inhabitants within). Such complacency is partly Johnson’s portrait of Rasselas the affected and slightly pretentious young man, but the wider idea resonates throughout Johnson’s writing and thought: human suffering may well be inevitable, but there will always

Suffering   537 be those who view it only in the abstract, fail (deliberately or otherwise) to understand its practical evils and results, or use it, calculatingly but erroneously, as part of a wider supposed justification of the workings of the Deity. Such figures are regularly questioned or shamed in Johnson’s writings, showing his empathetic understanding of the prosaic and miserable nature of real, rather than imagined, suffering, and his dislike of delusional or lazy thought when it failed to ameliorate existence, or to accept its own limitations. There are two main strands to the definition of suffer in the OED: “I. To undergo, endure. II. To tolerate, allow.” These are a modification of Johnson’s more diffuse description in 1755:

1. 2. 3. 4.

To bear; to undergo; to feel with sense of pain. To endure; to support; not to sink under. To allow; to permit; not to hinder. To pass through; to be affected by.

To endure and to tolerate are akin, of course, though “allow” shifts the focus a little. These definitions reflect the usage in Johnson’s contemporaneous writings (and anticipate those to come over the next three decades) in that the potential for suffering, and the wrongs and injustices that are almost inevitably bound up with it, are ever-​ present, and require endurance from any rational being. Moreover, having to allow and tolerate it are a concomitant of this: we endure or suffer things often as a necessary burden; the complication is that we must also maintain a degree of idealism amidst the resignation, rather than assume that things cannot be otherwise. This is described well in Rambler 79: As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. (Yale Works, vol. iv, 55)

This is an implicit rejoinder to Swift’s famous double-​bind from the “Digression on Madness” that the “sublime and refined Point of Felicity” resides in the “Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves,” where supine ignorance is preferable to the misery of knowing the evils of the world, yet being powerless to change them to any extent.1 Johnson was averse to the more nihilistic side of Swift’s description of human limitation, and refused to accept its premise: it is our “duty” to resist suspicion as much as we can, and the only acceptable choice. To be fooled may be bad, yet it would be worse to do wrong, even if the result is to suffer.

1 

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 112.

538   Adam Rounce

The Morality of Suffering Suffering, whether in having to allow bad and unjust things to happen or having to endure them, is the human state upon which many of Johnson’s moral debates are enacted or dramatized. An explanation for why this state is so prevalent is hard to provide, as Idler 89 admits: How evil came into the world; for what reason it is that life is overspread with such boundless varieties of misery; why the only thinking being of this globe is doomed to think merely to be wretched, and to pass his time from youth to age in fearing or in suffering calamities, is a question which philosophers have long asked, and which philosophy could never answer. (Yale Works, vol. ii, 275)

Like Rasselas, or Satan upon Mount Niphates, we either fear the worst or suffer it. In the absence of reasons for our uncertain state, Johnson’s remedy is neither a Swiftian questioning of all values nor the evasiveness inherent in apparent stoicism; instead, writing becomes an act of endurance, its purpose the wider restating of the problem, and thereby a means of amelioration or (to some extent) comfort. Johnson’s focus on suffering is not merely a dour moralistic reminder, but a considered examination that calls for collective awareness and responsibility, and illustrates Johnson’s idea of writing as a means of better understanding the world (or of accepting why we cannot). In this respect, Johnson often uses suffer in the sense of “allow,” depicting something wrong that has to be accepted: Shakespeare, he concluded in a famous passage, “has suffered the virtues of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice.” The tragedy of King Lear is so immense that it could not be otherwise: “A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 705), even if, for Johnson, the natural human desire for justice would rather see the bleakness of this representation mitigated, hence the sustained audience (inexplicable on the surface, to a modern reader) for Nahum Tate’s “happy-​ending” version of the play. Suffering Cordelia to die (along with the erstwhile intransitive suffering of Cordelia) is a wider questioning of the foundations of justice and those other fundamental, but sometimes elusive, values that attempt to keep the potential chaos and instability of the sublunary world at a distance. In blackly humorous-​related vein is Rasselas’s naive assumption, on entering the apparently free world, “that nothing was withheld either from want or merit; that every hand showered liberality and every heart melted with benevolence: ‘And who then,’ says he, will be suffered to be wretched?” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 65). Along with the affectated melancholia of the young man of feeling is the hopeful notion of some sort of greater power or collective will stopping people from being unhappy;

Suffering   539 Rasselas’s almost prelapsarian idea of unhappiness somehow being proscribed is an ironic joke at his expense, but also a desire that still exists, faintly, to some degree, in the Johnsonian worldview, even if it is known to be in vain. When telling the young travelers to keep moving (physically and mentally), Imlac manages to combine both uses of the word: “Do not suffer life to stagnate: it will grow muddy for want of motion; and it is natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or the evils that we suffer” (vol. xvi, 127). We have to allow many things, but should not allow ourselves to fall into stagnation. This is a warning against skepticism in its various forms, including the apathy of stoicism (apathy in a more enlightened sense than the modern usage, but still anathema to Johnson), but also an admittance of the need to keep questioning the nature of our sufferings, even if the answers are not always clear or even forthcoming. Robert Voitle summed this up in describing how, for Johnson, the “moral life is a life of constant activity,” and that it “is this belief that most decisively sets Johnson apart from those moralists who emphasize character and virtue,” hence “his insistence that morality is not primarily a matter of being something, or even of becoming something, but of doing. Witness, his disdain for escapists and recluses. The cloisterer may be of spotless virtue; he may be wise and know all things, but a truly good man cannot be, because a good man strives.”2 A significant related side of Johnson’s writing also delineates attempted explanations of the “evils that we suffer” in recent and contemporary literature and thought, and is fully alive to their shortcomings, not least the more cloistered of them.

Suffering for Art The representation of suffering in art, for Johnson as a moralist, is something of a touchstone: repeatedly in his criticism, Johnson looks for what could be called an awareness of what it means to suffer, and he is quick to locate either the presence or absence of such a recognition. Sometimes the degree to which feeling connects to the successful delineation of human life, as he recognized it, comes out almost as an aside, literally so in his comment on the appearance of Banquo’s Ghost, and Lady Macbeth’s warning to the guests at one of the most awkward of all dinner parties not to notice that her husband is falling apart before their very eyes: “If much you note him, You shall offend him, and extend his passion.” Johnson’s gloss is “Prolong his suffering; make his fit longer” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 871). It is notable that the extension of feeling is linked directly to suffering, and placed before the more scientific definition of increasing his fit. Entirely justified as Macbeth’s suffering may be, there is no doubting its presence and effect upon the reader.

2 

Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 135.

540   Adam Rounce In contrast, literature that fails to engage intrinsic human responses is often described as existing in a vacuum, where plot, character, and narrative may carry on their merry way without engaging the requisite sympathy to engender curiosity over joy, sorrow, or indeed suffering. Of Addison’s Cato, that archetype of neoclassical drama in its measured and buttoned-​up depictions of tragic idealism, Johnson agrees with the common conclusion that finds it “rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life.” The result of this lack of drama is that “Of the agents we have no care: we consider not what they are doing, or what they are suffering; we wish only to know what they have to say.”3 If we do not care why they are suffering, then this remoteness is more significant than the elegance of its sentiments, as there are limits to what the latter can impart, whatever the finesse of their expression. In similar vein, Johnson finds Edmund Waller’s poem of hyperbolic praise of the restored Charles II much inferior to his earlier Panegyrick on Cromwell, partly given the uneasiness of such a complete political volte-​face, but also because Charles’s life before 1660, for all the hiding in trees and visiting foreign courts, does not provide especially interesting material for art: “The Congratulation [to Charles] is indeed not inferior to the Panegyrick, either by decay of genius, or for want of diligence; but because Cromwell had done much, and Charles had done little.” Cromwell lacked only virtue, Johnson argues, but Waller was good enough to invent it for him, whereas “Charles had yet only the merit of struggling without success, and suffering without despair. A life of escapes and indigence could supply poetry with no splendid images” (Lives, vol. ii, 40). Nor could it make more immediate or visceral the relative sufferings of a monarch who was still for the most part protected and cushioned from the worse of life’s vicissitudes, for all his earlier defeats. The materials behind the poem are not striking enough to represent Charles’s experiences in any exalted or extended way; if Johnson’s dismissal seems unfair, Waller’s description of Charles as “Much-​suff ’ring monarch” rings hollow, as even at his lowest ebb, he was hardly Lear in the storm.4 In his annotation of King Lear, Johnson comments upon the Fool’s prophetic song, as Lear and his motley comrades head for the hovel: He that has an a little tyny wit With heigh ho, the wind and the rain; Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day. I fancy that the second line of this stanza had once a termination that rhymed with the fourth; but I can only fancy it; for both the copies agree. It was once perhaps 3  The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iii, 26. 4  The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. Percival Stockdale (London, 1770), 131.

Suffering   541 written, With heigh ho, the wind and the rain in his way. The meaning seems likewise to require this insertion. “He that has wit, however small, and finds wind and rain in his way, must content himself by thinking, that somewhere or other it raineth every day, and others are therefore suffering like himself.” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 684)

Amidst the considerable annotations in his Shakespeare edition, where Johnson corrects his predecessors with admirable patience (especially William Warburton’s rococo oddities), this is something of a musing aloud or flight of fancy. The suggested insertion of a phrase to mend the rhyme is at the expense of any metrical correctness. Yet the proposed addition of “in his way” is an attempt at making sense of a somewhat obscure symbolism, where the wind and rain are not plain enough as a metaphoric obstacle to human happiness. With the suggested extension, the daily universality of wind and rain encapsulates the prevalence of suffering. Of course, Johnson perhaps tries to find a more widespread meaning than is present in the Fool’s mocking proverb: after all, Lear is largely the intended the “tiny wit,” as the vanity of the division of the kingdom has led him and them to rely on what fortune has given them, with the rain yet another punishing reminder of his folly. Johnson’s application of the passage’s meaning to a larger idea is a sign of his tendency to not run away from the fact and causes of human suffering, and the sense of the Fool’s song has to be completed, because otherwise the nature and origin of such suffering would be arbitrary and not remotely explicable. The idea of the pagan vista of Lear reflecting a godless world, where only some suffer under the wind and rain for no good reason, is one that Johnson found abhorrent: that all are likely to suffer is not a consolation, but it does remove the capricious cruelty of the alternative. In 1773, in the Johnson/​Steevens revision, Johnson admitted that his speculation was in vain, given the presence of the same text in Feste’s song in Twelfth Night: Yet I am afraid that all this is chimerical, for the burthen appears again in the song at the end of Twelfth Night, and seems to have been an arbitrary supplement, without any reference to the sense of the song. (Yale Works, vol. viii, 684)

The addition to the footnote is rather melancholy in its acceptance of the refrain of the song as an “arbitrary supplement,” meaning an addition without any significant meaning: Johnson’s note is, in itself, a sort of supplement, which tries to explain or understand wider questions of providence, justice, and suffering, but it runs up against something that cannot be emended, rewritten, or made sense of. Johnson’s annotation shows the utmost significance, for him, of clarifying the universal nature of suffering through literature, even if it founders, in a case like this, upon the inexplicable presence of words that are diluted by their repetition elsewhere. The passage, therefore, means less than it seems, though the argument could be questioned—​the implications of Feste’s song are no less melancholy after all—​but Johnson would not build a thesis on a partial

542   Adam Rounce example, even if the lasting impression of his note is of the likelihood of suffering, and the need to try to understand it. As well as suffering in art, the suffering artist or imaginative figure is also prominent in Johnson’s work, though in a manner far more nuanced and ambivalent than the later sort of romanticizing of the idea that he partially influenced. Not the least striking aspect of his first significant biographical work, the Life of Richard Savage, is its description of a life of an unsuccessful public figure, the earliest such in English. Savage, Johnson’s friend, the quasi-​nobleman and doomed poet, is treated with a very subtle mixture of sympathy, compassion, and an awareness of his vain and self-​destructive tendencies. The result is a biography of great complexity that refuses to judge on simple moral grounds. It is clear, for instance, that many of the disastrous circumstances of Savage’s adult life were self-​inflicted, but Johnson refuses to either wholly blame or exonerate him, pointing out instead that he was at least able to bear his sufferings, something that many might not be able to do, in practice: “Whatever faults may be imputed to him, the virtue of suffering well cannot be denied him.” The problem, as the next sentence shows, is that suffering often finds its origins in less virtuous motives: “The two powers which, in the opinion of Epictetus, constituted a wise man, are those of bearing and forbearing, which cannot indeed be affirmed to have been equally possessed by Savage; and indeed the want of one obliged him very frequently to practise the other” (Lives, vol. iii, 182). The tact of this, whereby the vices and excesses of Savage are ironically the means to his virtue, is a backhanded compliment, but also a genuine consideration of the wider folly and weakness shared by many mundane lives and less extreme characters. Only immortals and Greek Stoic philosophers can bear and forbear in perfect harmony. Instead, as the passage continues, poor Savage is stuck in a circular path of vanity and self-​delusion, so that the positive virtue of suffering is negated by his failure to learn anything from it: “By imputing none of his miseries to himself, he continued to act upon the same principles, and to follow the same path; was never made wiser by his sufferings, nor preserved by one misfortune from falling into another.” There is virtue in suffering, ultimately, only if we try to understand our relationship with it, or ameliorate it where possible through our conduct or intellectual powers. Savage does the opposite: “He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness, which were dancing before him” (Lives, vol. iii, 154). He is not bearing his burdens like a saint, but neither should his folly be wholly condemned. Like Savage, the Astronomer in Rasselas is a victim of delusions of imagination and a refusal to accept the boundaries and limitations of the sublunary world on the individual ego: like Savage, when the evidence around him contradicts his fantasies and desires, he ignores it, though at a terrible cost. He is also saved by the sociability that his delusions have denied him, a pointer to Johnson’s need for variety with regard to place, persons, and circumstance, and his fear of the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” but also his awareness that we must not suffer in private, either: “I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret.” To suffer may be a likely prospect, but it is worse to do so where there can be no outlet or consolation, even

Suffering   543 that of the similar fate of your fellows. The Astronomer’s despair is partly at the waste of time and life he has endured almost unwittingly: “I am always tempted to think that my inquiries have ended in error, and that I have suffered much, and suffered it in vain” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 163). The vanity and emptiness combine with the ego’s imaginative misconceptions to form an example of the powerful but suffering mind: “Few can attain this man’s knowledge and few practise his virtues, but all may suffer his calamity,” as Imlac summarizes (vol. xvi, 149). The wider warning of the Astronomer’s example is that his sufferings are as inherently self-​inflicted as those of Richard Savage. Suffering for the individual is therefore a result to some extent of fate or fortune or circumstance, but also judgment. In some respects, this led Johnson to an area of moral inquiry that is beyond artistic representation, as the degree to which the suffering individual must answer for their own culpability to a higher power was not a suitable subject for literature. Hester Lynch Piozzi remembered Johnson’s habitual recalling of liturgical texts, and one painful example: When he would try to repeat the celebrated Prosa Ecclesiastica pro Mortuis, as it is called, beginning Dies irae, Dies illa, he could never pass the stanza ending thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus [May such suffering not be in vain], without bursting into a flood of tears; which sensibility I used to quote against him when he would inveigh against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and feeble, and unworthy the subject, which ought to be treated with higher reverence, he said, than either poets or painters could presume to excite or bestow.5

That earthly suffering should have some purpose was at the center of Johnson’s religious worldview, allied to his abiding belief that there was some providential reward (and therefore some reason) for the woes that people have to endure; the alternative seems to have caused him the same sort of distress as the erstwhile threat of damnation. But the sublime importance and reverence of religion was beyond anything that most earthly art or writing could presume. Johnson’s marginal note to a passage from John Norris’s Collection of Miscellanies, made when marking up quotations for the Dictionary, is arresting partly because of its relation to the mysterious and unhappy fate of his brother Nathanael, who had died young in 1737. The text runs, “It is supposed by the Ancient Fathers, that the Sufferings which our Blessed Saviour underwent in his body were more afflictive to him than the same would have been to another man, upon the account of the excellency and quickness of his sense of Feeling.” Johnson writes “my brother” in the margin to indicate him as an example of “another man,” “one of ordinary feeling,” as Robert DeMaria suggests.6 Just as the depth of Christ’s sufferings are more sensitive than the norm, so art might at its height represent suffering, but could only hint at its causation and rationale.

5 

G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897), vol. i, 284. DeMaria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 45–​6. 6 Robert

544   Adam Rounce Worse were attempts to explain away or summarize the awful truths behind suffering; these glib examples of vanity from a flawed perspective were treated by Johnson with contempt, and their fallacies exposed.

Fallacious Explanations Late on in Measure for Measure, Pompey describes how the prison is similar to Mistress Overdone’s brothel, as so many old acquaintances are there: “all great doers in our trade, and are now ‘for the Lord’s sake.’ ” Warburton, never shy of a confident though speculative gloss, paraphrases this last phrase as “i.e. to beg for the rest of their lives.” Johnson offers an alternative reading: I rather think this expression intended to ridicule the puritans, whose turbulence and indecency often brought them to prison, and who considered themselves as suffering for religion. It is not unlikely that men imprisoned for other crimes might represent themselves to casual enquirers as suffering from puritanism, and that this might be the common cant of the prisons. (Yale Works, vol. vii, 205)

The idea that the language of those would-​be martyrs suffering in prison for “the Lord’s sake” could be a cynicism adapted by the more worldly to mask their real crimes is ingenious, not least because it trades on the hyperbolic zeal so common to representations of Puritanism, and the stable of many a city comedy. Johnson’s claim works on the popular perception that much Puritanism was exaggerated cant, therefore it is plausible that such could be absorbed by prisoners into the pretense of suffering, as a way of potentially avoiding either guilt or actual offenses. The deceit of pretending to suffer for your God is the sort of cant that Johnson would usually dismiss with impunity, on the grounds of its toying with the morals and values that are the only guide to suffering humanity on its uncertain path. Yet it seems preferable to a more abstract type of argument, where the complacent modern mind tries to explain the nature of suffering, does so inadequately, but then retires with a degree of self-​satisfaction, without having achieved their ambitious aims, but safe in the knowledge that no one else could, either. At least the lying prisoners are straightforward in their insincerity. The two best-​known examples of such complacencies, separated by two decades, but related to each other by Johnson through their shared ideas, are the Essay on Man (1733–​4) and Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756). Among other qualities, Pope’s quasi-​epic poem and Jenyns’s quasi-​philosophical disquisition have in common an abstracted musing over the nature of human misery and suffering, that resides in a supposedly objective and scientific approach to their huge topics; unfortunately, it also means that their attitude slides into the sort of complacent

Suffering   545 detachment from the very problems that they are supposed to be explaining. As Johnson puts it (yoking together the naive remoteness with which Pope and Jenyns describe the suffering of millions as something that just happens, as part of a wider structure), “Life must be seen, before it can be known. This author and Pope, perhaps, never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne” (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 411–​12). And without such awareness, they cannot help but sound rather self-​satisfied or indeed smug. A related model for this idea (written not long after Johnson’s coruscating 1757 review of Jenyns’s book) is the philosopher in Rasselas, who offers stoic commonplaces that stress the dignity and contentment of the detached mind; it works, initially, as Rasselas describes finding a man who “from the unshaken throne of rational fortitude, looks down on the scenes of life changing beneath him” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 74). The problem comes, of course, when such fortitude is tested rather severely by the life he supposedly looks down upon with calm and serenity: Rasselas returns to find that tragedy has struck, with the sudden death of the man’s daughter, mocking all attempts at philosophical resignation or consolation: “you are come at a time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be remedied: what I have lost cannot be supplied” (vol. xvi, 75). Suffering of such a random and cruel kind cannot be reconciled into his worldview, the shortcomings of which are now revealed, rather painfully. To be able to separate yourself from the tangible effects of human suffering by rational inquiry is revealed to be a fallacy, neglecting any consideration of our necessary empathetic connection to the world. Johnson’s criticism of the Essay on Man places Pope as a great artist who has wittingly or otherwise followed a path of false reasoning that cannot but obviate the larger point of the work, whatever its erstwhile poetic achievements and effects: in Johnson’s dismissive words, “never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised” (Lives, vol. iv, 76). Johnson had been involved early on in the translation into English and annotation of Crousaz’s well-​known criticisms of Pope’s poem, and he did not view it as the masterpiece of Pope’s later years that its august theme and poetic pedigree suggest. Instead, its considerable poetic effects are subordinated to either specious or self-​evident ends, and little is signified.7 In attempting to describe human existence, the poem repeatedly offers evasions, simplifications, and generalizations that tell the reader nothing they did not already know, or mislead them into accepting something contradictory to the erstwhile theodicy that is being offered. The result, for Johnson, is often a series of banal, self-​evident, doubtful, or potentially impious claims masquerading as truth. The poem informs the reader that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to 7  For the context of Johnson’s reaction to An Essay on Man, see Lives, vol. iv, 34, and Harry M. Solomon, “Johnson’s Silencing of Pope: Trivializing An Essay on Man,” The Age of Johnson 5 (1992), 247–​ 80. For Johnson’s assistance in the Crousaz translations, see O M Brack’s introduction (Yale Works, vol. xvii, pp. xx–​lii).

546   Adam Rounce have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power. (Lives, vol. iv, 76–​7)

Such claims are presented as axioms, but are actually doubtful, contentious, or morally dubious, hence the mention of honor and virtue being qualities that can be performed or newly determined, rather than absolutes whose nature and value is fixed and decided. The poem, for Johnson, is too akin to a performance that is well acted, rather than a sincere argument that represents the scheme of the world, the wider order of being, and the providential nature of the universe; it sometimes seems more for Pope’s benefit than the education and edification of the reader.

Puppets and Wires Soame Jenyns’s On the Nature and Origin of Evil was demolished by Johnson’s review in the Literary Magazine (1757). It was seen thereafter as the writing of a dilettante, a gentleman with a political career who also wrote poems and other pieces; the essay’s pretensions are revealed to be rather superficial by its content; the immensity of its title and theme are not followed through or addressed with any real depth. Instead Jenyns offers a series of commonplaces that form a reading of the workings of universe that is analogous to Pope’s poem. Even Jenyns’s modern biographer has described the Inquiry as “Full of the cant of natural religion and couched in an epistolary style,” though he notes that such style at least made it accessible: “But if Jenyns attracted readers with his ease of expression, he sometimes abandoned his empiricism for fancy, and arrived at his conclusions too quickly.”8 Johnson came to a similar conclusion, though he used rather harsher terms. For Johnson, the Inquiry shares the complacency, remoteness, and dispassionate attitude toward suffering of An Essay on Man, which makes Johnson link it directly to Pope’s poem: “We are next entertained with Pope’s alleviations of those evils which we are doomed to suffer,” the choice of “entertained” linking both authors in their naive and superficial suggestions toward mitigating such sufferings. Jenyns draws on the same unconvincing resources as Pope, passing off speculations and lazy assumptions as an argument, such as “Poverty, or the want of riches, is generally compensated by having more hopes and fewer fears, by a greater share of health, and a more exquisite relish of the smallest enjoyments, than those who possess them are usually bless’d with” (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 405). This Panglossian search for an imagined consolation requires the paternalistic assumption that poverty is a happier state than it seems because it leaves you with more to hope for and less to worry over. There is a vulgarity to such argument, 8  Ronald Rompkey, Soame Jenyns (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1984), 136. See also 144–​6, where Rompkey describes Jenyns’s later View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion (1776), a work more amenable to Johnson.

Suffering   547 a form of rather desperate intellectual busking, determined as it is to accentuate the positives even as it is ever more unlikely that there are any: “The sufferings of the sick are greatly relieved by many trifling gratifications imperceptible to others, and sometimes almost repaid by the inconceivable transports occasioned by the return of health and vigour” (vol. xvii, 411–​12). Such implausible and rather tasteless conclusions and reasonings are almost incomprehensible to Johnson’s moral sense; the profound failure of Jenyns to relate to its subject matter in its fundamental human aspects, and its pseudoscientific tone create a sort of moral vacuum, as the non-​consolations are presented with the satisfaction of a puzzle solved, as if all suffering is now explained. When Jenyns does come to his solution to the problem of evil, something that he admits has defeated philosophers, theologians, intellectuals, mystics, and indeed almost every sort of rational being in human history, the result is something of a damp squib. “The true solution of this important question,” Jenyns claims, is subordination: “all subordination implying imperfection, all imperfection evil, and all evil some kind of inconveniency or suffering: so that there must be particular inconveniencies and sufferings annexed to every particular rank of created beings by the circumstances of things.” Hierarchy creates suffering, and that is that. It is a breathtakingly dismissive conclusion, and fallible in its basis, as Johnson argues: “That imperfection implies evil, and evil suffering, is by no means evident. Imperfection may imply privative evil, or the absence of some good, but this privation produces no suffering, but by the help of knowledge” (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 412). Likewise, a child is an imperfect adult, but does not necessarily suffer for it; the folly of offering a thesis that pretends to solve the problem is that it will automatically be found wanting, given the mundanity of the claim, relative to the grandiosity of the ambition. In this case, Jenyns does not really try to offer more than a perfunctory answer. Subordination is offered as an explanation for everything but, as Johnson says, the supposed absolute hierarchies offered are mere speculation and built upon sand, missing the most significant point: his scale of being I have demonstrated to be raised by presumptuous imagination, to rest on nothing at the bottom, to lean on nothing at the top, and to have vacuities, from step to step, through which any order of being may sink into nihility without any inconvenience, so far as we can judge, to the next rank above or below it. We are, therefore, little enlightened by a writer who tells us, that any being in the state of man must suffer what man suffers, when the only question that requires to be resolved is: Why any being is in this state. (vol. xvii, 413)

To paraphrase that unlikely bedfellow, Marx, anyone can philosophize badly about suffering; the important thing is to try to understand why it has to happen. It is not enough to offer fatuous explanations or palliations; this is a form of sophistry, suggesting that what is unknown can be made clear, when it is only sidestepped, or avoided through near ludicrous speculations. This evasion is a form of dishonesty, as is offering supposed answers while ignoring vital moral considerations.

548   Adam Rounce This intellectual abuse, where what is implausible or even offensive is presented as reasonable for the sake of supporting the larger argument, reaches its apogee in Jenyns’s most extreme supposition about the possible reasons behind suffering and evil—​that maybe a race of higher beings do it for fun or profit: he has, at last, thought on a way, by which human sufferings may produce good effects. He imagines, that as we have not only animals for food, but choose some for our diversion, the same privilege may be allowed to some beings above us, who may deceive, torment, or destroy us, for the ends, only, of their own pleasure or utility. (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 419)

This is, for Johnson, a repulsive conclusion, not least for the manner with which Jenyns presents it—​an unlikely but logical premise that has to be considered, whereas the very idea suggests something so profoundly disturbing about the nature of the universe as to be impossible to contemplate. Johnson’s ironic response is to suppose that these beings might also, amongst their tormenting, turn a vain and foolish thinker into an author: One sport the merry malice of these beings has found means of enjoying, to which we have nothing equal or similar. They now and then catch a mortal proud of his parts, and . . . easily fill with idle notions, till in time they make their plaything an author: their first diversion commonly begins with an ode or an epistle, then rises perhaps to a political irony, and is at last brought to its height, by a treatise of philosophy. Then begins the poor animal to entangle himself in sophisms, and flounder in absurdity, to talk confidently of the scale of being, and to give solutions which himself confesses impossible to be understood. (vol. xvii, 420–​1)

Jenyns, the puffed-​up writer, is the dupe of malicious higher beings, secretly encouraged to produce his fatuous works, which distract and annoy, but do not persuade, help, or console. After the satire is Johnson’s righteous anger at the idea that suffering is used as one counter in a wider philosophical game, as Jenyns offers a sort of speculation on Epicurean terms, but without its cultural values or contextual rationale (the classical world being used to viewing its gods as having such caprices). The result is instead a sort of parody of philosophical investigation, in that it produces a conclusion that is admittedly unlikely even to its author, as well as unacceptable and worthless, being more akin to modern apocalyptic science fiction. Even the most nihilistic reader of Johnson’s time would balk at adopting as their credo the idea that a race of higher beings might make us suffer for their own pleasure. Most importantly, it does no good to anyone, Jenyns included: his theories fail to explain or to help us understand. Suffering exists “because pain is necessary to the good of the universe; and the pain of one order of beings extending its salutary influence to innumerable orders above and below, it was necessary that man should suffer” (Yale

Suffering   549 Works, vol. xvii, 429), but it is not clear what value this has for anybody, even if the shaky premise behind it is accepted; it also suggests that a supreme being is either unthinking, negligent, or deliberately cruel, and that Jenyns’ perspective on the world is at best a sort of unconscious cynicism. Johnson’s ultimate response to Jenyns is one of his best-​known defenses of the worth of literature: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it; and how will either of those be put more in our power, by him who tells us, that we are puppets, of which some creature, not much wiser than ourselves, manages the wires!”9 Helping either the reader’s enjoyment or their endurance is a tangible measure of the value of writing, and one failed by lofty philosophical inquiries that offer richly unifying systems but deliver only complacent sophistries. As Imlac puts it, “Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 50), and what is any attempt to understand suffering but a response to either condition? Johnson’s criticism of Jenyns is an example of what Paul Fussell called his “sense of the Christian obligation to write ‘sincerely’ and to criticize responsibly.” It also demonstrates what Brian Hanley described as Johnson’s “core belief in the lofty moral and social purposes of authorship and, correspondingly, the duty of the critic to rebuke writers who plainly betray those aims.”10 His criticism of Jenyns was neither personal nor sustained—​a conversation from 1783 records Johnson’s pleasure at Jenyns’s kindness toward him—​but reflects the centrality for Johnson of the moral responsibility of writing.11 Jenyns’s airy deterministic speculations on pain and suffering being the possible entertainment of whimsical higher beings, jars with Johnson’s ultimate conviction, as stated in Rambler 184, “that our being is in the hands of omnipotent Goodness, by whom what appears casual to us, is directed for ends ultimately kind and merciful; and that nothing can finally hurt him who debars not himself from the divine favour” (vol. v, 285). The necessity of this belief for Johnson, given his own erstwhile doubts and uncertainties, meant that he always returns to it, or similar formulations, to express his larger faith in the goodness and mercy that existed beyond earthly pain and misfortune. Hannah More once reported a comment of Johnson’s that illustrates a consistent aspect of his relationship with suffering: “he hated to hear people whine about metaphysical distresses when there was so much want and hunger in the world.”12 Given the

9  Yale Works, vol. xvii, 421. For a vivid description of Johnson’s dislike of representations of pain, see Isobel Grundy, Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), 140–​1. 10  Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 91; Brian Hanley, Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 123. 11 For more on Jenyns and Johnson’s motives, see Yale Works, vol. xvii, 395, where Brack also quotes the memorandum of Johnson’s conversation in 1783 by William Bowles (distant relation to the poet), not printed by Boswell (who preferred to dwell upon a rude epitaph Jenyns had written on Johnson): “Soame Jenyns says he to whom I have not been too civil spoke to me with great kindness upon my late sickness & when I came first abroad congratulated me very kindly and I was pleased with it” (Boswell, Life, vol. iv, 524). 12  Quoted in Charlotte Yonge, Hannah More: A Literary Life (London, 1888), 47.

550   Adam Rounce very real conditions under which much of humanity seemed predestined to suffer, it was simply not acceptable to submerge such evils either beneath a cloud of false reasoning, or to dwell on your own abstract complaints, or “metaphysical distresses” (a phrase later used, probably coincidentally, by W. H. Auden in a poem about the abstract relation of the privileged individual to the wider world).13 Thomas Tyers, in one of the earliest biographical summaries of his life, recalled that “Johnson thought he had no right to complain of his lot in life, or of having been disappointed: the world had not used him ill; it had not broken its word with him, it had promised him nothing.”14 Instead of complaining or seeking redress for imagined slights, it was his duty to accept the presence of suffering, and to try and understand it, as much as limited human reasoning can, along with our wider place in a world which Johnson assumed to have an ultimate purpose and sense of divine judgment. This might also entail an amount of forbearance, though not resignation. Voitle claimed that “It is true that Johnson became somewhat more optimistic as he grew older, but this is chiefly because he tempered his expectations and became more tolerant of human failings.”15 Such tolerance, albeit wary, can be seen in a late apparent exercise: “I do not wish or pray to be wealthy, but I would live on a little, suffering no evil,” ran one of the epigrams from the Greek Anthology, translated in Johnson’s final winter (1783–​4; Yale Works, vol. xvii, 316, 334). It is a philosophy of acceptance, where the nature of suffering is alleviated but not removed.

Further Reading DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Grundy, Isobel. Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986. Hanley, Brian. Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Rompkey, Ronald. Soame Jenyns. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1984. Solomon, Harry M. “Johnson’s Silencing of Pope: Trivializing An Essay on Man.” The Age of Johnson 5 (1992): 247–​80. Voitle, Robert. Samuel Johnson the Moralist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

13 

“Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed” (1934), later retitled “A Summer Night,” in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), 136–​7. 14  Thomas Tyers, “A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson” (1784), in Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. i, 361. 15 Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist, 132.

Chapter 30

Death Eric Parisot

Reflecting on his formative years in his Annals, an aging Samuel Johnson recollects being taught by his mother “of the two places to which the inhabitants of this world were received after death; one a fine place filled with happiness, called Heaven; the other a sad place, called Hell” (Yale Works, vol. i, 10). Johnson cannot recall whether this lesson caught his childhood imagination, but it certainly resounded in the thoughts, writings, and conversation of his adult life. Johnson was obsessively concerned with death and the afterlife. The Four Last Things feature in just about all forms of his writings, including his essays, poetry, fiction, sermons, diaries, and prayers. Inscribed in Greek on the dial plate of his watch was the phrase Νυξ γαρ ερχεται, “the night cometh” (John 9:4), converting his timepiece into a personal memento mori (Life, vol. ii, 57). His conversation, so assiduously recorded and mischievously guided by James Boswell, often gravitated toward death and mortality, whether considered abstractly, or concretely as somebody else’s or his own. At times Johnson was able to discuss these themes at length with the dispassionate reason of an enlightened moralist. At others bereavement disturbed his rationalist views. On occasion, talk of death struck a raw nerve, inciting Johnson’s ire and drawing him into quarrel. On others, he resembled a quaking child, full of earnest trepidation, as if regressing to his infancy to finally apprehend what might have been unheeded in his mother’s instruction so many years ago. That Johnson returns to this early lesson on heaven and hell in his senior years, almost as an exercise of autobiographical self-​analysis, suggests just how mindful he was of his own thanatic fixation. Johnson’s biographers and critics have made much of his fearful obsession with death, which in itself has been constructed and preserved in various ways and given its own dubious afterlife. Boswell, for instance, remarks that Johnson “had, indeed, an aweful dread of death, or rather, ‘of something after death,’ ” tellingly alluding to Shakespeare’s great melancholic, Hamlet (Life, vol. ii, 298). For Boswell, Johnson’s “direful apprehensions of futurity” likely derived from his melancholic disposition, a “common effect” of an underlying chronic affliction (vol. iv, 300). This fear, Boswell maintained, was curable, but Boswell was an amateur physician at best. On one occasion, Boswell purposefully steers conversation toward death “to maintain that the fear of it might be got over,”

552   Eric Parisot anecdotally citing David Hume and Samuel Foote as two men who claimed they were not afraid to die—​an assertion met with skepticism from Johnson. Boswell persists and Johnson’s patience runs out, sending his companion home with a parting shot: “Don’t let us meet to-​morrow” (Life, vol. ii, 106–​7). But in relating this incident in his Life, Boswell’s choice of analogy in depiction of Johnson’s state of mind is revealing: His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him. (Life, vol. ii, 106)

To Boswell’s mind, Johnson’s rational judgment was threatened by his seemingly unreasonable fear of death and the afterlife, illogical beasts that Boswell insisted could be vanquished. But Johnson only tamed his beasts periodically, and they ultimately proved unconquerable. These two forces of Johnson’s mind, it would appear to Boswell, coexisted in perpetual, combative unease. Elsewhere in biography and criticism, Johnson’s disquietude is variously cast as a flaw of intellect or character. S. C. Roberts takes his cue from Boswell’s charge that Johnson’s fear of death was not natural but rather “from reflection” (Life, vol. ii, 298), suggesting that Johnson’s apprehensions were largely the result of a vigorous, melancholic imagination.1 Joseph Woods Krutch interprets Johnson’s trepidation as a lack of faith in God’s mercy, and a further indication of his rationalist skepticism.2 Other constructions are more speculative: according to Boswell, John Hawkins attributes Johnson’s fear and trembling to a combination of “amorous inclinations” and an acute sense of sin.3 There is arguably a grain of truth to all of these claims; Johnson’s imagination, his commitment to natural religion in the absence of divine revelation, and his heightened sensitivity to his own fallen state all contribute to Johnson’s unease about death. But it is Thomas Tyers’s rather circumspect description in his “Biographical Sketch” (1785)—​that Johnson “was all his life preparing himself for death”—​that seems to ring with the greatest semblance of truth.4 For Johnson himself, his fearful preoccupation with death and judgment was not an affliction or flaw but a religious duty, a pious exercise that imbued his life as a Christian moralist, and the most effective preparation for his inevitable moment of truth. It was, indeed, “a holy fear” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 31).

1 

S. C. Roberts, Doctor Johnson and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 101–​3. For a useful, if dated, review, see J. H. Hagstrum, “On Dr. Johnson’s Fear of Death,” ELH 14, no. 4 (December 1947), 308–​9. 2  Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (London: Cassell, 1948), 477–​8. 3  F. A. Pottle, “The Dark Hints of Sir John Hawkins and Boswell,” MLN 56, no. 5 (May 1941), 326–​7. 4  Thomas Tyers, “A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in O M Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1975), 62.

Death   553

A Holy Fear “Happy is the man,” as written in Proverbs 28:14, “that feareth alway.” Johnson elaborates on this text in his third sermon: “the whole system of moral and religious duty is expressed, in the language of Scripture, by the ‘fear of God.’ A good man is characterised, as a man that feareth God; and the fear of the Lord is said to be the beginning of wisdom” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 30; see Chapter 12, “Sermons”). Fear is a humbling emotion for Johnson, and to fear God is to resign oneself meekly to his omnipotent will. Glory awaits those who fear, for the meek shall inherit the earth (Psalms 37:11; Matthew 5:5), but this is a posture of trembling dread until that promise is fulfilled. Despite this, devout men, like Johnson, stay the course. This “holy fear . . . attends good men, through the whole course of their lives; and keeps them always attentive to the motives and consequences of every action; if always unsatisfied with their progress in holiness, always wishing to advance, and always afraid of falling away” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 31). Johnson’s “holy fear,” then, is strictly speaking a dread of divine judgment and its eternal repercussions. But the natural corollary of this anxiety is a pious dread of death, the very moment at which the tally of earthly deeds is fixed, unalterable, awaiting God’s decree. For serious-​minded men like Johnson, the perpetual question remains: if I die now, have I done enough to win God’s favor? According to Johnson, “Death, indeed, continually hovers about us, but hovers commonly unseen” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 308), both immanent and imminent. Fears of a sudden, unexpected exit, then, tend to heighten one’s sense of moral urgency. As Isaac Watts observes, if “at the Moment of Death the Soul enters into an unchangeable State, according to its Character and Conduct here on Earth, and that the Recompences of Vice and Virtue are in some measure to begin immediately upon the end of our State of Trial . . . Virtue will have a nearer and stronger Guard plac’d about it.”5 As J. H. Hagstrum rightly claims, Johnson belongs to a long tradition of seventeenth-​ and eighteenth-​century Protestant thinkers who place the contemplation of death at the center of religious devotion and moral practice. Popular devotional tracts such as Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651), William Sherlock’s Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689), and William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) had long inculcated frequent meditation upon one’s own mortality and the brevity of life as an important spiritual exercise. Law, for instance, implores his readers to nightly imagine the bed as a grave, and to reckon “all the dangers, uncertainties, and terrors of death . . . that your mind may be possess’d with such a sense of its nearness, that you . . . make every day, a day for preparation of it.”6 By the mid-​ eighteenth century, such devotional exercise was aesthetically rendered into, and abetted

5 Isaac Watts, An Essay toward the Proof of a Separate State of Souls between Death and the Resurrection (London, 1732), 11. 6  William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London, 1729), 479–​80.

554   Eric Parisot by, popular graveyard literature such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–​5), Robert Blair’s Grave (1743), and James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs (1746). Hervey’s tract is explicitly designed to remind “Readers of their Latter End,” a provocation to set their souls in order “That they may be able, through all the intermediate Stages, to look forward upon their approaching Exit, without any anxious Apprehensions: And, when the great Change commences, may bid Adieu to terrestrial Things, with all the Calmness of a cheerful Resignation, with all the Comforts of a well-​grounded Faith.”7 When set in its contemporary context, Johnson’s religious morbidity is in fact rather orthodox. But while Hervey’s Meditations invokes and exploits the affective potential of death in life to—​paradoxically—​mitigate its horrors in our final hours, Johnson’s skepticism was not so easily placated. Death and the afterlife were ineffable mysteries to Johnson, but intrinsic to the human condition. Remarking on Paradise Lost, Johnson lauds Milton’s depiction of Adam “seized with horror and astonishment” at his first vision of death. This first human encounter with death is a moment of unfathomable sublimity, “an immediate and perceptible communication with the Supreme Being” to “disturb the passions or perplex the intellects . . . an entrance into a state not simply which [Adam] knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 47). Johnson is openly wary, then, of those like Hervey who claim to “afford adequate consolations to the last hour, to chear the gloomy passage through the valley of the shadow of death” (vol. xiv, 261). This, as he expounds in sermon 25, is the stuff of revealed rather than natural reason: “All those to whom the supernatural light of heavenly doctrine has never been imparted”—​ and I suspect a sardonic implication that this in actuality means all of us—​must instead suffer the limits of our human capacity and meet death in “the darkness of ignorance.” The so-​called “refined and inquisitive,” who comfort themselves with “the fallacious and uncertain glimmer of philosophy,” do not escape Johnson’s censure either (vol. xiv, 261–​2). From Johnson’s perspective, what God has condescended to tell us through the Scriptures, “in plain and authoritative terms,” is that “there are acts which God will reward” of which “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” and deeds that will incur a punishment “inconceivably severe, and dreadful” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 29–​30; see Chapter 36, “God”). Here is his mother’s lesson writ large: salvation is conditional. The “most rational,” in Johnson’s opinion, will not “feel in themselves the marks of sanctification” and live freely with dubious conviction of their deliverance, but instead will never “be sure that they have complied with the conditions,” afraid until death finally reveals their future state (Life, vol. iv, 278). It is on this point that he is drawn into dispute with Boswell, William Adams and his wife Sarah: Boswell. “But may not a man attain to such a degree of hope as not to be uneasy from the fear of death?” Johnson. “A man may have such a degree of hope as to

7 

James Hervey, Meditations among the Tombs (London, 1746), v.

Death   555 keep him quiet. You see I am not quiet, from the vehemence with which I talk; but I do not despair.” Mrs. Adams. “You seem, Sir, to forget the merits of our Redeemer.” Johnson. “Madam, I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has said that he will set some on his right hand and some on his left.” (vol. iv, 299–​300)

Johnson was never confident of his salvation. Such self-​assurance was simply unreasonable to him, given our limited knowledge of death and the hereafter. Consequently, as he writes to Hester Thrale (March 10, 1784), confidence did not belong to “any part of the character of a brave, a wise, or a good man.” The heart of the truly brave, wise, and good “will not suffer him to rank himself ” in such manner. Instead, Johnson recommends and adopts an unassuming posture, full of honest “dread for the approaching path,” for “the serenity that is not felt . . . can be of no virtue to feign” (Letters, vol. iv, 295). If death is unknowable, and if salvation is contingent upon a divine decree that can only be revealed in death, then from Johnson’s perspective to fear and tremble in uncertainty is the rational thing to do. For Johnson, death is the imperative that informs the moral, living present. Whether one’s exit be gradual or swift, imminent or afar, it remains the individual responsibility of any Christian to keep death in view, and to strive toward moral fitness in readiness for the moment of transition from one state to another. This is not to say that too much pious gloom was never enough. Johnson was, after all, a worldly, sociable man, and warns against idle, excessive mournfulness: “a perpetual meditation upon the last hour, however it may become the solitude of a monastery, is inconsistent with many duties of common life.” Moreover, “To be always afraid of losing life is, indeed, scarcely to enjoy a life that can deserve the care of preservation.” But death, Johnson suggests, ought to remain in our thoughts “as an habitual and settled principle, always operating, though not always perceived” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 47, 307–​8). It is in this way, as an underlying edifying presence, that it might govern our moral choices. Johnson provides a practical example in Rambler 110 when discussing the merit of abstinence as “a cautious retreat from the utmost verge of permission” and “the precipice of destruction” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 225). The metaphor of the precipice, and related images of expansive chasms, is both recurring and instructive in Johnson’s writings, illustrating the perceived precarity of both his life and soul, as well as the sublime terror with which he viewed everlasting doom.8 Here, he is apprehensive to needlessly approach the brink of damnation; elsewhere in the same essay, he imagines one “suspended over the abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life,” asking who “can cast his eyes round him without shuddering with horror, or panting for security” (vol. iv, 224)? Earlier in Rambler 69, he forewarns his readers of growing old without religious hopes,

8  Robert

Voitle observes that in his poems and Dictionary Johnson seems to associate gulfs with damnation; see Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 42–​3.

556   Eric Parisot likening the experience to falling “into a gulph of bottomless misery, in which every reflexion must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish, and precipices of horror” (vol. iii, 367). These examples echo Johnson’s description of “holy fear” as imbuing a sense of “always wishing to advance, and always afraid of falling away” (vol. xiv, 31). But if the image of the precipice encapsulates the perilous state of moral life, and vast, sublime vistas the terrifying prospect of God’s eternal displeasure, then what of the bliss of God’s everlasting reward? To reprise Johnson’s third sermon, this is something human “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.” This is entirely consistent with Johnson’s conviction that death is impenetrable. This does not, however, preclude the contemplation of what death means more immediately for the living. Most obviously, it is the cessation of life. But for pious individuals like Johnson, who in his own words “feels himself alarmed by his conscience, anxious for the attainment of a better state, and afflicted by the memory of his past faults,” only “death shall set him free from doubt, and contest, misery and temptation” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 225). Come what may in the hereafter, the moment of death itself is the very moment of revelation. For those like Johnson who bear the trials of life in foreboding uncertainty—​as he concludes in his Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)—​death’s arrival is “kind Nature’s signal of retreat” (vol. vi, 108).

Contemplating the Dead In the annotations attached to the final lines of Johnson’s Vanity, E. L. McAdam and George Milne pointedly remark: “Johnson’s later attitude toward death, and particularly his own approaching death, has nothing of [the] serenity” exhibited by The Vanity of Human Wishes (Yale Works, vol. vi, 108 n). This is, indeed, true. Viewing death as a source of solace from the misery of our postlapsarian state is fine in theory, but for Johnson it was one often disturbed by his reality. This is no more evident than in his response to the deaths of friends and family, where natural emotion deeply challenged his commitment to reason as the cornerstone of his religious life. In Johnson’s view, contemplating the dearly departed provides the living with moral impetus. While it is natural for the death of someone near to heighten one’s own sense of mortality (vitae brevitas) or to consider how one might respond when faced with the prospect of their own death (ars moriendi), these are of secondary importance to Johnson: the primary moral function of the death of others is to spur self-​improvement and reflection upon the life now completed as a model to emulate. This is most clearly reflected in his “Essay on Epitaphs” (1740): the principal intention of epitaphs is to perpetuate the examples of virtue, that the tomb of a good man may supply the want of his presence, and veneration for his memory produce the same effect as the observation of his life. Those epitaphs are,

Death   557 therefore, the most perfect, which set virtue in the strongest light, and are best adapted to exalt the reader’s ideas and rouse his emulation. (Yale Works, vol. xix, 497)

Alternatively, to use Johnson’s own pithy summation: “We profess to reverence the dead not for their sake but for our own” (vol. xix, 500). There is, Johnson warns, a danger of becoming inured to the lessons of death, such is the likely frequency with which we will encounter it—​excepting the profound sense of loss attending the departure of the closest few (Yale Works, vol. iv, 48). Johnson was not the detached and unsentimental being that his rationalist views of death demanded he be, and this is most clear in his experiences of grief. Grief is a natural, righteous, and sometimes inevitable emotion, he acknowledges, a “passion to which the virtuous and tender mind is particularly subject” (vol. iii, 94; cf. vol. xiv, 60). But left unchecked, it degenerates into a vain, affective invention of indolence. In Idler 41, written only days after the death of his mother in 1759, Johnson muses: “The loss of a friend upon whom the heart is fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation” which “finds nothing but emptiness and horror.” Our yearning, our reminiscences, and even our dutiful thoughts of a life lived with honesty and grace often serve only “to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled” (vol. ii, 129). True consolation, he suggests, comes with the divine assurance that can only be afforded in our own death. But in the meantime, as he wrote to James Elphinston (September 25, 1750), the bereaved must diligently abide by the virtuous example of those being mourned: “tears are neither to me nor to you of any further use, when once the tribute of nature has been paid. The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation” (Letters, vol. i, 45). This, for Johnson, is the proper balance of sentiment and duty in the wake of death. Inordinate grief “is a species of idleness” that only leaves us susceptible to “being lacerated and devoured by sorrow for the past” (Johnson to Hester Thrale, March 17, 1773, in Letters, vol. ii, 21). No other event in Johnson’s life—​including perhaps his own death—​challenged his rationalist and pious convictions on mourning, death, and the afterlife more than the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in March 1752. Johnson was understandably inconsolable. As John Taylor related to Boswell, Johnson summoned him in the middle of the night with a letter that “expressed grief in the strongest manner he had ever read,” and upon his arrival found Johnson “in extreme agitation.” Boswell describes his sorrows as “severe, beyond what are commonly endured, I have no doubt” (Life, vol. i, 238–​ 9). Johnson attempts to restore his public guise as rational Christian moralist in the sermon he composed for Elizabeth’s funeral; here he reminds his fellow mourners that grief without religion lends itself to a mind of “gloomy vacuity, without any image or form of pleasure, a chaos of confused wishes, directed to no particular end”; that “the dead will not revive,” so we should not wish for what “we cannot hope to obtain”; and, finally, that “The present moment is in our power . . . Let it, therefore, be our care, when we retire from this solemnity, that we immediately turn from our wickedness,

558   Eric Parisot and do that which is lawful and right” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 267–​7 1). Although the sermon was never delivered—​according to Arthur Murphy, Taylor felt “the praise of the deceased was too much amplified” (vol. xiv, 261 n. 1)—​Boswell labels it “a performance of uncommon excellence . . . full of pious and rational comfort to such as are depressed by that severe affliction which Johnson felt when he wrote it” (Life, vol. i, 241). Perhaps Boswell did not mean to question the authenticity of Johnson’s assuredness by describing his homily as a “performance,” but his private prayers addressing the memory of Elizabeth paint a different picture. In the closet, Johnson deeply struggled to toe his own rationalist line. In a prayer composed in the early hours of April 26, for instance, he seeks consolation in his wife’s continuing presence and ongoing intervention in his life: “O Lord . . . if thou hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living, and appointed my departed wife to have care of me, grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration, whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other manner agreeable to thy government; forgive my presumption, enlighten my ignorance.” It is palpably clear that Johnson denounces this notion as erroneous, proleptically seeking forgiveness in anticipation of God’s censure. It is equally transparent, however, that Johnson’s yearning for emotional comfort was too great to resist. Similarly, on the first anniversary of Elizabeth’s death, Johnson hesitantly succumbs to the Catholic solace of praying for her “conditionally if it were lawful.” Weeks later, he confesses that he knows not whether he does “too much indulge the vain longings of affection” when hoping for “a happy interview” in the afterlife, but reaffirms that he will “not deviate too much from common & received methods of devotion.” Contrarily, in less affected moments, Johnson implores God’s aid to shun these sentimental yearnings for the departed; these are the “vain imaginations” of “idleness,” or to waste his blessed life “in vain searches after things which thou hast hidden from me” (Yale Works, vol. i, 46, 50, 53–​3, 47–​8). If this tension was a pervasive one in Johnson’s meditations upon the dead, it is most forcefully exposed by the personal experience of profound grief at the death of his wife. Joseph Towers remarks on this apparent discord in his biographical essay of 1786, painting Johnson’s “custom of praying for the dead, though unsupported by reason or by scripture” as a lesser variety of “irrational superstition.” However, according to Towers, this emotional susceptibility formed a conspicuous feature of Johnson’s decidedly rational, but ultimately human, nature.9 In a sense, this tension between Johnson’s rationalism and his emotional needs reflects a broader cultural transition. As religious historian Philip C. Almond attests, the Calvinist belief that the state of the soul was fixed at death, as espoused by the likes of Sherlock, Watts, and Johnson himself, represented the orthodox opinion in England from 1660 to 1750.10 But by the mid-​eighteenth 9 

Joseph Towers, “An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” in Brack and Kelley, eds., Early Biographies, 221. 10  Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 69. William Sherlock declares that “there is no altering our State in the other World” in A Practical Discourse concerning Death, 27th ed. (London, 1751), 220; cf. Watts, Improvement.

Death   559 century, this hard line was being eroded by sentimentalism, as exemplified by Johnson’s own concession to the emotional recompense of intercessory prayers for the dead, and his relaxed position on Catholic purgatory. When questioned by Boswell on the existence of purgatory, Johnson reminds him that it is “not revealed” and therefore should not constitute “an article of faith,” but does affirm that a middle way is a “rational supposition” of “no harm,” as is to pray for the souls of the deceased (Life, vol. ii, 162–​3; cf. 104–​5). Likewise the traditional belief in the dissolution of earthly ties at death was challenged by the emergence of a modern view of the afterlife, one that allowed for communication between the living and the dead, and a social rather than a theocentric or beatific vision of heaven.11 The popularity of Elizabeth Rowe’s Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728), a fictional series of letters from beyond the grave that typically intervene in the earthly affairs of the bereaved, speaks to this growing sentimental trend.12 Johnson himself appears to bear an open mind to the issue of communion with the dead; he remarks, for instance, that “five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it” (Life, vol. iii, 230; cf. vol. i, 405–​6). But when pressed on the issue of an earthly community in the realm of the dead, he is stronger in his conviction that all relationships, as we know them in mortal life, will cease to exist: “After death, we shall see every one in a true light. Then, Sir, they talk of our meeting our relations: but then all relationship is dissolved; and we shall have no regard for one person more than another, but for their real value” (Life, vol. ii, 162).13 What might initially appear, then, as a deeply personal tension—​between Johnson’s firm demarcation of life and death and his sensitivity to the emotional void created by such a view—​arguably reflects an important period of transition in the modern conception of the afterlife. For Johnson’s most cogent statements on the dead and their transition into the other world, perhaps one needs to turn to his finely crafted funerary poetry. Johnson saw epitaphs and elegies as focalizing the edifying lessons of the dead. While epitaphs primarily served to promulgate virtue at solemn sites of worship and commemoration, for Johnson elegies ought to be—​borrowing from William Shenstone—​“the effusion of a contemplative mind,” a species of writing that gives voice to natural sentiments in the wake of loss (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1348). To invoke Dustin Griffin’s useful summation, an “epitaph’s end is moral action,” while an elegy’s is “emotional expression.”14 But it is

11 While Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang argue that the focus on a communal and familial concern begins to overshadow an emphasis on divine love after the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–​1772) (Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988], 183), Philip C. Almond suggests such tendencies emerged earlier in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Heaven and Hell, 109). 12  Twenty-​seven editions of Rowe’s Friendship in Death were published from 1728 to 1760. 13 Almond cites this as a sign that Johnson, like others, was “worried about a heaven that was becoming too earthly”: Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 160. 14  Dustin Griffin, “Johnson’s Funeral Writings,” ELH 41, no. 2 (Summer 1974), 195.

560   Eric Parisot the measured combination of both elements in the elegy “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” that marks the poem as the exemplary commemoration of the virtuous dead.15 Johnson much admired Levet, his long-​ time companion and lay-​ physician to the poor, and was deeply moved by his sudden death in January 1782. Weeks later, he recited his elegy to Boswell “with an emotion that gave them full effect” (Life, vol. iv, 165). Moreover, the verses compellingly illustrate many of his views on death and moral living. The poem begins with a grim depiction of mortal life: “Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine, | As on we toil from day to day” (lines 1–​2, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 313–​15). This is an image of universal humanity, irretrievably fallen and destined to seek the solace of redemption that we, ultimately, can never find through our own labors. In keeping with the life of “protracted woe” in The Vanity of Human Wishes (vol. vi, 104), we toil in darkness awaiting the redeeming light of Christ. But as clarified in sermon 15, in which Johnson embellishes the misery of the world with all his rhetorical might, this wretched life motivates us “by necessity [to] turn our thoughts to another life” (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 166). Some, like Levet, abide with grace in this miserable state: “Officious, innocent, sincere” (line 10) in his devoted efforts to alleviate the misery of others, he lives a life of humility, “Obscurely wise,” and “without . . . show” (lines 10, 16). In Johnson’s oft-​quoted epigrammatic line, Levet’s life was one of “a single talent well employ’d” (line 28). This line betrays his nagging doubt over the proper use of his own God-​given gifts, and his preoccupation with the Parable of the Talents; as Boswell reports, “The solemn text, ‘Of him to whom much is given, much will be required’ [Luke 12:48], seems to have been ever present to his mind, in a rigorous sense, and to have made him dissatisfied with his labours and acts of goodness, however comparatively great” (Life, vol. iv, 427).16 Levet, on the other hand, is lauded for his exemplary use of limited abilities, and the poem instills a confidence in Levet’s just reward. But while we witness Levet freed from his chains and exiting the cavernous prison of life (lines 35–​6), the poem reveals nothing of what lies beyond; we as readers are left to remain—​both figuratively speaking and according to the poem’s imagery—​in the dark. Johnson does not append a clichéd vision of holy rapture that abounded in contemporary religious verse to confirm Levet’s recompense, and this is entirely consistent with his view of death as impenetrable to the living. Finally, despite Johnson’s sorrow, his elegy puts into poetic practice what he has preached elsewhere: it is an expression of judicious restraint exhibiting a mastery over undue grief. Much debate has been generated by the elegy’s muted pathos, which has been variably described as decorously detached; as an inferred rather than overt statement of private grief; as the subordination of personal emotion to the universal human condition; and

15  Griffin proposes we see a combination of the elements of elegy and epitaph in Levet’s elegy, a poem that fulfills “Johnson’s recipe for epitaph far better than any of the ‘epitaphs’ do”; “Johnson’s Funeral Writings,” 201. Cf. David F. Venturo, “The Poetics of Samuel Johnson’s Epitaphs and Elegies and ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,’ ” Studies in Philology 85, no. 1 (Winter 1988), 74. 16 Cf. Rambler 154: “He that neglects the culture of ground, naturally fertile, is more shamefully culpable than he whose field would scarcely recompence his husbandry” (Yale Works, vol. v, 57).

Death   561 as a jubilant expression of hope and joy as opposed to plaintive despair.17 Irrespective of one’s ultimate interpretation, of primary significance here is Johnson’s belief that excessive grief only obscures the instructive capacity of the dead. He immortalizes Levet in verse not to lament the loss of a good man, nor to proclaim to the world his ultimate divine reward, but to consecrate Levet’s exemplary life as one worthy of emulation. It is in the trails blazed by our predecessors, the benevolent dead, that we find renewed moral purpose and hope for an undiscovered country.

Iam Moriturus Johnson was a colossus of eighteenth-​century culture: an imposing critic to the literati, an unending source of wit for dilettantes, and a towering moral authority for modern times. It should come as no surprise, then, that many observers took a keen—​if not morbid—​interest in the manner of Johnson’s own death. The importance of dying well had long been established in Christian and popular culture by the time of Johnson’s death in 1784. One’s attitude in the hour of death was said to expose the condition of the soul and provide a clue to one’s ultimate fate. In a sense, the moment of death was a rare opportunity for spectators to witness the nearest thing to divine revelation, turning the deathbed into a theater of curiosity. A “good death”—​one of calm, pious resignation—​could turn a tragic denouement into a scene of triumph, a moment of reassurance for both the actor of the play and their audience.18 As Joseph Addison writes, “There is nothing in History which is so improving to the Reader as those Accounts which we meet with the Deaths of eminent Persons, and of their behaviour in that dreadful Season.”19 Addison’s deathbed experience was long upheld as the eighteenth-​century epitome of holy dying; it is said he sent for a young relation to witness his death, advising him to “See in what peace a Christian can die,” before soon expiring. This scene takes on an almost mythical status in the hands of Edward Young: Addison’s “compositions are but a noble preface; the grand work is his death: That is a work which is read in heaven.”20 Young’s account, published four decades after the event, also speaks to the continuing currency of ars moriendi during this period, and to the power of print to lay bare the intimate scene to spectators across space and time. David Hume’s death, however, piqued the curiosity of many for contrary reasons, with some like Boswell expecting the atheist to suffer pangs of fear, doubt, or remorse in the absence of religious 17  For

a review of these opinions, and his own position in relation to these, see John A. Vance, “A Poem of Joy: Johnson’s ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,’ ” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 4 (Fall 1984), 390–​1. 18  Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–​1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 188. 19  Spectator 289, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. iii, 28–​9. 20  Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), 106.

562   Eric Parisot consolation in his final hours, only to be surprised to hear otherwise (see Chapter 31, “Doubt”). Johnson, incidentally, knew better: “Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention . . . It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right” (Life, vol. iii, 153). Expectation was perversely high for the death of the greatest living moralist of the age. Stories of Addison’s righteous exit and Hume’s unexpectedly easy death encouraged what Lawrence Lipking describes as “competitive dying,” and Johnson was the next major player to enter the fray. Much was at stake for Johnson and his chronicler Boswell; as Lipking explains, an infidel like Hume “could not be allowed to overmatch a Christian. Hence a good death for Johnson was more than a matter of personal happiness. In the eyes of his followers, it was his public duty.”21 This was especially so for someone like Johnson, who visibly placed the problem of death at the center of his religious life, and at such great emotional cost. Johnson himself, however, gave little credence to the art of dying well. “The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives,” he reminds his readers in his Life of Pope (Yale Works, vol. xiii, 1167).22 Elsewhere in his Lives he demonstrates by example: Thomas Otway dies in penury, and ingloriously by choking; the solemnity of John Dryden’s funeral is interrupted by a gang of drunken youths; the last words of Richard Savage, who had a famously retentive memory, were to say that he’d forgotten what he was saying.23 Death, like life, interrupts, humiliates, confounds—​in modern vernacular, it happens. But this, in Johnson’s view, bears little reflection on the moral quality of the individual, their preceding life, or their prospects in futurity. “The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time,” Johnson vehemently affirms when quarreling with Boswell (Life, vol. ii, 106–​7).24 But well he might claim that the manner of one’s exit does not prefigure the prospect of God’s favor, for Johnson severely doubted his capacity to face death without shameful fear. “What shall free us from reluctance?” he asks of Boswell decades before his death: “Those who have endeavoured to teach us to die well, have taught few to die willingly: yet I cannot but hope that a good life might end at last in a contented death” (Life, vol. i, 365). In his final months, his anguish is more conspicuous when writing to Hester Thrale (March 2, 1784): “Write to me no more about dying with a grace; when you feel what I have felt in approaching eternity—​in fear of soon hearing the sentence of which there is no revocation, you will know the folly” 21  Lawrence

Lipking, “The Death and Life of Samuel Johnson,” Wilson Quarterly 8, no. 5 (Winter 1984), 142. 22  Cf. Jeremy Taylor, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying, 25th ed. (London, 1739), 233: “make no judgment concerning the dying person, by his dying quietly or violently, with comfort or without, with great fears of cheerful confidence, with sense of without.” 23 Isobel Grundy claims Johnson “stands at a turning-​ point between an older sensibility and a very modern one” on the matter of the relation between death and the life that precedes it: “Samuel Johnson: A Writer of Lives Looks at Death,” Modern Language Review 79, no. 2 (April 1984), 257–​62. 24 Controversially, even suicide was seen by Johnson to reveal little about one’s fitness for salvation: see Life, vol. iv, 225–​6.

Death   563 (Letters, vol. iv, 293). Ever the pragmatist, he could not be sure of his demeanor when the hour of his death finally arrived. Johnson lingered in tentative hope until December 13, 1784. Did he die with a calm fortitude steeled by years of preparatory thoughts of death? Or did he suffer in miserable doubt to the last? And what were the last words of the great moralist—​a witty encapsulation of a life’s work to effect his apotheosis, or something menial to forever ground Johnson’s death in mundanity? In truth, it depends on whose account. John Hoole reports that upon his arrival at eleven o’clock he encountered the departing Miss Morris, who came to ask Johnson for his blessing. Boswell corroborates this: “The Doctor turned himself in his bed, and said, ‘God bless you, my dear!’ These were the last words he spake” (Life, vol. iv, 417–​18). For Boswell these final words were befitting of Johnson’s exalted virtue, that when approaching the uncertain climax of his religious life he selflessly concerned himself with the moral welfare of others. It is the very quality that prompted Hannah More to remark that “No action of his life became him like the leaving it.”25 Coupled with John Byng’s “very agreeable account” of Johnson as “perfectly composed, steady in hope, and resigned to death,” Boswell fashions an archetypal “good death” of—​to borrow from the last line of his biography—​a character worthy of “admiration and reverence” both now and in futurity (Life, vol. iv, 418, 430). Hoole, however, undermines the pathos of Boswell’s triumphant scene with a further observation: later in the day, Johnson “took a little warm milk in a cup when he said something upon its not being properly given into his hand and I believe this was the last time he spoke.” This is not the enduring image of a moral giant vanquishing fear at the last, but the mundane figure of a grumpy old man. Hoole, moreover, concludes his narrative with “the most awful sight of Dr. Johnson laid out in his bed without life!—​”26 If the stark image of Johnson’s lifeless body wasn’t enough, Hoole’s choice to end his narrative with an exclamation point and an indeterminate dash doubly confirms the finality of Johnson’s end and the discomfiting uncertainty of what lies ahead. While Boswell attempts to direct his reader’s attention to Johnson’s transcendence, Hoole reminds us of the corporeal reality from which we are being diverted. Boswell’s construction of Johnson’s blessed death is undermined further still by the “strange dark manner” of Hawkins’s earlier biography (Life, vol. iv, 395). Hawkins begins his account of Johnson’s final day with the gruesome episode of the great man rashly stabbing at his own legs, first with a lancet and then a pair of scissors, to discharge the excessive fluid caused by dropsy. Hawkins surmises that the “great effusion of blood,” believed to be eight to ten ounces, brought on the doze that would see Johnson out to his end. The scene is given further context by the adjacent recollection of Johnson’s row with surgeon William Cruikshank: “ ‘Deeper, deeper,’ Johnson cried, ‘I will abide the consequence: you are afraid of your reputation, but that is nothing to me.’—​To those 25  William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2nd ed. (London, 1834), vol. i, 394. 26  John Hoole, Journal Narrative Relative to Doctor Johnson’s Last Illness Three Weeks before His Death, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Iowa City, IA: Windhover Press, 1972), Monday, December 13 (no pagination).

564   Eric Parisot about him, he said,—​‘You all pretend to love me, but you do not love me so well as I myself do.’ ”27 This is a different image of the dying Johnson: ungracious, frail, and desperately clinging to life. It is profoundly ironic that Johnson did not heed his own counsel against “being lacerated and devoured by sorrow for the past,” which manifests physically here (Johnson to Hester Thrale, March 17, 1773, in Letters, vol. ii, 21).28 But Hawkins attempts to restore his reputation by dubiously ascribing last words that are unrecorded by Hoole or Boswell. Hawkins claims that he was informed by Francesco Sastres that Johnson murmured “Iam moriturus” in his last moments. The phrase meaning “now I am about to die” echoes the salutation of Roman gladiators to Caesar, and portrays a stoic and heroic image of Johnson to redress the less palatable depiction of a distracted Johnson driven to self-​mutilation. It also recalls Boswell’s figurative portrayal of Johnson fighting his beasts—​his apprehensions over death—​in the Roman Coliseum. This presumably inadvertent association, though, brings a different inflection to these final words reported by Hawkins; they possibly reflect Johnson’s sense of defeat, his once indefatigable sense of reason finally giving way to restless doubt and horror that are now, in his last moments, at the height of their power. In any case, Paul J. Korshin convincingly refutes Hawkins’s testimony, chiefly by highlighting Sastres’s later admission to Boswell that he was not present when Johnson died.29 But this fictional scene does enable Hawkins to reconcile Johnson’s final day with the rest of his life as paragon of reason and virtue. For Hawkins, it is the combination of the two contrasting images of Johnson on his deathbed—​distraught and self-​destructive at times, resigned yet resolute in the last—​that fulfills Johnson’s anticipated apotheosis from human to immortal, from living moralist to virtuous dead. It is Johnson’s triumph over his very human frailties that makes him exemplary, in Hawkins’s view. Many “have appeared possessed of more serenity of mind in this awful scene” than Johnson, but Hawkins “wished to attract attention to the conduct of this great man, under the most trying circumstances human nature is subject to.” This juxtaposition of “doubts and scruples” and “religious humility” “give[s]‌his friends a pious hope.”30 According to Johnson’s own terms, his departed soul left “a lifeless body to human malice” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 95). Cruikshank ordered an autopsy, while Joshua Reynolds took a mold of his face for a death mask. But it was the biographical anatomization of his life by Hawkins, Boswell, and Thrale—​who published Anecdotes of the Late Samuel

27 

John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 358. Lipking interprets this passage as “perhaps the most aggressive last words in the canon” and the last words “that suit Johnson best” (“Death and Life,” 150–​1), but seems to have misinterpreted the chronological sequence of events in Hawkins’s account. 28 Cf. Sermon 10: “So tenaciously does our credulity lay hold of life, that it is rare to find any man . . . so far wasted and enfeebled with disease, as not to flatter himself with hopes of recovery” (Yale Works, vol. iv, 112). 29  Paul J. Korshin, “Johnson’s Last Days: Some Facts and Problems,” in Paul J. Korshin, ed., Johnson after Two Hundred Years (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 70. 30 Hawkins, Life, 358–​9.

Death   565 Johnson in 1786—​that perturbed some. The latter two in particular are mocked and censured by satirist John Wolcot (Peter Pindar) in his eclogue Bozzy and Piozzi (1786): Just like two Mohawks on the man you fall—​ No murd’rer, is worse serv’d at Surgeon’s Hall. Instead of adding splendor to his name, Your books are downright gibbets to his fame.31

An anonymous author begins their own biography of Johnson, published the same year, by accusing Hawkins, Boswell, and Thrale of violating the memory of their beloved subject: “With a new and base species of intellectual anatomy, they have laid open his heart after his death, and have produced to the observation of mankind parts of its constituent materials not always creditable to the dead, but what is perhaps of still more consequence, in the highest degree, afflicting to the living.”32 But evidence suggests that Johnson himself would differ on the matter. As he suggests in Rambler 60, the biographer’s attention should not be drawn by “those performances and incidents, which produce vulgar greatness,” but instead by “the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.” It is from “the manners or behavior” of the biographical subject “that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 321–​2). Likewise for the epitaphist, it is the articulation of private virtue that must be given primacy, of “virtue exerted in the same circumstances in which the bulk of mankind are placed, and which, therefore, may admit of many imitators” (vol. xix, 503). What was objectionable in Johnson’s biographies to some would likely be seen as necessary for him. His obstinate and, at times, unbecoming fear of death, as exposed in the recording of his private moments and conversations, was a frailty to which nigh all of humanity could relate. Far from dishonoring him, the immense printed record of his tremulous attitude to his own mortality and salvation elevates Johnson to rare eminence in death, as the benevolent hero of common humanity.

Further Reading Griffin, Dustin. “Johnson’s Funeral Writings.” ELH 41, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 192–​211. Grundy, Isobel. “Samuel Johnson: A Writer of Lives Looks at Death.” Modern Language Review 79, no. 2 (April 1984): 257–​65. Hagstrum, Jean H. “On Dr. Johnson’s Fear of Death.” ELH 14, no. 4 (December 1947): 308–​19.

31 Peter Pindar, Bozzy and Piozzi; or, The British Biographers: A Town Eclogue (London, 1786), 51. See also Helen Deutsch, “Doctor Johnson’s Autopsy, or Anecdotal Immortality,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 113–​27. 32  Anon., “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” in Brack and Kelley, eds., Early Biographies, 223.

566   Eric Parisot Korshin, Paul J. “Johnson’s Last Days: Some Facts and Problems.” In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 55–​76. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Lipking, Lawrence. “The Death and Life of Samuel Johnson.” Wilson Quarterly 8, no. 5 (Winter 1984): 140–​51.

Chapter 31

D ou bt Carrie D. Shanafelt

Of the many ways in which he resisted the intellectual fashions of his era, Samuel Johnson’s contempt for philosophical skepticism is among the best known and the most baffling, both to his contemporaries and to readers today. Described as a habitually skeptical person by his friends as well as his enemies, Johnson was suspicious of evidence in nearly every case—​historical records as well as personal accounts, linguistic and political theory, and textual attribution. He hated forgery, fraud, and dissembling, and worked to expose James Macpherson’s forgery of the Ossian poems, though many readers wished him to leave the matter alone.1 As Martin Maner has shown, Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets does nearly as much to debunk long-​held just-​so stories about celebrated writers as it does to assert positive biographical truth.2 And although his extensive writings on law, religion, and morality ultimately reassert traditional values, he nearly always constructs new epistemic and pragmatist foundations for those values, never holding classical or scholastic sources to be above criticism. In this light, his hostility to fellow skeptics may strike one as hypocritical, even churlish. As skeptical as he may appear to have been, Johnson was also terribly anxious about the proliferation of skeptical methods and rhetoric in contemporary discourse, which threatened the authority of nearly all theological argument, and centralized the authority of individual empirical experience over traditional wisdom. In A Dictionary of the English Language and in his review of Soame Jenyns, Johnson expresses concerns about the potentially contagious nature of doubt and its devastating effects on readers 1 Thomas Curley suggests that Johnson may have been motivated to expose Macpherson out of guilt that his own Parliamentary Debates (1741–​4), reconstructed as full speeches based on notes from the proceedings, had been taken as reportage of actual speeches, which he could not have heard or recorded. Published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, these speeches were presented as “Debates in the Senate of Lilliput,” and presented under lightly disguised real names. Curley believes that Johnson’s brush with accusations of forgery may have contributed to his extreme disapproval of any form of authorial fraudulence, whether intended or unintended. Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22–​3. 2  Martin Maner, “Samuel Johnson, Skepticism, and Biography,” Biography 12, no. 4 (Fall 1989), 302–​19.

568   Carrie D. Shanafelt who found themselves especially vulnerable to crises of religious faith, including himself. Turning the eye of his skepticism onto the prejudice of individual experience and speculation, he intended to contribute to the development of an intellectual culture in which the general reader could participate with more credulity—​not that they could ever find truth in this life, but that they would not lose the hope that motivates the search for divine knowledge. It is difficult to discern what criteria, if any, Johnson had about which areas of knowledge should be protected from skeptical criticism, or why. In some cases, he suggests that skepticism about religion is dangerous, but religion is not the only traditional knowledge he defends from skepticism. At times it is a matter of audience, not wanting to influence readers who may be young or otherwise vulnerable to a crisis of faith or morality. At other times his rejection of skepticism is on the basis that it is purely academic or merely fashionable. In a discussion of skepticism with James Boswell, Johnson noted, “It is always easy to be on the negative side” (Life, vol. i, 428). As he went on to explain, taking a critical position is tempting, because it returns the burden of evidence to the interlocutor to risk making a positive claim in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion of bad faith. In matters of less cosmic importance, such as anecdotal accounts of experience, Johnson seems inclined to apply the greatest possible skepticism, while recommending precaution in expressing public doubt about metaphysical matters, such as theology and the nature of existence. Structuralist and poststructuralist analysis of doubt, skepticism, and dialectic formed the bedrock of critical debate on Samuel Johnson’s life and writing across the latter half of the twentieth century. Scholars endeavored, first, to draw clear boundary lines between Johnson’s skeptical and anti-​skeptical positions and, later, to reconcile them as part of a more complex system of thought that would yield the best fruits of his dialectical wisdom, if properly gleaned.3 These studies are interlinked as debates, as later writers continually found earlier arguments to be not necessarily incorrect, but incomplete, and contradicted by other evidence from Johnson’s extensive poetic, narrative, and critical writing, as well as reported conversation with Hester Thrale, Boswell, and others. With so much conflicting evidence to draw from in a long intellectual life, preserved by the work of so many hands, Johnsonians who seek to construct a coherent explication of his 3 

A rich vein of Johnson scholarship has attempted to define or describe Johnson’s critical analysis of observation and evidence; I list a sample of relevant sources here in chronological order: Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); John Wright, “Samuel Johnson and Traditional Methodology,” PMLA 86, no. 1 (January 1971), 40–​50; Howard Weinbrot, “The Reader, the General, and the Particular: Johnson and Imlac in Chapter Ten of Rasselas,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 5, (Fall 1971), 80–​96; Arthur Scouten, “Dr. Johnson and Imlac,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 1973), 506; Ian Donaldson, “Samuel Johnson and the Art of Observation,” ELH 53, no. 4 (1986), 788–​91; Martin Maner, The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Philip Davis, In Mind of Johnson: A Study of Johnson the Rambler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Charles Hinnant, “Steel for the Mind”: Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994); and Philip Smallwood, Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

Doubt   569 analytical methodology must either limit themselves to a small category of evidence or give up hope of forging a key that fits every lock. More recent scholarship on Johnson has largely abandoned the search for an objective logic that guides Johnson’s critical project, instead turning to more subjective analysis of Johnson’s experiences of doubt. This work is subjective, in part, in the sense that Johnson himself was, as Fred Parker writes, “an unsystematic and anti-​systematic thinker, the quality of whose thought is inextricably bound up with the manner of his writing, lending itself badly to abstraction.”4 Unlike many of his contemporaries, who aspired to objectivity and consistency as the goals of true observation, Johnson openly rejected empiricist objectivity as either a possible method or a desirable end of discourse. Rather, he avowed that affinities, desires, fears, limitations, beliefs, and pleasures guide all thinking, and that “systems” of thought can only lead one into absurdity, not objectivity. Well before what Charles Taylor calls the “massive subjective turn” in late eighteenth-​century philosophy,5 Johnson criticized empiricist objectivity as either naive or dishonest about the experience of thinking from a particular subject position. In recent years, scholars have begun to acknowledge not only Johnson’s subjectivity, but also their own as readers and critics, in imitation of his generous admission of the subjective nature of his analytical method. In Loving Dr. Johnson, Helen Deutsch acknowledges her subjective perspective in relation to her subject, self-​consciously analyzing his work and life as an act of affective affinity. Deutsch positions her work as a homage to the inconvenient fact that Johnson’s lasting reputation was built on the shifting sands of personal anecdote and intimate observation by his friends. She writes, “The man whom the Home University Library termed the paradigm of English sanity was plagued famously with fears of madness, death, and worse, an eternity of damnation—​by what we might call an existential terror of moral and literal endlessness.”6 In order to make peace between these conflicting images of Johnson, Deutsch proposes that one might acknowledge, along with Johnson, that our own analysis is necessarily driven by “desire, fantasy, narcissistic misrecognition, and unsettling confrontation with the alien.”7 The same Dr. Johnson who was an avatar in the twentieth century for the common-​sense British Enlightenment has become a wholly new figure in recent scholarship that draws on all of the same sources; he is moody, unpredictable, intellectually heroic in the face of trauma, and alternatively skeptical and credulous for untraceable reasons—​a human mind and heart, rather than an efficient mechanism for analysis. Johnson’s tendency toward skepticism, censure of skepticism, and criticism of anti-​ skepticism suggests a mind at cross purposes with itself, and anti-​systematic to the point

4  Fred

Parker, “ ‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Johnson and Moral Philosophy,” in Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, eds., Samuel Johnson after 300 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15. 5  Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 29. 6  Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 27. 7 Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson, 17.

570   Carrie D. Shanafelt of incoherence. Yet all three of these positions indicate that Johnson was fundamentally at odds with the prevailing contemporary discourse of evidence. For Johnson, doubt should be applied not only to the object under consideration, but also to the mind that approaches that object. The more confident we are in our judgment, the more doubt we may express about an object; the more doubtful we are of ourselves, the less we may criticize the wisdom of others. Without an accurate and humble assessment of one’s faculties and state of mind, Johnson fears that doubt and skepticism become merely rhetorical devices, used to make easy triumphs at the cost of sincere conversation about what is commonly accepted as truth. In this chapter, I examine three layers of Johnson’s perspectives on skepticism to demonstrate his desire for writers and philosophers to turn the eye of doubt inward, while general readers are encouraged to doubt themselves less, and to maintain a healthy skepticism about the fashionable ideas of the moment. In these ways, Johnson models a process of Christian discernment that depends on a conception of the self that is ill-​suited to post-​Lockean British empiricist discourse, but that anticipates the late eighteenth-​century return to metaphysics (see Chapter 28, “Philosophy”).

Johnson the Skeptic In spite of all that he said and wrote about the contagious, dangerous, intellectually dishonest nature of skepticism, it is difficult to conceive of Johnson as something other than a rigorous skeptic himself. In every aspect of his critical, poetic, and narrative writing, religious contemplation, and conversation, Johnson ruthlessly pares away at unsoundness and inconsistency to reveal what he believed could remain—​the unbending truth or excellence at the core of a text, idea, or person, if one exists. Martin Maner describes Johnson’s method in the Lives of the English Poets as a form of skeptical historical dialectic, in which a tentative conclusion is built on the shaky foundation of evidence that has been found to be dubious. “Johnson’s sceptical manner is a form of philosophical dialectic, a way of juxtaposing probabilities and forcing us to choose. By means of it he keeps his inferential procedures visible, as though he wants us to see him judging probabilities, testing the limits of biographical inference.”8 His skepticism about reported, unverifiable information in the Lives is thorough, questioning both the truth of reported events and also the motives of the witnesses who have reported them. By demonstrating his process of analysis for the reader, we are invited to learn how he has arrived at a particular conclusion, and we have been given the materials to consider the wisdom of his solution for ourselves. This rhetoric of historical dialectic demonstrates Johnson’s twin skepticisms: he is skeptical about evidence when it comes from other people, who certainly have personal

8 

Maner, “Samuel Johnson, Skepticism, and Biography,” 302.

Doubt   571 interest in communicating a particular kind of narrative about the life of the poet, and he is skeptical enough of his own prejudices and expectations to present accounts that may conflict with his own understanding. In this sense, Johnson’s historical writing is far more skeptical than that of self-​proclaimed skeptic David Hume, whose History of England applied rigorous doubt to the extant narratives of political events, but not to his own self-​interest in devising a coherent narrative of progress. By offering competing accounts of historical events, and performing his analysis of those accounts on the page, Johnson models self-​consciousness in exposing the materials and method of his discernment. Johnson’s rhetorical practice of exposing the terms of his analysis was deeply troubling to many readers at the time, as it contrasted with the confident rhetoric of consensus epistemology, which could be skeptical of traditional and received knowledge, but laid the foundations of argument in a shared experience of modern life. In an anonymous pamphlet called The Deformities of Samuel Johnson (1782), attributed to James Thomas Callender, the author vituperates against Johnson as a moralist and a critic, in part on the basis that he “leaps at once from the wildest scepticism to the wildest credulity.”9 Callender expresses frustration that a writer of Johnson’s stature pretends to doubt himself at the same moment that he is dismissing common opinions and observations, as well as the ideas of other great writers. “But while we thus meet with something that is ridiculous in every page, we are not to forget even for a moment, what we have often heard, and what is most unquestionably true, viz. That Dr Johnson is the father of British literature, the capital author of his age, and the greatest man in Europe!!!”10 Instead of reading Johnson’s rigorous skepticism as earnest, soul-​searching discernment, Callender and many of his contemporaries began to see him as a literary cynic, whose distrust of others is matched only by his performative distrust of himself. In an intellectual culture increasingly dictated by critical consensus as common sense, Callender and other contemporary writers had little patience for Johnson’s failure to develop consensus even within himself. The problem with Johnson’s rhetoric of skepticism is, of course, that the demonstration of the analysis often undermines the decisiveness of the conclusion. In matters of religion, the visible dialectic of skeptical discernment in his rhetoric has made him vulnerable to a bizarre range of speculations about his “true” beliefs and doubts. Blanford Parker notes that Johnson’s rhetoric leaves the interpretation of his skepticism open to such wildly different readings that some readers have been “almost convinced of his agnosticism” while others see him as “the very type of the God-​possessed,”11 which suggests to many critical readers that he was either confused or in conflict with himself about the nature of divine knowledge. Parker concludes, however, that this division in

9 

James Thomas Callender, The Deformities of Samuel Johnson (Edinburgh, 1782), 15.

10 Callendar, Deformities, 34. 11 

Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234–​5.

572   Carrie D. Shanafelt Johnson’s methods of analysis is quite strictly drawn around matters of faith, written in the form of religious mystery, which may look to the secular world like negative proof. Parker claims instead that, as a fideist C, Johnson often applied humanist skepticism to worldly matters, but for things unseen he employed religious discernment, which constitutes an alternate epistemic modality from the empiricist discourse of his contemporaries. For fideist Christians, skepticism is not reserved only for the objects of evidence, but must also be applied to the subject of thought, as one’s perception and interpretation may be under the influence of worldly motives as well as divine help. Parker writes, “He wished to observe and understand as far as one could through the broken glass of experience, his fellow creature.”12 Johnson’s sense of experience as a “broken glass,” in Parker’s phrase, was not shared by his otherwise-​skeptical empiricist contemporaries, who trusted nothing but experience, fully convinced of the accuracy of their own observations, while doubting traditional and received knowledge as the products of priestcraft and scholasticism. Johnson’s skepticism about his own motives and limitations as an observer may appear to readers today as refreshingly frank, but it struck some of his contemporaries as tantamount to an admission of intellectual failure and ineptitude. Jack Lynch reads Johnson’s resistance to skepticism about religion in a less certain light than Parker. The fact that Johnson only and exclusively barred himself from doubt in the case of God is possible evidence that Johnson had rather serious doubts indeed, and found bare assertion of faith to be the only balm for a rigorously, habitually skeptical mind. Lynch writes, “Belief, therefore, is a matter of discipline: it is not entirely something that happens to you, but something at least partly under the control of the will. A defiant insistence on belief is not dodging the question, but confronting it head-​on.”13 Lynch concludes that Johnson knew he struggled with disbelief, and could succumb to despair and cynicism if he devoted himself to the kind of excoriating skepticism in religion that he applied so freely to biography and critical analysis. He seems to have been particularly careful to warn public readers against too much skepticism about fundamental truths like religion, even in his lexicography, where a spiritually vulnerable person might go to seek answers.

Johnson the Anti-​Skeptic In A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson’s relevant definitions and illustrative quotations demonstrate his concerns about the potential outcomes and intentions of overly rigorous uncertainty. A skeptick is “One who doubts, or pretends to doubt, of every thing,” slyly suggesting that the extreme skepticism of intellectuals is an

12 Parker, Triumph, 249. 13 

Jack Lynch, “Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever,” Eighteenth-​Century Life 29, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 16.

Doubt   573 affectation rather than a sincere experience of epistemic crisis. All of the quotations that follow render the “skeptic” a figure of pity or derision, or, in the case of Alexander Pope, impossibility: With too much knowledge for the sceptick’s side, With too much weakness for the stoick’s pride, Man hangs between. Pope’s Essay on Man.

Here Johnson bends the quotation a little for the purpose of illustration, and omits the next clause, in which Pope clarifies that, although Man may not succeed in living as a philosophical skeptic, he exists in a real, constant state of doubt, the state that Johnson used to define skeptick: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err.14

In isolation, the lines quoted in the Dictionary suggest that a true skeptic does not exist; one cannot live on knowledge from experience alone, and depends, to some extent, on received or traditional knowledge. The skeptic is therefore someone who may aspire to doubt received knowledge, and even claim to have really done so, but must adopt some received ideas in order to communicate meaningfully with other people. The difference between a skeptic and a doubter, as described by Pope, could be delineated in terms of intention: the skeptic, in a neoclassical imitation of Pyrrho, employs systematic doubt to dogma as a method of epistemic praxis, while the doubter questions received knowledge only when experience of the world contradicts it. Though we all may, in the course of life, find that surprising incidents cause us to lose confidence in our prejudices and beliefs, only the philosopher seems to employ purposefully pretended uncertainty to distance himself from the taint of received knowledge. Throughout his work and reported conversation, Johnson found himself particularly irked by those who, it seemed to him, compensated for their lack of ideas by expressing a fabricated inability to verify common ideas and expressions—​inspiring real doubt in others by inventing doubt of their own. Johnson’s definitions of doubt, as a verb and noun, and in related forms (doubter, doubtful) do not suggest the aspect of pretense in the definition of skeptick. To doubt is “To question; to be in uncertainty.” The majority of the quotations included to illustrate the various definitions of doubt are stated in the negative: 14 

Essay on Man, 2.1.5–​10, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 516.

574   Carrie D. Shanafelt Let no man doubt . . . whether there is any hell or no I doubt not to make it appear Doubting not who behind him doth attend why doubt we to incense his utmost ire? it could not have had time to settle into doubt got past doubt no doubt past a doubt Our doubts are traitors

Johnson includes no examples in which doubt is represented as a tool of intellectual inquiry or a purposeful search for truth; rather, doubt is exclusively depicted as a lamentable state, one that a person would strive to overcome. To doubt is not to purify the mind of the idols of received knowledge, but to exist in a state of uneasiness, longing for a return to certain knowledge. One of the few positive representations of “doubt” in these examples comes from the final lines of the first part of Pope’s Essay on Criticism: To teach vain Wits a science little known, T’ admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!15

In Pope’s satirical representation of modern intellectual discourse, the trouble with his contemporaries is that they relentlessly interrogate the received wisdom of previous generations while apparently experiencing no genuine doubt about their ideas and conclusions. Doubt can be a useful intellectual tool, according to Pope—​and, by extension, Johnson—​when it produces humility about the motives and vanity of one’s own interpretation of observed experience. Johnson’s apparent distaste for contemporary philosophers reflects not only disagreement with their (often atheistic) conclusions, but also with their eagerness to reject orthodoxy and received wisdom. A rigorous practice of doubt had become the defining methodology of the Enlightenment, and its acidic skepticism threatened to eat away at the foundations of religion, law, philosophy, and science, without any certainty that a civil and functional society could persist without that foundation. This destruction had been promoted by Sir Francis Bacon in The New Organon (1620),16 in which he named the Idols of the Tribe, Cave, Market, and Theatre as false worship of received knowledge that warps and biases the tools of true observation and rational induction.17 Skepticism

15 Pope, Essay on Criticism, lines 199–​200, in Poems, 150.

16 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17  Blanford Parker notes that humanism had begun this project of erasure long before Bacon: “The Humanists were from the beginning the champions of ‘nature.’ It was not Bacon, but Erasmus who first announced the liberating project.” However, “Only later did the skeptical tensions inherent in the humanistic synthesis widen and challenge orthodoxy from within” (Parker, Triumph, 232).

Doubt   575 was taken up, to varying degrees and in conflicting ways, by seventeenth-​century French philosopher-​scientists René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Blaise Pascal, among others, just as English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke each exercised their own semi-​skeptical analytical methods in epistemology and political theory. In 1704, Jonathan Swift would depict the ensuing attacks on traditional scholarship as the Battle of the Books, in which self-​aggrandizing Moderns declare war on the mighty Ancients, whose powers are prodigious, but difficult to defend against the Moderns’ overweening artifice. As the hostility between the two sides escalates, a spider and a bee in the library begin a parallel dispute. Aesop, interpreting their behavior as an allegory for their own conundrum, says, “For, pray Gentlemen, was ever any thing so Modern as the Spider in his Air, his Turns, and his Paradoxes? He argues in the Behalf of You his Brethren, and Himself, with many Boastings of his native Stock, and great Genius; that he Spins and Spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any Obligation or Assistance from without.”18 Rather than drawing from Nature directly, as the Ancients had done, or even drawing from the knowledge of predecessors, Modern wits had confidence only in themselves, and destroyed others to celebrate their own vanity. Although Johnson took issue with Swift on a number of accounts, he rarely fails to align himself with Swift and Pope in their suspicion of modern forms of skepticism—​ the neo-​Pyrrhonists who seem to doubt for the sake of doubting, declaring triumph over long-​dead foes by simply disbelieving their authority, while rushing to embrace strange solutions for the sake of their novelty. But unlike Pope and Swift, Johnson did not express cynicism about the entire project of skepticism, perhaps because he identified too closely with the skeptical turn of mind. According to Lynch, “It is fair to say he opposed skeptical doctrines and methods, but he was too honest to reject them out of hand.”19 Balancing Johnson’s published statements on skepticism with his private notes and reported conversation, Lynch concludes that Johnson experienced severe epistemic anxiety at times, and, fearing a permanent loss of faith, felt the need to rein in his own skeptical tendencies. Lynch writes, “Johnson felt a real anxiety, sometimes bordering on terror, about the grounds on which we are able to distinguish truth from falsehood.”20 While his contemporaries freely engaged in skeptical thought experiments about religion and epistemology, Johnson treated the skeptical method with, well, skepticism. In expressing doubts about traditional and received knowledge, he feared that readers, including himself, might lose the capacity for belief altogether. In his review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, Johnson seems less perturbed by Jenyns’s conclusions about evil than by his method of analysis, which boasts of the independence of his thought from any of the many writers who have considered the topic before him. Johnson demonstrates that most of Jenyns’s best 18  Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 151–​2. 19  Lynch, “Unbeliever,” 7. 20  Lynch, “Unbeliever,” 3.

576   Carrie D. Shanafelt arguments were first and better articulated by Alexander Pope, but contends that neither author sufficiently differentiates between (what we might call) phenomenology and ontology of evil—​between objects and events that are interpreted by human beings to be bad, and subjects who knowingly perform bad actions. This slippage between objects and subjects is typical of post-​Lockean empiricist philosophy, and Johnson is one of the few readers of this era who identifies it as an error. Johnson’s subsequent criticism is that Jenyns doubts received wisdom too much, and himself too little; this is one of his clearest descriptions of the limitations of the skeptical method in mid-​eighteenth-​century British rhetoric: When this author presumes to speak of the universe, I would advise him a little to distrust his own faculties, however large and comprehensive. Many words easily understood on common occasion, become uncertain and figurative when applied to the works of Omnipotence. Subordination in human affairs is well understood, but when it is attributed to the universal system, its meaning grows less certain, like the petty distinctions of locality, which are of good use upon our own globe, but have no meaning with regard to infinite space, in which nothing is high or low. (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 412–​13)

Johnson objects to contemporary empiricist discourse in that writers who distrust received wisdom typically fail to apply that same skepticism to their own faculties of observation, motives, and prejudices. What we see with the eye or feel with the hand may be biased not only, as Bacon suggested, by the false idols of received knowledge, but also by our own prejudices, caused by limited experience and self-​interest. In the case of theological analysis, like that of Jenyns, empiricist skepticism makes hardly any sense at all. What would it mean to trust our own faculties of perception regarding objects of analysis beyond the reach of human organs? In such matters, we have recourse only to what has been written and said by others, in addition, one may hope, to divine guidance.

Johnson the Anti-​Anti-​skeptic In approaching the last layer of Johnson’s remarks on skepticism and doubt, I find myself in the critical company of those who are baffled by Johnson’s contempt for some of his closest intellectual peers. One can only speculate about the reasons for his animadversion against Berkeley and Hume, the philosophers with whom he seems to have the most in common. As philosophers whose skepticism was explicitly mitigated by anti-​skeptical impulses, Berkeley and Hume, in nearly opposite ways, challenged themselves to produce theoretical works that establish modern, clear, coherently argued claims for rather traditional ideas, even if their methods betray novelty and innovation. Yet, in both cases, aside from a few contemptuous remarks, Johnson was silent on both philosophers in his writing.

Doubt   577 Philosophers have long suggested that Johnson’s famed “refutation” of George Berkeley’s anti-​skeptical skepticism suggests a nearly willful misunderstanding of Berkeley’s epistemology. In an unambiguous rejection of the skeptical turn that had come to define modern intellectual discourse, Berkeley attempted to reconcile contemporary neo-​Pyrrhonist methods with faith in an omniscient and omnipresent God by doubting the real existence of anything but God. Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) dramatizes the process by which an empiricist skeptic is rescued from doubt and despair when he learns to embrace “common sense,” and believe that objects exist in that they are perceived, rather than that they are perceived because they exist. Philonous, the mind-​lover, says to Hylas, defender of matter, “I am content, Hylas, to appeal to the common sense of the world for the truth of my notion. Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry-​tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses.”21 Berkeley considered all sensible qualities we encounter to be part of God, rather than evidence of some objective reality outside of God’s mind or ours. In the twentieth century, philosopher Richard Popkin wrestled with the difficulty of classifying Berkeley as a skeptic, since his explicit justification for his epistemology is to combat the theological despair produced by empiricist skepticism, and provide modern readers with a new philosophical justification for faith.22 By the time James Boswell discussed him with Johnson, Berkeley had become an oddity—​the one post-​Lockean philosopher who reconciled empirical perception with evidence of God rather than with evidence of existence, folding phenomenology into ontology rather than vice versa. Although no major philosophers had followed in his footsteps, Berkeley remained a figure of intellectual fascination because his argument, though absurd, was logically irrefutable. As reported by Boswell: After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,—​“I refute it thus.” (Life, vol. i, 471)

This stone-​kicking refutation is typically cited as Johnson’s prima facie rejection of an idea that he should have corroborated, given the anti-​skepticism he shared with Berkeley about faith and existence. Berkeley redefines perceivable qualities as what

21  George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, ed. Jonathan Dancy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117. 22  Richard H. Popkin, “Berkeley and Pyrrhonism,” The Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 2 (Dec. 1951), 223–​46.

578   Carrie D. Shanafelt we mean when we talk about existence—​and so the heavy stone Johnson kicked is its perceived heaviness, and no refutation of Berkeley at all. In this case, Johnson’s distaste for Berkeley could be that one would need to justify faith to contemporary skeptics using their methods and rhetoric. If religious faith and physical perception, experiences of the mind and the body, must be submitted to contemporary methods for interpretation and analysis, then something may be lost in their elemental, mysterious nature. I believe because I can believe, and I feel and see because I can feel and see. If God has given a person the desire to seek divine answers, those answers should not come from the same methods used by enemies of religion. To reduce faith to a solution derived through analysis is to render it an object of the machinations of intellectual wit, rather than the desire of a subject to seek the divine. In this analysis, I can only speculate about Johnson’s motivations in “refuting” Berkeley, and wonder that no actual refutation found its way into his essays on relevant topics. Boswell, also reduced to speculation, evaluates Johnson’s hasty response as the product of “politicks” (Life, vol. i, 472). In The Passion for Happiness, Adam Potkay entertains a parallel speculation about the intensity of Johnson’s expressions of disgust for David Hume, which, aside from the matter of religion, are surprising given the two writers’ remarkably similar perspectives on the utility of traditional morality. We have little evidence of Johnson’s opinions of Hume, aside from his extremely terse reactions to Boswell’s attempts to reveal to Johnson that they were actually in agreement, repeatedly ending in animosity. During a conversation on attitudes toward death, Boswell tells him that Hume had claimed not to fear death, which incensed Johnson so powerfully that he angrily sent Boswell away, calling out, “Don’t let us meet to-​morrow” (Life, vol. ii, 106–​7). Potkay remains baffled by these dismissals, arguing that Hume and Johnson “concur that happiness or human flourishing is the proper aim not only of ethical precept but also of descriptive psychology, and that its attainment depends partly on political and economic conditions, but primarily on an inner economy, the proper management or regulation of the passions that propel us.”23 He surmises that disciplinary boundaries have prevented current readers from encountering Johnson and Hume as contemporaries writing in many of the same genres—​history and biography, and essays on morality and politics—​in a time when literature and philosophy were not really distinct topics of study. Potkay notes that, just as Johnson was seen as a skeptic who, nevertheless, derided the projects of skeptics, Hume too “had little relish for being thought a ‘skeptical innovator’ and went to great lengths to avoid being tarred with this brush.”24 Like Johnson, Hume sought to offer readers a pragmatist foundation for civil participation in modern society, but while Hume made confident use of observation and language as tools of inquiry, Johnson remained skeptical about the subjectivity of observation and expression.

23  Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 12. 24 Potkay, Passion, 2.

Doubt   579 Even as early as A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–​40), his most skeptical work, Hume describes the feeling of exhaustion and despair from too much time spent in skeptical philosophical inquiry, especially about observation and perception. Like Johnson, he is concerned that doubt may plague the mind and reduce one to cynicism: This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cur’d, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it . . . Carelessness and in-​attention alone can afford us any remedy.25

Just as Johnson desired, as Lynch observes, to combat his habitually skeptical mind with meditation, sociability, and faith, Hume also required respite from his philosophical meditations to avoid succumbing to isolation and despair. The only way to ameliorate the symptoms of excessive skepticism about empirical perception is to engage with life without too much reflection until the next wave of doubt rises. Hume eventually adopted even more explicitly anti-​skeptical methods, and in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) he overcomes skepticism by arguing that our ability to understand narratives depends on a relatively stable shared experience of the world, as well as a common language for expressing that experience. Hume writes, “General language, therefore, being formed for general use, must be moulded on some more general views, and must affix the epithets of praise or blame, in conformity to sentiments, which arise from the general interests of the community.”26 Hume takes for granted that our ability to communicate about moral reflection on experience is evidence that we meaningfully share not only experiences, but also the terms of praise and blame that give our lives meaning and purpose. Nevertheless, Johnson would declare to Boswell that “Hume, and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull” (Life, vol. i, 443–​4). Although Berkeley and Hume were anti-​skeptical skeptics in nearly precisely opposite ways, Johnson opposed them both, on the presumption that each of them had gone about their inquiries using methods that were somehow unnatural, abhorrent in method, and doomed to fail. To the frustration of many of his readers, Johnson refused to engage with either of these philosophers in his written work and seemed to consider them below the dignity of published criticism. To Johnson, the fashionable skepticism of post-​Lockean empirical philosophy should be derided alongside speculative histories, bizarre innovations, and literary hoaxes; possibly he thought that these works of systematic abstraction, whether atheist or Christian, served to eat away at readers’ confidence in the foundations 25 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144. 26  David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115–​16.

580   Carrie D. Shanafelt of knowledge, especially religious belief. Johnson instead proposes that, where positive traditional knowledge is not in conflict with observation, idle assertions of doubt—​as well as too-​confident assertions of faith—​may pose intellectual and spiritual danger for vulnerable readers. Johnson wanted to maintain the possibility that the mysteries of human nature necessarily evaded human understanding, and that the most rigorous empiricist skepticism was ultimately never skeptical enough. Yet to claim a divine perspective on human nature would be blasphemous, as well as plainly incorrect. In The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, the final chapter is “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded,” outstripping even Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme in its humility about providing the reader with a path for right action. Both Rasselas and Candide were published in 1759, and both works narrate the adventures of a young man and woman, a male mentor, and a female servant leaving a formerly idyllic setting to travel abroad and seek a path of life that will make them happy. In both narratives, the characters attempt to find happiness through wealth, love, learning, and adventures, but find that even contentment is fleeting, troubled by the mind even beyond complications of circumstance. But while Voltaire allows his traumatized characters consolation in the form of an agrarian vocation (“il faut cultiver notre jardin”)27, Johnson’s travelers continue to be deluded by false hope for a long time before they simply plan to go home: “Of these wishes that they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained. They deliberated a while what was to be done, and resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abissinia” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 176). While Voltaire’s characters become cynical from their experiences, learning that the true nature of humanity is vanity, betrayal, and cruelty, Johnson’s characters learn only that no one seems to have the answers, but that they cannot stop hoping to find them. Rasselas, Nekayah, Pekuah, and Imlac are not possessed of a heroic will to keep trying despite disappointment; their continued delusional efforts to exceed their own context are simply a part—​for better or worse—​of being human. Whether we are to read their final intention to return to Abyssinia as abandonment of their projects or a plan to embrace hopelessness that will certainly fail, Johnson provides no clues. As a narrative, Rasselas is organized as a series of episodes in which the characters’ continually refreshed longing for answers ends inevitably in dissatisfaction, and yet, unlike the characters in Candide, they never stop believing that the next project they pursue will be the one that brings them lasting joy. As a novelist Johnson seems to know better than his characters that they are trapped in a cycle of hope and disappointment, but he never claims to know, as if he were God, what makes them continue to seek perfect satisfaction in an imperfect world. Unlike Voltaire’s characters, who have found in their travels that there is no satisfaction and nothing else to hope for in this life, Johnson’s find they are driven to hope for something they will never find outside of God.

27 Voltaire,

Candide ou l’optimisme, vol. xlviii of Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1980), 260.

Doubt   581 In comparing these three levels of skeptical inquiry, I wonder if I have not, in my own way, “milk[ed] the bull,” in that Johnson’s anti-​systematic mind is not that of a philosopher, in that he does not trust conclusions, nor is it that of an artist, in that it does not trust perception. Instead, he responds to other authors as a critic, one who is profoundly sensitive to the mysteries of subjectivity, desire, fear, and hope, in an era in which his contemporaries have not begun to consider the world as something other than information to be collated. Johnson’s capacity for doubt, whether he experienced it as a strength or a weakness, gave him a perspective on his world and culture that was singular in its insatiable hunger for real and lasting knowledge.

Further Reading Deutsch, Helen. Loving Dr. Johnson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Lynch, Jack. “Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever.” Eighteenth-​Century Life 29, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 1–​19. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Parker, Fred. “ ‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Johnson and Moral Philosophy.” In Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, edited by Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, 15–​ 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Potkay, Adam. The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Shanafelt, Carrie. “The ‘Plexed Artistry’ of Nabokov and Johnson.” In Samuel Johnson among the Modernists, edited by Anthony W. Lee, 165–​87. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019.

Chapter 32

Hope Adam Potkay

I am afraid, every man that recollects his hopes, must confess his disappointment; and own, that day has glided unprofitably after day, and that he is still at the same distance from the point of happiness. —​Adventurer 69, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 391 It is not therefore from this world, that any ray of comfort can proceed, to cheer the gloom of the last hour. But futurity still has its prospects; there is yet happiness in reserve, which, if we transfer our attention to it, will support us in the pains of disease, and the languor of decay . . . Hope is the chief blessing of man, and that hope only is rational, of which we are certain that it cannot deceive us. —​Rambler 203, in Yale Works, vol. v, 295

Worldly vs. Christian Hope My two epigraphs may at first glance appear to be contradictory. In the first, hope, as experienced by each individual (“every man”), disappoints. This hope, never drawing one nearer to the vanishing point of happiness, is implicitly discouraged. In the second epigraph, however, hope is encouraged as a blessing that will not deceive, and that belongs to us collectively as “man.” But this latter hope is not of “this world”: “futurity” serves as polite code for Christian immortality and the happiness of heaven. The hope for eternal salvation, rational to the degree that it is based on theology as well as revelation, is a Christian virtue rooted in St. Paul’s epistles and especially 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three” (King James Version). By contrast, the hopes that Johnson addresses in Adventurer 69, and copiously throughout his writings and conversation, are personal hopes or wishes for earthly

Hope   583 goods and a future that might fulfill the wants (in the sense of both desires and lacks) of the present. About these later and various hopes, much can be said—​because, Johnson remarks, they are only breath, insubstantial. Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson records Johnson’s distinction between theological hope, which needs no elaboration, and temporal hope, which is nothing but expatiation: Some one urged in his presence the preference of hope to possession; and as I remember it, produced an Italian sonnet on the subject. “Let us not (cries Johnson) amuse ourselves with subtleties and sonnets, when speaking about [theological] hope, which is the follower of faith and the precursor of eternity; but if you only mean those air-​built hopes which to-​day excites and to-​morrow will destroy, let us talk away, and remember that we only talk of the pleasures of hope; we feel those of possession, and no man in his senses would change the last for the first: such hope is a mere bubble, that by a gentle breath may be blown to what size you will almost, but a rough blast bursts it at once.”1

Johnson’s bifurcated sense of hope has deep roots in the Western tradition. Since the rise of Christianity, hope has been a double-​edged concept: on one hand, it is a passion or emotion, and its contrary is either fear or despair.2 On the other hand, hope of a specific kind is one of the three theological virtues, along with faith and “charity”/​caritas, better translated as love. This hope’s opposite is despair, the vice of abdicating that which a Christian should have. As a theological virtue—​the anticipation of sharing eternally in the glory of God—​hope is always a good thing in Christian cultures (see Chapter 36, “God”). It’s not something one can have too much of. Neither is it misdirected. Although hope is typically a response to a possible but uncertain future outcome, people of faith can nevertheless expect eternal life with certainty.3 Thus Johnson maintains in Rambler 203, “that hope only is rational, of which we are certain that it cannot deceive us” (Yale Works, vol. v, 295).

1  Hester Piozzi, Anecdotes, in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 278. 2 Thomas Aquinas primarily opposes the passion of hope to despair, and only secondarily to fear; see Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of “Summa Theologiae” 1a2ae 22–​48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 215–​30, 226, 238–​9. However, hope appears as an emotion opposed to fear in Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, 4.37.80) and the mechanistic analyses of the passions found in Spinoza, Hume, and others. Parts of this tradition are reviewed by Jayne M. Waterworth, A Philosophical Analysis of Hope (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 32–​40. For Waterworth, hope is not clearly an emotion, as it lacks the “characteristic feelings” associated with other emotions: for example, “cowering in fear” (41). Whereas Aristotle, in The Art of Rhetoric (1.11.5), finds a pleasurable sensation in hope, Waterworth argues that it is not “necessarily the case that one who hopes should experience any hedonic tone at all” (57). 3  Terry Eagleton notes that “the Anglican funeral service speaks of the ‘sure and certain’ hope of resurrection. Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Heinrich Rengsdorf write of ‘confident waiting and trustful hope.’ The truth is that Christians have hope not because the future is obscure but because it is in some inscrutable sense well founded.” Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 82. See also Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986), 107–​9.

584   Adam Potkay With respect to worldly things, hoping—​like its kindred activity, wishing—​is oriented toward an unknowable future. And depending on hope’s intentional object, it may be morally problematic. Hope has been judged as either a good or bad thing depending both on its object—​is that which one hopes for worthy or not?—​and also on the likelihood of that object’s attainability—​is one’s hope reasonable or not? Moralists, most notably the authors of Ecclesiastes, and Juvenal in his tenth Satire, have presented most worldly hopes or wishes as vain enticements, since no worldly relationship or possession can secure satisfaction. Wish and hope are linked concepts. Johnson’s Dictionary defines to hope as “to live in expectation of some good” and “to expect with desire”; it then defines to wish as “to have a strong desire,” noting secondarily that wish “has a slight significance of hope.” Hope presupposes desire, and thus to wish in that word’s primary sense (“a strong desire”); in its secondary sense wish blurs into the hope it “slightly” signifies. The vanity of most or all hopes is commonplace in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophical traditions and the Latin poetry they inspired. The Stoic Seneca, in his more temperate moods, recommends “let us restrict the range of hope” in order to avoid disappointment and anger.4 Less moderately, he advises against hope altogether: “cease to hope . . . and you will cease to fear.”5 Boethius concurs in The Consolation of Philosophy: “Fly from hope and sorrow. The mind is clouded, bridled and bound, where these things reign.”6 For Horace, in Ode 1.11, the uncertainty and brevity of life preclude “long hopes” (spem longam), and so he famously counsels “seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible” (carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero).7 Classical distrust of hope is juxtaposed to its Christian elevation in the dialogue poem “On Hope,” written jointly by Abraham Cowley and Richard Crashaw, and first published in Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple (1646).8 Johnson admired the poem, both Cowley’s stanzas against hope (four out of the poem’s ten) and Crashaw’s stanzas for it. Cowley’s stanzas, published separately as “Against Hope” in his collection The Mistress (1647), comprise the one Metaphysical poem that Johnson applauds in his otherwise

4 

In vicinum spes exeat: from Seneca, De Ira/​On Anger, 3.7, in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), vol. i, 272–​3. 5  Quoting the Stoic Hecato, Seneca writes, Desines, inquit, timere, si sperare desieris: from Seneca, Epistle V, in the Loeb Classical Library edition, Epistles: 1–​65, ed. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 22–​3. 6  My translation from Boethius, book 1, poem 7, lines 27–​ 31: “Spemque fugato | Nec dolor adsit. | Nubila mens est | Vinctaque frenis, | Haec ubi regnant”; in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 172. For Johnson’s translations from Boethius, see Yale Works, vol. vi, 257–​63. 7  My translation from Horace, Odes and Epodes, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 32. 8 Quoted from The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: Norton, 1970), 71–​4. Williams, in his editorial headnote to the poem, remarks that “On Hope” was probably written in the late 1630s or early 1640s, when Crashaw and Cowley were both at Cambridge.

Hope   585 severe delineation of the genre in his Life of Cowley.9 Hope is a cheat, an illusion; a companion to fear; a prelude to disappointment and anger. It is a “vain shadow” (line 5), “Fortunes cheating Lotterie, | Where for one prize an hundred blankes there bee” (lines 51–​2); “Brother of Feare! more gaily clad | The merrier Foole o’th’ two, yet quite as mad” (lines 71–​2). In Crashaw’s corresponding defense, hope, clearly theological, sails above Fortune and the stars (lines 61–​4); it is “Faith’s sister!” and “Feares Antidote!” (81–​2). Cowley and Crashaw’s “On Hope” ends with Crashaw’s verdict: “True Hope’s a glorious Huntresse, and her chase | The God of Nature in the field of Grace” (89–​90). What true hope anticipates is eternal and spiritually perfected life. For Crashaw, it also provides a foretaste of this anticipated state—​hope is “our earlier Heaven!” (line 41)—​ and collapses the present into that future, chronological time into spiritual timelessness. Sweet Hope! Kind cheat! Faire fallacy! by thee Wee are not where, or what wee bee, But what, and where wee would bee: thus art thou Our absent presence, and our future now. (lines 67–​70)

Johnson quoted this stanza among his illustrations to his first definition of hope in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Yet Crashaw’s lines raise a cognitive question: how can we know, now, what eternal life will be like, and without this knowledge, how can hope be our future now? The object of Christian hope is determinate—​ eternal life—​but it is also unspecific, as we can never know what that life will be like. (Hoping for a worldly good, by contrast, can be both determinate and specific.)

Imagining Heaven Not that lack of knowledge can keep us from imagining future life. As Jacob Sider Jost argues, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hell and divine judgment recede in importance, and heaven is increasingly imagined in terms of chronological time and individual personality. In contrast to a “theocentric heaven . . . in which human pleasures and relationships were subsumed in the overwhelming presence of God,” John Bunyan and the Spectator papers popularized “a more humanized heaven in which licit human pleasures and relationships, particularly ties of kinship, marriage, 9  For

Cowley’s “Against Hope” and “For Hope,” see The Collected Works of Abraham Cowley, vol. ii, The Poems, part 1, The Mistress, ed. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth, and J. Robert King (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 71–​3. Johnson, in his Life of Cowley, quotes the first twenty lines of “Against Hope” as the most admirable piece by the Metaphysical poets: “where scholastick speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon Hope, shews an unequalled fertility of invention.” The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vol. i, 213.

586   Adam Potkay and friendship, continue in a new form.”10 In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, hope in a sociable heaven is expressed more strongly by Boswell than by Johnson. Boswell records for April 17, 1778: I talked with regret of the sad inevitable certainty that one of us must survive the other. Johnson. “Yes, Sir, that is an affecting consideration. I remember Swift, in one of his letters to Pope, says, ‘I intend to come over, that we may meet once more; and when we must part, it is what happens to all human beings.’ ” Boswell. “The hope that we shall see our departed friends again must support the mind.” Johnson. “Why yes, Sir.” (Life, vol. iii, 312)

Johnson cites an earlier writer on the certainty of parting, and Boswell wishes it away; Johnson’s reply has more courtesy than conviction. Of Johnson’s deathbed, Boswell writes: “I had the consolation of being informed that he spoke of me on his death-​bed, with affection, and I look forward with humble hope of renewing our friendship in a better world” (Life, vol. iv, 380). A significant exception to Johnson’s general unwillingness to think too much about what happens to souls after death comes in Idler 41, written days after his mother died in January 1759 (see Chapter 30, “Death”). Here a posthumous state is touchingly engaged. The “Gospel, which has brought ‘life and immortality to light,’ ” is introduced through the polite mediating device of a fictional letter written to “Mr. Idler.”11 Our fictional correspondent dares to hope that the living may be cared for by their dead loved ones: “Let hope . . . dictate, what revelation does not confute, that the union of souls may still remain; and that we who are struggling with sin, sorrow, and infirmities, may have our part in the attention and kindness of those who have finished their course and are now receiving their reward” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 130). In short, our dead beloved may tend to us, in some way, wherever they are. Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, does his best to get Johnson to speculate further on our relations to dead loved ones; ghosts; “middle” or purgatorial states; and final salvation.12 In general, however, Johnson was loath to speculate on posthumous experience. Perhaps his imagination was chastened by a passage from Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–​4) that he discusses with Boswell. For Pope, eschatological hope is a virtue natural to all, 10  Jacob Sider Jost, Prose Immortality, 1711–​ 1819 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 25. Cf. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 183–​9; E. Derek Taylor, “Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven,” in Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S.J., Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, 2012), 71–​89. 11  Christ “brought life and immortality to light” is a quotation from 2 Timothy 1:10. 12 See Johnson’s letter of 1750 to Elphinston, encouraging him that his virtuous conduct might increase his dead mother’s happiness (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 211–​12); Johnson’s prayer that his departed wife might attend to him (vol. i, 235–​6); and Boswell’s speculation that Johnson “supposed that there was a middle state after death, previous to the time at which departed souls are finally received to eternal felicity” (vol. i, 240).

Hope   587 its proper object being determinate (eternal life) but unspecific: we don’t know what eternal life will be. Pope gently ironizes an American Indian who hopes—​just as many of Pope’s fellow Europeans did—​for a heaven that looks like an improved version of his life on earth: Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore! What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that Hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind . . . Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n, Behind the cloud-​topt hill, an humbler heav’n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d, Some happier island in the watry waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold! To Be, contents his natural desire, He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.13

In an irony of Pope’s lines, his Indian, humbly content “To Be” in an afterlife, seems more like eighteenth-​century Protestant readers of Addison and Steele than does the Christian who here seeks “Angel’s wing” and “Seraph’s fire”—​a baroque fantasy that seems quite un-​English (that is, Catholic) by 1730.

The Psychology of Hope In conversation with Boswell, Johnson interprets Pope’s lines about an afterlife in terms of how hope works in this life; his interest is in hope as a principle of psychology.14 Boswell records for April 10, 1775: 13 

Quoted from An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), 1.91–​112. 14 Claude Rawson remarks that Johnson “secularizes and psychologizes” Pope’s lines: Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 44. Rawson’s larger point is that “the world of the Essay, with its fresh, infectious delight in the conventional coherences of a theodicy, has no relevance for minds [like Johnson’s] to whom Discord was a psychological condition rather than a philosophical problem” (44).

588   Adam Potkay He this day enlarged upon Pope’s melancholy remark, “Man never is, but always to be blest.” He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion, that though, in general, happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, “Never, but when he is drunk.” (Life, vol. ii, 350–​1)15

Consciousness of the present moment is painful, Johnson claims, unless either the present is supplemented by futurity, or consciousness is abated by liquor. Drunkenness is stasis, while hope propels us and provides some tenuous, future-​oriented “happiness” or pleasurable consciousness. Having mulled over Johnson’s stark wisdom for a year, Boswell seeks some qualification from the great man at their next Easter-​tide meeting (March 29, 1776): “Sir, you observed one day at General Oglethorpe’s, that a man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk. Will you not add,—​or when driving rapidly in a post-​ chaise?” Johnson. “No, Sir, you are driving rapidly from something, or to something.” (Life, vol. iii, 5)

In his conversations with Boswell, Johnson is not satirizing human unreason or insatiability. Satirizing is something he partly does elsewhere, notably in his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of Juvenal’s tenth Satire, and in the sermon he ghost-​ wrote on Ecclesiastes 1:14, “all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”16 Yet even in these apparent satires, Johnson has been called a “satirist manqué,” one for whom the distance necessary for satire collapses in sympathy with all-​too-​human nature.17 For Johnson worldly hopes might be illusionary, but they are at the same time the only palliative for the ache or emptiness of the existential present. Johnson states this most plainly in Rambler 67: Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable; nor does it appear that the

15   Johnson’s premise here is the same in substance as that, though expressed without the Latinate and authoritative style, of a Rambler essay from twenty-​five years earlier (no. 5, April 3, 1750), “Every man is sufficiently discontented with some circumstances of his present state, to suffer his imagination to range more or less in quest of future happiness, and to fix upon some point of time, in which, by the removal of the inconvenience which now perplexes him, or acquisition of the advantage which he at present wants, he shall find the condition of his life very much improved” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 25). See Fredric V. Bogel on Johnson’s perception of insubstantiality and his countervailing rhetoric of substantiality, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 57–​7 1. 16  This appears as Sermon 12 in Johnson, Yale Works, vol. xiv, 127–​36. 17  W. J. Bate, “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” in W. H. Bond, ed., Eighteenth-​Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde (New York: Grolier Club, 1970), 145–​60.

Hope   589 happiest lot of terrestrial existence can set us above the want of this general blessing, or that life, when the gifts of nature and of fortune are accumulated upon it, would not still be wretched, were it not elevated and delighted by the expectation of some new possession, of some enjoyment yet behind, by which the wish shall be at last satisfied, and the heart filled up to its utmost extent. Hope is, indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 354)

In short, hope motivates. In misery it keeps us alive; it reveals the inadequacy of good fortune to our desires and keeps us in perpetual motion. Hope also gives us “vigour and perseverance” to achieve at least some goals, proving less “fatal” than the insufficiency of hope that is timidity (vol. iii, 137–​8). Johnson assumes that our motives are fundamentally self-​interested, hedonistic, and acquisitive: we crave new pleasures and possessions. In doing so, he situates himself within a mechanistic project that extends from Thomas Hobbes, for whom happiness is a psychological matter rather than, as for the ancients and Thomists, an ethical assessment of the life that is good or proper for human beings (eudaimonia). Hobbes dismisses ancient ideals of happiness near the outset of Leviathan (part 1, ­chapter 11): The Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme), nor Summum bonum, (greatest Good), as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still the way to the latter.18

In Hobbes’s psychological model, there is no ultimate aim of life—​and thus no final repose—​only incessant movement to or from objects of desire or aversion. Nor is this movement clearly subjected to any rational or higher control. In the place of the reason of “the old Morall Philosophers,” Hobbes makes do with “desire,” an impetus force he earlier equates with “Appetite,” contrasts to “Aversion,” and associates with “Love” (“save that by Desire, we alwayes signifie the Absence of the Object; by Love, most commonly the Presence of the same”). From appetite/​desire, Hobbes derives hope: Appetite with an opinion of attaining, is called hope. The same, without such opinion, despaire. Aversion, with opinion of Hurt from the object, feare. (Leviathan, vol. ii, 80, 84)

18 

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), vol. ii, 150.

590   Adam Potkay As I have argued elsewhere, Hobbes’s mechanistic psychology, as developed by Locke and Mandeville, informs Johnson’s view of human nature just as it does David Hume’s.19 With regard specifically to hope, Addison’s Spectator 535 (November 13, 1712) provides a likely bridge from Hobbes to Johnson: “one Hope no sooner dies in us but another rises in its stead. We are apt to fancy that we shall be happy and satisfyed, if we possess our selves of such and such particular Enjoyments; but either by reason of their Emptiness, or the natural Inquietude of the Mind, we have no sooner gained one Point but we extend our Hopes to another.”20

“The Present Hour Alone Is Man’s” With Hobbes and Addison, Johnson agrees that there is no reaching happiness in this world, and thus no possible fullness to the present moment. Only once does he memorably suggest otherwise: in his drama Irene (drafted 1736–​7, performed and published 1749). In the play’s most applauded speech,21 Johnson recurs to the Stoic-​Epicurean and specifically Horatian topoi of the value of present exertion or enjoyment, and the nullity of the future. Horace’s Odes, arguably Johnson’s favorite body of poems (he began and ended his poetic career with translations from them22), abounds with sentiments such as, in Dryden’s translation, “To morrow and her works defie, | Lay hold upon the present hour” (book 1, ode 9) and “Happy the Man, and happy he alone, | He, who can call to day his own: | He, who secure within can say | To morrow do thy worst, for I have liv’d to day” (book 3, ode 29).23 At the center of Irene’s narrative arc Cali Bassa, the elderly courtier who has planned a coup against the play’s power-​mad sultan, imagines “to-​morrow’s action” (3.2.18). His presumptive claim on the future is promptly checked by his fellow conspirator, the noble Demetrius: To-​morrow’s action? Can that hoary wisdom Born down with Years, still doat upon to-​morrow? That fatal mistress of the young, the lazy, The coward, and the fool, condemn’d to lose An useless life in waiting for to-​morrow, 19  See Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 61–​75. 20  The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), vol. iv, 409. 21  J. D. Fleeman notes Charles Burney’s report that Demetrius’s speech (Irene 3.2.14–​33) “was received with most applause at the first performance”: Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 194. 22  Johnson’s translation of Horace’s Ode 1.22 dates to his years at Lichfield Grammar School; his translation of Ode 4.7 is dated on the manuscript “Nov. 1784.” See Fleeman’s edition, 182, 229–​30. 23  Both translations appear in Dryden’s collection Sylvae (1685); see The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenborg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. iii, 79, 83.

Hope   591 To gaze with longing Eyes upon to-​morrow, Till interposing death destroys the prospect! Strange! That this gen’ral fraud from day to day Should fill the world with wretches undetected . . . But thou, too old to bear another cheat, Learn, that the present hour alone is man’s. (Irene 3.2.19–​33, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 154–​5)

Demetrius’s speech is the counterpoint to Johnson’s later insistence that “man is never happy for the present”: here the present is all we have and all we need. Yet Demetrius’s sentiments, built upon rhetorical commonplaces, seem crowd-​pleasing by design. In Irene, an apprentice work, Johnson has not yet forged mature and mixed views on hope’s vanity and existential value. Demetrius’s set piece recalls not only Horace and Dryden’s translations, but also lines Johnson long admired from Dryden’s heroic play Aureng-​Zebe, declaimed by the titular protagonist as he awaits expected death.24 Unlike Demetrius, the character Aureng-​Zebe demystifies hope in futurity without any comforting evaluation of the present moment; he is, however, answered by another character’s carpe diem speech. For Aureng-​Zebe, hope is an illusion, but it is also all there is, “Life” itself, at least in our temporal state: When I consider Life, ’tis all a cheat; Yet, fool’d with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to morrow will repay: To morrow’s falser than the former day; Lies worse; and while it says, We shall be blest, With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange couzenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And, from the dregs of Life, think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I’m tir’d with waiting for this Chymic Gold, Which fools us young, and beggars us when old. (4.1.33–​44)

According to Boswell, Johnson “frequently quoted” these lines (Life, vol. ii, 124–​5). They are quoted in full among the illustrations to Johnson’s second Dictionary definition of life (“Present state”) and declared justly “celebrated” in his Life of Dryden (Lives, vol. ii, 95). Just as Johnson praised Cowley’s “Against Hope” without mention of “For Hope,” so he dissociates Aureng-​Zebe’s complaint from its rebuttal in his interlocutor’s subsequent lines:

24 

Aureng-​Zebe is quoted from Dryden, Works, vol. xii, 210.

592   Adam Potkay ’Tis not for nothing that we life pursue; It pays our hopes with something still that’s new: Each day’s a Mistris, unenjoy’d before; Like Travelers, we’re pleas’d with seeing more. Did you but know what joys your way attend, You would not hurry to your journey’s end. (4.1.45–​50)

Admittedly, these fine lines are given to the villainess of Dryden’s play, an empress with incestuous designs on her stepson Aureng-​Zebe. Still, it may be a condensation of their carpe diem wisdom with which Johnson concludes Demetrius’s speech in Irene: “Learn, that the present hour alone is man’s.”

Therapy for Unreasonable Hopes For the mature Johnson, hope is in the main an illusion, a cheat, but also most if not all of life itself. Unlike some classical moralists, Johnson offers no aggressive therapy against hope. Yet, while conceding, as no ancient would, hope’s inevitability, Johnson nonetheless encourages us, as the ancients did, to distance ourselves as best we can from unreasonable hopes. Rambler 67, which begins by proclaiming “Hope is necessary in every condition” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 354), ends with an allegorical vision of the “garden of Hope” accessible by “two gates, one of which was kept by Reason, and the other by Fancy.” Reason admits few hopes, and those after “many interrogatories, and long hesitation,” while Fancy admits all hopes indiscriminately (vol. iii, 356).25 Exhibiting a similar turn, Rambler 2 posits that “the natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope” (vol. iii, 10) before recommending the Stoic Epictetus’s council on how to subdue hope. “It is the sage advice of Epictetus, that a man should accustom himself often to think of what is most shocking and terrible [for example, the death of one’s wife or child], that by such reflexions . . . [one] may be preserved from too ardent wishes for seeming good, and from too much dejection in real evil” (vol. iii, 13). Johnson later recalls Epictetus’s advice that we might moderate our attachment to transient things, “If we remember, that whatever we possess is to be in our hands but a very little time, and that little, which our most lively hopes can promise us, may be made less, by ten thousand accidents” (Rambler 17, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 94). (Both hope and the effort to conserve the past may be seen in Johnson’s appeals and allusions to Epictetus and other authorities; as Anthony Lee argues of Rambler 2, “his

25 Johnson concedes in Adventurer 69 that “to indulge hopes beyond the warrant of reason” is more excusable in “the man of high courage and great abilities” than it is for persons of “mean . . . understandings” and “timidity” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 394).

Hope   593 practice requires that the creative endeavors of the present and the expectations of the future must be thoroughly grounded in the wisdom of the past.”26) As a letter writer, Johnson was less erudite and more circumstantial in his case against unreasonable hope. One of his epistolary masterpieces is the letter of June 8, 1762 sent to a lady who, Boswell explains, “solicited him to obtain the Archbishop of Canterbury’s patronage to have her son sent to the University”: Madam, I hope you will believe that my delay in answering your letter could proceed only from my unwillingness to destroy any hope that you had formed. Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which the world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken. When you made your request to me, you should have considered, Madam, what you were asking. You ask me to solicit a great man, to whom I never spoke, for a young person whom I had never seen, upon a supposition which I had no means of knowing to be true. There is no reason why, amongst all the great, I should chuse to supplicate the Archbishop, nor why, among all the possible objects of his bounty, the Archbishop should chuse your son. (Life, vol. i, 368–​9)

Later in his biography, Boswell records Johnson’s response to what seemed to him another improper expectation: “A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience” (Life, vol. ii, 128). Johnson urged experience over hope. For example, he counseled friends coming to a new place or revisiting an old one to recall their previous expectations and then to admit their disappointment (Johnson, almost doctrinally, presumes that experience will disappoint). Bennet Langton, entering into “a new state of life at a new place,” is promised that the exercise of recalling past disappointments will serve as a prophylactic against future ones: “I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed” (Life, vol. i, 337). Joseph Baretti, revisiting his native Italy in 1762 and presumed to be let down by the experience, is offered as consolation that “a time will come, when the present moment shall no longer be irksome; when 26  Anthony W. Lee, “Rambler 2 and Johnson’s Dictionary: Paratextual and Intertextual Entanglements with Pope, Statius, Dryden, Gay, and Milton,” The Eighteenth-​Century Intelligencer 32, no. 1 (March 2018), 9–​18, at 13.

594   Adam Potkay we shall not borrow all our happiness from hope, which at last is to end in disappointment” (Life, vol. i, 371). The time to come is, of course, the afterlife, and Johnson here sounds like his earlier fictional creation, the sage Imlac, in the next-​to-​last chapter of his philosophical tale, Rasselas (1759). Before we arrive at Imlac’s final discourse in c­ hapter 48, however, there are 47 chapters dealing with this life, in which hopes nearly always meet with disappointments. Rasselas tells the tale of the three young people under Imlac’s gentle charge—​Prince Rasselas, Princess Nekayah, and her servant Pekuah—​who, having left their enclosed home, restlessly seek happiness in distant lands and different occupations. What they uncover instead is “the dangerous prevalence of imagination” they all share, an imaginative disorder focused by the mad astronomer who has come to believe he controls the weather (­chapters 40–​6). Prompted by the philosopher’s evident madness, the sage Imlac generalizes, “No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope and fear beyond the limit of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 150). Given this rigorist definition of sanity (which we are free to accept or not), there is the distinct possibility that none of us is in his or her right mind, or that none of us participates in a fully shared reality.27 Imlac’s discourse reveals the connection between imagination or fancy, on one hand, and hope and fear, on the other: hope in particular is an imaginative projection in which what we want to happen in the future often distorts a probabilistic view of what will happen. In the penultimate chapter of Rasselas, Imlac takes Rasselas and company to the convent of St. Anthony, where he discourses on the immortality of the soul. Rasselas and Nekayah come to think beyond “the shortness of our present state” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 174). Nekayah declares, “I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity” (vol. xvi, 175). In the tale’s next and final chapter, however—​titled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”—​Nekayah, along with her companions, does not think only on eternity; each of them maintains hopes for achieving happiness as well as power in this world, however unattainable these things are recognized to be. The ending of Rasselas has divided critical opinion: does the tale as a whole affirm spiritual hope, or undermine it?28 Alternatively, it may show Christian hope to be, before our hour of death, or at least in youth, a very difficult thing steadily to keep in mind. Nekayah’s hope to think only of eternity is not only unfulfilled, but is also, perhaps, unfulfillable. Otherworldly hope remains a thing hoped for.

27  Leo

Damrosch writes: “Only rarely does Johnson admit that society itself may be nothing more than a conjunction of separate fantasies: ‘In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert’ (Idler 32). Out of his personal experience and out of shrewd observation of other people, Johnson has created a richly complex fiction of the self, unsparing in its pessimism but committed to a conception of truth based upon shared ‘realities’ [sociable, external, and religious] that can rescue the self from itself.” Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 35. 28  I analyze this critical divide in The Passion for Happiness, 198–​206.

Hope   595

Hope and Fear, Prayer and Faith Johnson recurs to hope as a theological virtue in the sermons he ghost-​wrote for others, and in particular a gallows sermon he wrote for a preacher in Newgate prison (see Chapter 12, “Sermons”). “To the greater part of those whom angels stand ready to receive,” Johnson writes, “nothing is granted in this world beyond rational hope;—​and with hope, founded on promise, we may well be satisfied.”29 “Having declared and confirmed our faith by the holy communion, we deliver ourselves into . . . [God’s] hands, in firm hope, that he who created and redeemed us will not suffer us to perish.” Johnson again echoes Imlac’s discourse on the immortality of the soul: that it “will not perish by any inherent cause of decay, or principle of corruption, may be shown by philosophy; but philosophy can tell us no more. That it will not be annihilated by him that made it, we must humbly learn from higher authority” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 174). Johnson’s hope in eternal life and salvation was never quite firm, at least not free from visceral fear of possible annihilation or, granting an immortal soul that will not be annihilated, damnation.30 These fears are everywhere present in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, with the fear of divine judgment stated most elegantly, with regard to Pauline theology, in a 1781 conversation: “In general no man can be sure of his acceptance with God; some, indeed, may have had it revealed to them. St. Paul, who wrought miracles, may have had a miracle wrought on himself, and may have obtained supernatural assurance of pardon, and mercy, and beatitude; yet St. Paul, though he expresses strong hope, also expresses fear, lest having preached to others, he himself should be a cast-​ away” (Life, vol. iv, 123). Johnson famously feared that he might be such a cast-​away or, from the Gospel parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–​30), the worthless servant cast into darkness. Knowing fear, Johnson prayed for hope, as well as faith and love. He did so with calm precision in the middle quatrain of a Latin prayer he composed in his last year (January 18, 1784); I quote the Latin along with my translation: Noctes atque dies animo spes laeta recurset, Certa mihi sancto flagret amore fides. Certa vetet dubitare fides, spes laeta timere, Velle vetet cuiquam non bene sanctus amor. (Yale Works, vol. vi, 348)

29 Johnson, Sermon 28, in Yale Works, vol. xiv, 306; my following quotation is from 308–​9. 30  See

Boswell, Life, vol. ii, 81; vol. ii, 93 (fear of death natural to man); vol. ii, 106–​7; vol. ii, 298; vol. iii, 153–​4 (exasperation with Hume for his professed deathbed calmness with regard to annihilation).

596   Adam Potkay May joyful hope return to my soul night and day, May settled faith inflame me with a holy love. May settled faith forbid me from doubting, joyful hope from fearing, May sacred love forbid anyone from wanting [that which is] not well.31 In contrast to the doctrinal clarity and poetic economy of these lines, Johnson had earlier prayed more heatedly for the theological virtues at the end of his greatest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, with which I will conclude. The poem, an imitation of Juvenal’s tenth Satire, is a panorama of the wrong things that most people typically wish or hope for, including riches, power, beauty and, a theme close to Johnson’s heart (and to our own hearts), authorial and scholarly fame. This latter theme first appears in Johnson’s early poem, “The Young Author” (lines 11–​14): So the young author panting for a name, And fir’d with pleasing hope of endless fame, Intrusts his happiness to human kind, More false, more cruel than the seas and wind.

(Yale Works, vol. vi, 72)

The Vanity of Human Wishes turns in its final verse paragraph from temporal hopes which seem to have no proper objects, to fervid prayer for spiritual gifts. Johnson veers away here from Juvenal, who satirizes prayer as an unnecessary ritual before conceding that if one must ask for something, “Pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body, a spirit | Unafraid of death, but reconciled to it, and able | To bear up, to endure whatever troubles afflict it, | Free from hate and desire.”32 Johnson concludes, rather, with prayer as an existential imperative, and includes in the proper objects of prayer a variant of the three theological virtues: Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant mind? . . . Enquirer, cease, petitions yet remain, Which heav’n may hear, nor deem religion vain . . . Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resign’d; For love, which scarce collective man can fill; For patience sov’reign o’er transmuted ill; For faith, that panting for a happier seat, Counts death kind Nature’s signal of retreat: These goods for man the laws of heav’n ordain, These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain; With these celestial wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she does not find. (lines 343–​68, in Yale Works, vol. vi, 107–​9)

31  My colleague Georgia Irby kindly helped with this translation, explaining that the cuiquam in the final quoted line must be a dative of reference. 32  Verse translation of Juvenal’s tenth Satire, lines 356–​60, by Rolfe Humphries, The Satires of Juvenal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958), 134.

Hope   597 Pray, Johnson enjoins, so as to attune your flawed will to God’s supreme will and order. Avoid “specious prayer,” that is, praying with improper, self-​magnifying motivation;33 any such “prayer,” which clearly resembles a wish or hope, is apt to lead one to be ambushed by fate or fortune, as Johnson’s poem has hitherto so amply shown. Johnson’s understanding of prayer accords with that of the popular devotional manual, The Whole Duty of Man (attributed to Richard Allestree, 1621–​81), which he was made to read as a boy.34 “Prayer is the never-​failing means of bringing thee, if not all that thou thinkest thou wantest, yet all that indeed thou do’st, that is, all that God sees fit for thee.”35 Through prayer God’s will is not altered, but she who prays is altered, brought into conformity with divine order; prayer thus draws us close to “God . . . the Fountain of Happiness . . . And therefore the nearer we draw to him, the happier we needs must be” (112). In Johnson’s account, “celestial wisdom . . . makes the happiness she does not find” in our present state. Finally, Johnson’s view of prayer as an act of devotion—​“when the sense of sacred presence fires, | And strong devotion to the skies aspires” (lines 357–​8)—​ recalls from The Whole Duty of Man: “when thou drawest nigh to God in Prayer, . . . raise up thy Soul to the highest pitch of zeal and earnestness thou art able. And because of thy self alone thou art not able to do anything, beseech God that he will enflame thy heart with this heavenly fire of Devotion” (116). Prayer may be considered a type or expression of wishing or hope, but in Johnson what is prayed for does not, in its trinity of things hoped for, include hope: between love and faith, he inserts “patience sov’reign o’er transmuted ill.” Patience is a corollary of hope in Pauline Christianity—​“if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:25, King James Version)—​but Johnson, elevating patience (“the power of suffering; endurance”36) to the level of faith and love, gives it a dignity independent of hope and its attendant joy. The switch befits a poem on the vanity of hopes within a world where much is to be endured and little enjoyed. However, by a further substitution, Johnson attributes to faith the prospective, desiderative, and restless qualities often associated with hope: faith is “panting for a happier seat” (my emphasis). Recall from Johnson’s early poem “The Young Author,” the, at least partial, self-​image of one “panting for a name, | And fir’d with pleasing hope of endless fame.” Yearning hope is not so easily dispelled from nature, or from Johnson’s greatest

33   Johnson’s relevant Dictionary definition of specious is “2. Plausible; superficially, not solidly right; striking at first view,” which he first illustrates with lines from Milton: “neither do the Spirits damned | Lose all their virtue; lest bad men should boast | Their specious deeds on earth, which glory excites, | Or close ambition varnisht o’er with zeal” (Paradise Lost, 2.482–​5). 34 Boswell, Life, vol. i, 67. Johnson recalls being force-​fed The Whole Duty of Man while he was too young to appreciate it, and attributing his spiritual awakening while at Oxford to William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Boswell, Life, vol. i, 68). On the subject of prayer, the two works are in accord: see A Serious Call (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), chap. 12, 105–​19. 35  The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1718), 112. 36  Johnson’s first Dictionary definition of patience is “The power of suffering; indurance; the power of expecting long without rage or discontent; the power of supporting faults or injuries without revenge; long suffering.”

598   Adam Potkay poem. Johnson, to his own glory as an author, remained an unsettled spirit, a Hobbesian with regard to an ever-​elusive happiness. His own thoughts repine “at humble peace,” praise it as he may (line 121). We are better prepared for the ending of The Vanity of Human Wishes by Johnson’s vivid lines, “restless fire precipitates on death” (line 20), and “to new heights his restless wishes tow’r” (line 105). For Johnson, the calm of certain faith, the certa fides of his Latin prayer, was aspirational. Desires, wishes, and anxious hopes were his lifeblood, and the basis for his representation of mankind.

Further Reading Mittleman, Alan. Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Potkay, Adam. Hope: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Waterworth, Jayne M. A Philosophical Analysis of Hope. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Chapter 33

Emoti on Philip Smallwood

The tears stand in my eyes. —​Johnson to Hester Thrale, July 8, 1784

Emotion and Too Little of It Johnson is one of the most emotionally intense personalities in English writing, and he is one of the most reluctant betrayers of personal emotion: we see the latter tendency in the unsentimental language of his criticism, the compact, restrained, rugged austerity of some of his poetry, and in the organization and formulation of his literary tastes. Emotion, a developing topic in eighteenth-​century aesthetics, is not the logical subject of a Johnsonian theory, but its presence, as for Tolstoy, was a pivotal factor in according value to art.1 As a judgment supported by his reaction to the empty rantings of the plays, and by the intellectual and scholastic contexture of his writings, Johnson thought the poet Dryden, on the whole, not much acquainted with “the simple and elemental passions.” His great predecessor, he wrote, is “not often pathetick” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 483–​4). Nevertheless, one of the works in the Lives of the Poets Johnson exalts most highly is Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast. This is the famous music ode of 1697 devoted to the headiest of emotional states and Johnson is perhaps hinting that the rhapsodies of the poem, echoed in the most exquisite of musical settings by Handel, have dazzled perceptions. Johnson notes that “some of the lines are without correspondent rhymes” but this is a defect, he observes, “I never detected but after an acquaintance of many years, and which 1  Tolstoy writes of the defining characteristic of art as its capacity to “infect” the viewer, reader, or spectator. See What Is Art and Essays on Art (1898), trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 227–​30.

600   Philip Smallwood the enthusiasm of the writer might hinder him from perceiving.” If the “last stanza has less emotion than the former,” Johnson’s praise nevertheless remains exceptional: The ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, perhaps the last effort of his poetry, has been always considered as exhibiting the highest flight of fancy, and the exactest nicety of art. This is allowed to stand without a rival. If indeed there is any excellence beyond it, in some other of Dryden’s works that excellence must be found. (vol. xxi, 482)

This pitch of esteem for any individual poem, here in harmony with the general judgment of mankind, is a rarity in the sometimes abrasive critical atmosphere of the Lives of the Poets. “Fancy,” “art,” and especially the overall generous supply of “emotion” go together in Johnson’s appraisal. At a different point on the judgmental and emotional scale, the failure of particular poems to make their readers weep (if only inwardly) when weeping is required, can stir Johnson to unqualified critical disapproval and to assert his need for a full-​out expression of sympathy and pity. In his Life of Milton, famously, Johnson is scathing on the matter of John Milton’s pastoral fatuity in the fanciful artistry of his poetical elegy Lycidas. He objects that, while ostensibly mourning the death of his college companion, Milton strikes a would-​be elegiac note that is full of showy and distracting convention about imaginary flocks of sheep and their shepherds: “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief ” (Yale Works, vol. xxi, 175). Again in the Life of Cowley, the first of the Lives, Johnson can complain of the sterility of Cowley’s poem on the death of his friend William Hervey that “when he wishes to make us weep, he forgets to weep himself,” preferring to impress by clever imagery and chill Metaphysical conceits (vol. xxi, 50). Johnson’s account of the deficiency of the Metaphysical school of poets is more generally that they refrigerate feeling—​especially in the poems about love or death that precisely demand it. Such writers are like “Epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion” (vol. xxi, 27). The fact that the Metaphysicals missed the “sublime” is a mark against them.

And Too Much Description of the variety of Johnson’s emotional range lies beyond the scope of this chapter; I will, however, seek to recall some suggestive examples from his life and from his writing which indicate significant outposts of this territory. As the real-​life corollary to Johnson’s wish for emotional incitements in poems, some of Johnson’s letters, the personal diaries, his annals, and his private prayers to his Maker can testify to an utterly merciless cycle of self-​inspection revealing the core of his suffering humanity and his frequent propensity to guilt and regret. His work on Shakespeare as an editor and a critic likewise extends our sense of the role of emotion in Johnson’s literary-​critical

Emotion   601 experience. The attention he accords to Shakespeare helps give meaning to his system of preferences in the Lives, and explains why emotionally impoverished writing must be taken to task, but also suggests the central place of indirectness—​the feeling about feeling that is the basis of any literary criticism—​in the structure of Johnson’s emotional world. When personal feelings assert themselves within the artistic medium of his own poetry, Johnson’s private emotions can seem to require an escape from self-​revelation, whether in writings not written to be published or in those that are. On this last point, we can observe that the major works of Johnson’s poetic oeuvre, specifically London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), are famously imitations of Latin originals; they serve as emotional proxies that allow the authorial presence to appear in disguise, and they displace personal feelings as they reverberate with their Juvenalian sources and the classical poet’s caustically unsentimental satire. But another form of self-​fashioning also seems to signal a Johnsonian unease with any feelings that could be formulated in English and discovers an expressive role for the intensely personal emotion concealed within Johnson’s corpus of neo-​Latin. We find, for example, an especially eloquent conduit for autobiographical experience in the Latin poem—​“In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae Diffluentum”—​where Johnson in his final year of life recalls being taught to swim as a boy by his father. Evoking the constancy and change that shape any individual experience, the poem first appeared posthumously in Johnson’s Works of 1787 and is a poignant masterpiece of restrained emotional capaciousness that admits but does not indulge the personal note: Errat adhuc vitreus per prata virentia rivus, Quo toties lavi membra tenella puer; Hic delusa rudi frustrabar brachia motu, Dum docuit blanda voce natare pater. Fecerunt rami latebras, tenebrisque diurnis Pendula secretas abdidit arbor aquas. Nunc veteres duris periêre securibus umbrae, Longinquisque oculis nuda lavacra patent. Lympha tamen cursus agit indefessa perennis, Tectaque qua fluxit, nunc et aperta fluit. Quid ferat externi velox, quid deterat aetas, Tu quoque securus res age, Nise, tuas. (Yale Works, vol. vi, 342)

I do not think with Johnson’s editor Niall Rudd that “charming” (the term he accords to the piece) is quite the right description for this poem’s intensity and power.2 2 

Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 9. For Rudd’s prose translation see 121–​2. David F. Venturo very eloquently captures the “touching and delicately ironic conclusion” to the poem in his discussion of the allusion to Nisus and Euryalus from Virgil’s Aeneid, and in his observation that Johnson “provides consolation in the face of . . . painful change by noting that, in spite of the transformation of the landscape, the tireless stream continues uninterrupted along its perennial course.” Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 137–​8.

602   Philip Smallwood “In Rivum” has been movingly translated by the American poet David Ferry as “The Lesson—​from the Latin of Samuel Johnson” (1993). The version focuses the potential of the Latin to express a psychologically self-​searching quality (the swimming “lesson” becomes a moral one) and suggests the complex of past and present encompassed in the shift from wistful recollection to urgent reality. We are reminded of how much of the present is the past: The stream still flows through the meadow grass, As clear as it was when I used to go in swimming, Not good at it at all, while my father’s voice Gently called out through the light of the shadowy glade, Trying to help me learn. The branches hung down low Over those waters made secret by their shadows. My arms flailed in a childlike helpless way. And now the sharp blade of the axe of time Has utterly cut away that tangle of shadows. The naked waters are open to the sky now And the stream still flows through the meadow grass.3

There is the fondness of the memory, and there is the unbearableness of a recollection that cannot be indulged without overwhelming the writer. The elegiac tenderness and emotional continence of this twentieth-​century poem recur to its eighteenth-​century Latin inspiration and elicit a distinctive voice from its lines. Christopher Ricks has conducted a detailed analysis of Ferry’s version of Johnson’s original where he explains Ferry’s complicated reconstruction of the spirit of the Latin in pointedly un-​Johnsonian English.4 Ferry omits the last lines addressing the remembrance to Nisus (the Virgilian pseudonym for Edmund Hector and a residue of the schoolboy friendship from the memory of which the poem allegedly arose). But his English adaptation is otherwise surprisingly close and is verbally keyed to the Latin sufficient to evoke the emotional consequence of memory. So, for example, the repetition of the rhetorically emphatic “Nunc” dividing off the second of the two mood-​movements of the poem is re-​enacted in the “And now . . . the sky now” of Ferry’s own variety of estranged idiom. “He could be the 3 David Ferry, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 199. The poem, which first appeared in Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993), is reprinted here with the permission of the poet. 4  Ferry’s note to the poem, in Of No Country I Know, expresses a debt to the prose translation of E. L. McAdam, Jr. in the Yale Edition (289). But Ricks’s rendering of the last line of the Latin, strategically omitted in Ferry’s version, appears more accurate than the version of McAdam. For Johnson’s “Tu quoque securus res age, Nise, tuas” McAdam has “Whatever the haste of a stranger carries off, or old age wears away, may your life also, Nisus, move serenely on” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 343). Ricks’s prose rendering of the final line is “You also, Nisus, heedless of what swift time brings from outside or what it wears away, do what is yours to do”—​a version that respects the force of Johnson’s “tuas.” See Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 338.

Emotion   603 more personal,” comments Ricks, “when he was not being nakedly so” (336). The concomitant of the neo-​L atin is the additional layer of Johnson’s response to the disruptive potential of emotions stirred in gratitude to his father from this distance in life, the sorrow of old age, and the loss of trusting innocence in a childhood world of long ago. This displacement through a language from the cultural past may be necessary to make emotion deriving from sources in personal history, but felt acutely in the present, endurable enough to express at all. “The great business of his life,” Boswell reports Joshua Reynolds citing Johnson, “was to escape from himself ” (Life, vol. i, 144–​5) and such anxiety about confronting his feelings should not surprise us given the image of Johnson’s stern and relentless rationalism and the need to hold untethered emotion in check. (This is the Johnson hard up against all-​too-​true truths faced in the implacable finality of Ferry’s “sharp blade of the axe of time.”) More readily than any emotional sensitivities, such uncompromised realism has frequently explained Johnson’s literary personality and his critical judgments. But again, the contrast is with those real-​life channels of feeling not filtered obliquely through the near-​extinct artistry of neo-​Latin but expressed directly in English prayers, diary entries, meditations, and correspondence. We know from such sources that Johnson experienced personal grief of the most painful kind when his wife died in 1752, once again on the death of his mother, and a third time on the death of his friend Henry Thrale: “No death,” he wrote to Henry’s wife, Hester, “since that of my Wife has ever oppressed me like this.”5 It is on the death of his wife that this wave of emotion, his tears taking more than two years to subside, seems to have swept over Johnson. Boswell reports that on the night of his wife’s death, the Rev. Dr. Taylor found Johnson “in tears and in extreme agitation” (March 18, 1752; Life, vol. i, 238). One year after she died, Johnson records on March 28, 1753 that “I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty’s death with prayer and tears in the morning.” On Easter Monday of the same year, Johnson visited Tetty’s grave in Kent and said a prayer for her and it is here, as the distancing effect of the Latin comes to his aid, that “Fluunt lacrymae.” Johnson’s prayer “In the Morning,” after a second grief-​stricken year (March 28, 1754) has at its head the same expression in abbreviated form: “Fl. Lacr.” (Yale Works, vol. i, 50–​4). Again, the prayer brings out the relation between Johnson’s personal lamentation and the intensity, even the agony, of his religious communion at a time of psychological crisis. Loss of a different kind, much later in life, occurs when having heard that the widowed Hester Thrale was to marry the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi, Johnson was so taken aback that he felt once again utterly bereft. The original letter from Johnson to Hester Thrale is preserved in the Hyde Collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the margins of the main text seem—​ to my eye—​in places slightly smudged. I won’t insist that the run of the black ink on

5 

Johnson to Hester Thrale, April 5, 1781, in Letters, vol. iii, 330.

604   Philip Smallwood the paper is caused by the falling tears of a man weeping over what he is attempting to write—​from the disappointment and reproach that the content of the letter undoubtedly expresses; but it is at least consistent with this possibility. After many years of intimate friendship, writing on June 30, 1784, Hester Thrale had sent Johnson an official announcement of her second marriage, begging Johnson’s pardon for having concealed the connection with Piozzi from him so far. On July 2, 1784 Johnson wrote back to Hester Thrale as follows: Madam: If I interpret your letter right, You are ignominiously married, if it is yet undone, let us talk together. If You have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your Fame, and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. If the last act is yet to do, I, who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and served you, I who long thought you the first of humankind, entreat that before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see You. I was, I once was, Madam, most truly yours, Sam. Johnson6

However pompously unreasonable in content and tone, the letter registers an agony of betrayal that cuts to the quick. But then follows the hasty, anxious, poignant postscript, scribbled down the left margin of the page and oriented at right angles to the main text: “I will come down if you permit it.” (He means he will come from London “down” to Streatham, where Hester Thrale lived.) This addition in the wings of the letter seems as swiftly to quench the petulant outburst. It issues from the heart—​is uttered in unmediated anguish, and suddenly artless compared with the letter itself and the rhetorical patterning of “if,” “I,” “who,” and the accusatory “You” that resists, at least in the composure of the composing, an emotional disintegration. In a letter to Mary Manning, the “Modernist” writer and playwright Samuel Beckett suggests Johnson’s grappling with the consciousness of his own powerful emotions on this same occasion. Beckett there describes Johnson’s “horrified love of Mrs Thrale,” and of “the whole mental monster ridden swamp.”7 That there is an element of self-​horror in Johnson’s reaction, horror at perceiving the capacity of his own emotion to engulf him, is the force of Beckett’s intuition.

6 

Johnson to Hester Thrale, July 2, 1784, in Letters, vol. iv, 338. to Manning, July 11, 1937, quoted in Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Dairies (London: Continuum, 2011), 127. The original of the letter, regrettably absent from the recent four-​ volume Cambridge edition, is held in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Beckett had a deep and long-​standing interest in Johnson’s complex emotional character and his Human Wishes represents an attempt to write a play about the Johnson–​Thrale relationship. For an excellent discussion of Beckett’s interest in Johnson see Frederick N. Smith, Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 110–​31. 7 Beckett

Emotion   605

Emotion in Art and Life Such vulnerability to sensations of loss comes out in Johnson’s depictions of grief-​ stricken states in his other writings. In 1759, he turned aside from the travails of his edition of Shakespeare to write Rasselas, which is a narrative fable, not quite a novel and not really a treatise, but at the pinnacle, nevertheless, of English literature’s capacity for philosophical consolation. Contrary to the anecdote relayed by Boswell, it was not a Vanity of Human Wishes in prose (the party of travelers at the end of the book has yet mixed hopes of a rewarding futurity);8 but the work cannot be divorced from the personal sorrow and isolation that Johnson felt at this time. Here the prince, having escaped from the putative “Happy Valley” in order to embrace the realities of the world, meets with the distinguished philosopher of Nature. He, having a short time ago lost his daughter, finds no consolation, at the moment he needs it most, in his lifelong philosophical commitment to reason: Rasselas, who could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments, paid his visit in a few days, and was denied admission. He had now learned the power of money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where he found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with his eyes misty, and his face pale. “Sir,” said he, “you are come at a time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end: I am now a lonely being disunited from society.” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 74–​5)

“My daughter, my only daughter”: the repetition bespeaks agonizingly the initial unprocessed stages of pain. The sense in which such experience is both universal and yet disuniting from society has been brought out in our time by Helen MacDonald, a daughter writing in response to the death of her father in her memoir winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson prize H is for Hawk: Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.” Robbed, Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.9

8  Boswell writes that “Rasselas, as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so successfully enforced in verse” (Life, vol. i, 342). 9  Helen McDonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), 13.

606   Philip Smallwood Johnson’s episode of the meeting between Rasselas and the philosopher presents through the eyes of the prince “a grief observed.” We view the amputation from the outside in, as we see it simultaneously from the inside out, and we observe that it penetrates Johnson’s subjectivity as it touches our own.10 There is the poet Gray’s “sacred source of sympathetic tears.”11 But for all the sympathetic sentiment we may extend to the bereaved, fictional or real, we don’t feel this emotional pain as we feel our own. It is common to humanity, but somehow peculiar to ourselves, an aspect of Johnsonian “general nature” yet unique in its characteristics, context, and cause. Such passages from Johnson’s own writings will explain the singular, sensitive and compassionate Johnson who edited and evaluated the great master of humanity’s extensive emotional empire in 1765. The dialogue of Shakespeare, he tells us, is “level with life.” Shakespeare “has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.” Shakespeare holds up to his readers “a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.” He excels in “accommodating his sentiments to real life” and engaged in dramatic poetry “with the world open before him”; he caught his ideas “from the living world” while his plays seem “scarcely to claim the merit of fiction.” The reader of other dramatists, in encountering Shakespeare, “may be cured of his delirious ecstacies” by reading “human sentiments in human language” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 62–​5, 69). Though the emotions of life and those of art are brought very close in these formulas, there is a line to be drawn between Johnson’s admiration for Shakespearean dramatic reality and evidence that Johnson confused art and life. In an anecdote related by Stendhal, the gallant soldier present during a performance of Shakespeare in the Baltimore theater who rose, took out his pistol, and shot the actor playing the part of Othello at the point where he “murders” Desdemona—​so deludedly carried away by the performance was he—​shows how the difference between responding to art and responding to life will not withstand a category mistake. As Johnson well knew, our sanity is at risk when we confuse the two.12

As a Mother Weeps over Her Babe But if Shakespeare “seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction,” Johnson’s emphasis on “seems” is not one that all his contemporaries or successors would unequivocally share. Having drawn up his shortlist of Shakespeare’s faults in the preface, Johnson 10 

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). Gray, “The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode,” line 94, in Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 50. 12  The anecdote is related by Stendhal’s persona of the “Romantique.” See Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Racine et Shakspeare (1823–​5), 17. For the historian of ideas René Wellek, Johnson “is one of the first great critics who has almost ceased to understand the nature of art, and who, in central passages, treats art as life.” A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–​1950, 8 vols. (London: Cape; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955–​92), vol. i, The Later Eighteenth Century, 79. 11  Thomas

Emotion   607 turns magisterially to dismiss the commonplace charge that he has failed to observe the dramatic unities of time and place. This prized notion could explain nothing of Shakespeare’s emotional intensity. We think of the extreme time disparities of the Winter’s Tale or the changes of place from Rome to Alexandria in Antony and Cleopatra. As readers, viewers, or spectators we connect the remembered narrative with what is presently happening on the page, stage, or screen, and respond without perplexity to the action, dialogue, and human situations we witness. Johnson’s exposure of the central fallacies is forthright, devastating, and satirical, and he suggests that while the theory of the unities is self-​refuting, it cannot be left to reveal its absurdity unaided: It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited. The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolomies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation. (Yale Works, vol. vii, 76–​7)13

This leads to the second critical assault strategy of the passage. While “delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation” (and Johnson admits nothing of the sort), “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players”: They come to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions that compleat a story may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre. (vol. vii, 77)

13 

Johnson’s use of the term delusion is precise and significant. In his Dictionary, he defines delusion as “1. A cheat; guile; deceit; treachery; fraud; collusion; falsehood” and “2. A false representation; illusion; errour; a chimerical thought.” Illusion he defines as “Mockery; false show; counterfeit appearance; errour.” There are clearly overlaps between the two terms; but Claude Rawson is writing a little casually when he says that Johnson “was impervious on principle to the force of dramatic illusion.” See “Art and Money,” review of Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The Publication of Plays in London 1660–​1800, TLS, March 4, 2016, 24–​5. The term Johnson uses, “not dogmatically but deliberatively” (or “deliberately,” Yale Works, vol. vii, 80), is not “illusion” but “delusion.”

608   Philip Smallwood The section in which the argument culminates makes in its own terms a very moving observation about the credibility of Shakespeare’s most emotionally compelling dramatic scenes: It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to drama. It is credited, whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more. (vol. vii, 78)

The simile of the mother who weeps over her babe Johnson employs to delineate the precise sense in which artistic experiences distinct from situations in the actual world are nevertheless credible. Note the deployment here of the conditional mood of the verb (“may”) to signify the hypothetical, unreal condition having real effects in the present. The tears fall as the mother imagines an event that has not happened but still might. It is as if she had already endured the loss. The tears shed in expectation respond to her recognizing her child must one day die. However, the event that the mother conceives is not the terminus of her child’s adult life but the possible premature death, always a prospect in vulnerable infancy (and a commonplace real-​world fact of eighteenth-​century parental experience—​as Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale was sadly aware).14 The premonition of grief is experienced as present emotion. And just as the sufferings she brings to mind belong to a future unrealized, so as we sit in the theater (“always in our senses”) it is a “fallacy” that the audience, any more than the players on the stage, are unhappy. Yet as we confront the ruling conditions of uncertain real life starkly dramatized, we do really “lament.” Being in one’s senses does nothing to diminish the role the predictive imagination has in Shakespeare’s artistic capacity to generate emotional scenes of non-​ delusive reality.15

14 

Only four of Hester Thrale’s twelve children survived to adulthood. In his discussion of this passage, Fred Parker observes that “The act of imagination [by the mother] is indispensable; but it ends in ‘the stability of truth.’ ” See Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 97. See also the examination of the passage by Greg Clingham, “Playing Rough: Johnson and Children,” in Anthony W. Lee, ed., New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2018), 171. 15 

Emotion   609

The Painful “Pleasure” of Grieving for Heroines Johnson’s specific remarks on the dying of Cordelia reveal this vulnerability and make it harder to speak in general terms of tragic “delight.” They cut across, but do not eliminate, the intensity of sustained pleasure that Johnson undoubtedly felt when he experienced Lear, Hamlet, or Othello as a reader. Johnson responds to the tragic climax of King Lear in simultaneously guarded yet self-​exposing terms quite alien to the scholarly decorums permitted to a modern editor of Shakespeare’s plays. He has been talking about the tendency of modern audiences to prefer the Tate adaptation of 1681, where Lear’s daughter survives: Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. (Yale Works, vol. viii, 704)

“The mournful distraction of Ophelia,” Johnson writes of Hamlet, “fills the heart with tenderness” (vol. viii, 1011), while in Othello “the soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected,” yet murdered by her crazed husband (whose psychological realization Johnson greatly admires), is one of the “proofs of Shakespeare’s skill in human nature, as, I suppose it is vain to seek in any modern writer” (vol. viii, 1047). The depth of the pathos here is evident in Johnson’s wider response to the fates of the unfortunate heroines of Shakespeare’s most ambitious plays. “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene,” writes Johnson of Desdemona: “It is not to be endured” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 1045). The experience of both Othello and Lear is, however, endured, sufficiently at least to permit the shaping of his remarks and though neither scene can be enjoyed without complication, Johnson is under the obligations of an editorial duty. He cannot fully give way to these feelings. But while he laments “the possibility . . . of misery” raised in stage performance by Lear, Othello, and Hamlet, he cannot evade the “presence of misery” when he encounters the tragic text as an editor. Nor is it clear he wants the plays other than they are. What happens has to happen. Thus Johnson’s first-​person language on Cordelia is modalizing and it is fundamentally not like that of the critic—​typically John Dennis, whom he quotes—​working with a concept of poetical justice that he cannot relinquish. Faced by the end of the heroine and the

610   Philip Smallwood end of the play, the mind is too mazed to know quite what is wanted: “If my sensations could add,” “I might relate,” “I know not whether” are Johnson’s formulations. Johnson intimates his feelings, but he registers his distraction without apology for Shakespeare’s exorbitant vision in King Lear and he offers no censure, moral or aesthetic. As Fred Parker has noted, emotional disarray does not develop into devaluation. Shakespeare is the “poet of nature,” but Johnson is the only critic of his period to account for the full dark, barely bearable, horror of such scenes without condemning them a priori—​ as had, for example, Thomas Rymer, in his honest scorn for the raucous barbarity of Shakespeare’s Othello.16 For Johnson the moments of desolation elevate the plays to which they belong, even as they hover on the brink of unnatural extremity or have us stare appalled into its depths. Shakespeare is the dramatic artist who typically produces such scenes, and with the death of Cordelia we might suspect that he can carry even this heroine “indifferently” through right and wrong and at the close dismiss her “without further care.” Such a habit of dramatic attention, according to Johnson’s estimate in the preface, goes down as a fault. Yet at this concluding moment Shakespeare seems all too dreadfully intent on the effects he contrives. Johnson, in response, is the reluctant but necessary advocate of the nature in theatrical art that humanity cannot reconcile. These instances qualify our sense of tragedy as a bearable experience, its bearableness being a precondition of any “delight.” Knowing that it is a fiction does not undermine the credibility of drama, and under the conditions of Shakespearean art, the confessed fictionality may do very little to mitigate the bewildering, terrible force of the plays: Enter Lear with Cordelia in his armes

reads the stage direction in the final scene of the play. Lear: She’s gone for ever. I know when one is dead, and when one lives; She’s dead as earth.17

“My daughter, my only daughter,” cries Johnson’s philosopher of Nature in a father–​ daughter bereavement echoed by Rasselas.

16 

The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). I have in mind Rymer’s (justified) outrage at the opening scenes of the play in which Brabantio is so cruelly bated. 17  King Lear, 5.3, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1342.

Emotion   611

Diverted Feelings—​the Comedy of Tragedy In a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper, the Palestinian director and actor Amir Nizar Zuabi suggests the congeniality of the “rhythms” of Shakespeare (in common with those of the Qur’an) to Arab Palestinians, and he explains how these rhythms are consonant with the terms of their daily lives: There are not a lot of places where the absolute elasticity of mankind is more visible than in the Palestinian territories. In the span of one day, you might find [yourself] reading a book in the morning, then in the afternoon be involved in what feels like a full-​scale war; by dinner you and your wife have a lengthy discussion about the quality of that book, and just before you slip into bed there is still time to witness another round of violence . . . This mad reality blends everything—​ injustice with humour, anger with grace, compassion with clairvoyance, comedy with tragedy.18

For all his distress at the deaths of Cordelia, Desdemona, and Ophelia, Johnson asks us to face “this mad reality” full on. The haunting image of the mother who weeps over her babe looks ahead to the real-​world domestic (paternal) tenderness of Johnson’s letters to Hester Thrale’s daughter, Queeney, and their solicitous tone, followed up in the correspondence after the devastating news of Hester’s second marriage.19 But the passage from the preface also links the credibility of tragic drama to a chaotic reality that perversely refuses to divide laughter from tears. As they disrupt the categories defined in the Heming and Condell folio,20 the plays are: not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which, at the same time, the reveler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design. (Yale Works, vol. vii, 66)

18  Quoted by Tom Sperlinger from an article in the Guardian newspaper in Sperlinger’s Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching under Occupation (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2015), 29–​30. 19  See especially the letters to Hester Maria Thrale of Saturday, July 3, 1784, and Tuesday, July 6, 1784, in Letters, vol. iv, 339. 20  They had been divided into “Tragedies,” “Comedies,” “Histories.”

612   Philip Smallwood Johnson means to be taken as loud and clear, but his sentence expands through the extent of the paragraph to chart the tensions that make up “mingled” drama. As Johnson lets go the formal generic classifications so the thought is amplified through the sequence of parallel clauses, unrolling a description of the texture of life from one semicolon to the next. When he imagines the bizarre coincidence of the reveler “hasting to his wine” as “the mourner is burying his friend,” it may not be clear that Johnson is thinking of any anarchic scene from Shakespeare but is allowing his attention to roam beyond the intervening text and to inhabit a world where the emotions of life and the emotions of art most naturally intersect. In this connection, a note to the subsequent paragraph by Johnson’s editorial collaborator and successor George Steevens, printed with Johnson’s preface in Edmond Malone’s Shakespeare (1821), comments on Johnson’s statement that the “two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy,” are “compositions . . . considered so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 66). To supply what Johnson here cannot bring to mind, Steevens quotes the commentary on Aristotle by the scholar Thomas Twining who invokes a plot from classical tragedy analogous to Johnson’s claims for the Shakespearean scenes: The unlearned reader will understand me to allude particularly to the scene (in the Alcestis of Euripides), in which the domestick describes the behaviour of Hercules: and to the speech of Hercules himself, which follows. Nothing can well be of a more comick cast than the servant’s complaint. He describes the hero as the most greedy and ill-​mannered guest he had ever attended, under his master’s hospitable roof; calling about him, eating, drinking, and singing, in a room by himself, while the master and all the family were in the height of funereal lamentation.21

Johnson’s Shakespearean “mingled” drama offers an image of life containing many such preposterous situations, and it is by reference to this idea that Johnson makes approving allusion to three scenes from Hamlet, answering criticisms by Voltaire and by Dennis on the play’s departure from due decorum of character and genre. There is the early representation of the Danish “usurper” as a “drunkard,” the fact that “The play of Hamlet is opened, without impropriety, by two centinels” and the scene at the end of the play where “the Grave-​diggers themselves may be heard with applause” (vol. vii, 65, 68, 69). The tragic emotion of which Johnson writes in the preface derives from a Shakespearean intensity that resists Tragedy (with a capital T). The sadness and sorrow that incite weeping in more uniformly tragic drama are checked or diverted by some ludicrous or incongruous turn of events, punning banter, or clownish character. There is a parallel here with how Johnson thwarts emotional over-​extendedness and overt sentimentality in his Latin poem about learning to swim as a boy. These are forms of what Freya Johnston has called the “pendulum” quality of Johnson’s mind and they hypothesize a 21 

Works of Shakespeare, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols. (London, 1821), vol. i, 66.

Emotion   613 deep-​level psychological parallel for the oppositions that Johnson is said to balance out in the syntactical rhythms of his prose. The principle is that feelings of whatever kind are not destroyed, but are made more intense by their counteraction.22 So it is with the comedy of tragedy. The clash between Hamlet’s bitterness and grief over his dead father, and the drunken nighttime revels of King Claudius (1.4) plays out this habit of sudden emotional re-​ direction. The noisy carousing is heard while Hamlet waits for the ghost of old Hamlet to appear, and where Hamlet’s comment to Horatio is caustic with a sense of his uncle’s vulgar impropriety: The King doth wake to-​night, and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail, and the swagg’ring up-​spring reels; And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, The kettle-​drum and trumpet thus bray out The triumph of his pledge. (lines 8–​12)

The burial of Hamlet’s father is alluded to almost immediately in the same scene. This comes in the challenge Hamlet mounts to the unburied specter: Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly [inurn’d,] Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws, To cast thee up again. (lines 46–​51)23

The ensuing stage business whereby the ghost of Hamlet’s father urges Hamlet to swear on his sword that he will exact revenge manages to be at once awesome, horrible, and comic. “All pleasure,” writes Johnson at the conclusion of his defense of Shakespearean practice (in which the “pleasures” of tragic experience are exalted), “consists in variety” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 67). Even as he had the available spaces of his emotional consciousness filled out to its periphery by painful events, Johnson nevertheless found the “highest pleasure that the drama can give” (vol. vii, 111). And of Hamlet Johnson was able to acknowledge in his endnote to the play that, “If the dramas of Shakespeare were to be characterized, each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it from the

22 Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, “Johnson’s Pendulum: Introduction,” in Johnston and Mugglestone, eds., Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–​10. 23  Riverside Shakespeare, 1196.

614   Philip Smallwood rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety” (vol. viii, 1010–​11).24 The dislocations of “mingled drama” are, then, an excitement to “pleasure,” and they are not to be wished away without evading the realities that make Shakespeare the poet of a nature not very reassuringly humane. This experience of an emotional landscape fully equal to nature’s desolation was the occasion for Johnson’s most sustained critical revolt against the parochial limitations of un-​transcended time.

“Unsentimental Pity” Johnson, I have suggested, was conducted by Shakespearean “pleasure” to the terrible abysses of life’s tragic plane and its appalling absolutes and finalities.25 Correspondingly, Johnson is a robust satirist of the so-​called Age of Sensibility: he comically parodied the emotive effusions of his friend the poet and critic Joseph Warton, and he subjected to ridicule some of the versified pathos and simpering sentiment fashionable among his contemporaries. But we have seen that Johnson is also the “Man of Feeling” himself and is instinctively more emotional, and in his criticism far more demanding of emotion, than is sometimes allowed. On a passage in Congreve’s Mourning Bride, he wrote admiringly that the reader “feels what he remembers to have felt before, but . . . feels it with great increase of sensibility” (Yale Works, vol. xxii, 749). This reaction must be held in tension with Johnson’s adverse responses to excessive varieties of emotional exuberance; these stand in contrast with the qualities felt on the death of Queen Catherine in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Henry VIII, 4.2—​ This scene is above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetick, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the romantick circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery. (vol. viii, 653)

—​praise for Shakespeare certainly, but a rebuke to the author of Hamlet (for the poison), King Lear (for the precipice), and perhaps Othello (for the “throes of tumultuous misery”). The emotional Johnson is known for the black dog of melancholia and for the depression which forms “a kind of rust on the soul” (Rambler 47, Yale Works, vol. iii, 258). 24 

It was as a little boy—​spooked by reading the scene with the ghost in Hamlet—​that Johnson rushed upstairs to the street from the kitchen of his father’s shop in the center of Lichfield, “that he might see people about him.” Yet even in 1765, now a grown man in his fifties, Johnson can write in his endnote to the play of the apparition that in the first act of Hamlet “chills the blood with horror.” (Yale Works, vol. viii, 1011). 25  I take the expression from H. A. Mason’s compelling attempt to define tragedy. See The Tragic Plane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

Emotion   615 But correctives to spiritual desolation were forever on his mind: “despair is criminal,” he records at one low point in his personal diaries (vol. i, 225).26 As for tears, human wishes may often seem vain, but while misery is part of life, never in his writings does Johnson come near to the bleak lacrimose effusions of (say) Tennysonian emotion. This is not because eighteenth-​century men were any more stalwarts of the stiff upper lip than the great souls of Victorian sensibility. Theatre audiences were often ready with their handkerchiefs: Boswell reports a pleasing performance by Garrick where “I was fully moved & shed abundance of tears.”27 Johnson once confessed to crying as a schoolboy when moved up a form against his will (Yale Works, vol. i, 18); in his adult years he wept many private tears for the loss of Tetty. Occasional outbursts of anger or irritation are recorded by his biographers, and extensive evidence of the disturbing forces at work at every level of his psyche. There are, however, few records of Johnsonian tearfulness in public life. But Johnson’s life, and his writings, reveal the extraordinary depths of compassionate sympathy for other people, and it is this that the poet and Johnsonian translator David Ferry evocatively calls his “unsentimental pity.”28 The experience of such pity is built into the sequence of fifty-​two lives described in the collection from which we began and it is encompassed in Johnson’s movement between judgments of poems on emotionally demanding criteria and the poets who composed them. Johnson’s account of the final stages of the life of William Collins indicates how “pity” may indeed be “unsentimental” and how emotion generated by the objects of our pitying attention is unmitigated by that: The latter part of his life cannot be remembered but with pity and sadness. He languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it. These clouds which he perceived gathering on his intellects, he endeavoured to disperse by travel, and passed into France; but found himself constrained to yield to his malady, and returned. He was for some time confined in a house of lunaticks, and afterwards retired to the care of his sister in Chichester, where death in 1756 came to his relief. (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1332)

He “found himself constrained to yield to his malady.” In the quiet respectfulness of this phrasing, Collins discovers within himself the loss of mind that Johnson’s narrative

26 

The diary entry for April 14, 1775, 10.30 p.m. For commentary on Johnson’s depression (including speculation, and a response to speculation, about his neuroses and sexuality) see Donald Greene, “ ‘A Secret Far Dearer to Him than His Life’: Johnson’s ‘Vile Melancholy’ Reconsidered,” The Age of Johnson 4 (1991), 1–​40. 27  James Boswell, May 12, 1763, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–​1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (London: Penguin, 2010), 216. 28 David Ferry, “What Johnson Means to Me,” Johnsonian News Letter 55, no. 2 (September 2004), 7–​10.

616   Philip Smallwood records. This is a rational act of self-​knowledge experienced with heartbreaking dignity and lucidity. Then follows the story of Collins’s mental self-​ministrations and their ultimate failure. When he remembers Collins, Johnson’s “pity and sadness” foregoes the healing of tears, the physical discharge of emotion. But through this example of distressed humanity, known to Johnson in life, Johnson nevertheless accepts with a steady gaze the terminally inexplicable nature of human misery and its ultimate causes. His language substantiates the compassionate emotional character I have attempted to explain; but no critical or biographical explanation can show how these causes are just.

Further Reading Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938. Cunningham, J. S. “The Essayist, ‘Our Present State,’ and ‘The Passions.’ ” In Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, edited by Isobel Grundy, 137–​57. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984. Gross, Gloria Sybil. This Invisible Riot of the Mind: Samuel Johnson’s Psychological Theory. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Hagstrum, Jean H. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1952. Leavis, F. R. “ ‘Thought’ and Emotional Quality.” In A Selection from Scrutiny, edited by F. R. Leavis, 2 vols., vol. i, 211–​31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Potkay, Adam. The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Chapter 34

Happine s s Brian Michael Norton

“But man is not born for happiness,” Johnson writes, announcing a sudden and ironic moment of peripeteia in the Life of Collins (Yale Works, vol. xxiii, 1330). The cash-​ strapped Collins has just inherited a fortune of £2,000 from a recently deceased uncle, an “inexhaustible” sum, he thinks, freeing him from present difficulties and promising smoother days ahead. Without giving the reader (or Collins) a chance to enjoy even the anticipation of this felicity, Johnson punctures the fantasy: But man is not born for happiness. The narrative goes on to recount a life of misspent time and energies, squandered talent, and mental affliction terrible enough to require confinement. The passage is typically Johnsonian: formal and august in tone, if ever so subtly arch, at once generous and gently mocking in its sympathies. Charting the vicissitudes of a single author’s fortunes, Johnson tells a larger truth about human life; in this case, and more specifically, he seeks, in comically matter-​of-​fact style, to disabuse us of a cherished illusion. Placed after the conjunction, Johnson’s declaration serves as an implicit refutation of our hopes and expectations. We can dream of happiness all we want, imagining it to be just around the corner, but we will never find it. Johnson is famous for expressing rather gloomy views on the subject. “Such is the condition of life,” he flatly states in Rambler 196, “that something is always wanting to happiness” (Yale Works, vol. v, 261). In a frequently cited line from Rasselas, he has Imlac declare that “Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” (vol. xvi, 50). Boswell had a sharp ear for such pronouncements, finding in them an echo of his own sentiments and perhaps taking some comfort in thinking himself not quite so bad off as his wise friend. Here Boswell catches Johnson in propria persona sounding more than a little like Imlac: “That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 53). The passage, which Boswell presents as a direct quotation, has Johnson expressing the idea in characteristically polished, vigorous language; it is a well-​ considered statement of the author’s views. This next one, which Boswell paraphrases, is equally revealing in the way it meanders toward a similar conclusion. Aboard a boat

618   Brian Michael Norton sailing to Skye, he records Johnson musing “that it seemed certain that happiness could not be found in this life, because so many had tried to find it, in such a variety of ways, and had not found it” (vol. v, 180). We are all familiar with this Johnson: the pessimist, the melancholic, the somber traditionalist who teaches us that there is no happiness in this world. Howard Weinbrot refers to this image of the author as “Sad Sam,” a caricature he considers long overdue for a “rebalancing.” Toward this end he reminds us of “Smiling Sam,” the lover of friendship and laughter, the city dweller who in company found refuge from what tormented him in solitude, a figure Weinbrot portrays as an “urban beatus ille,” a “happy man.”1 Without getting into questions of personal well-​being, I would add that Johnson’s written and recorded statements on happiness are not uniformly negative, not as bleakly pessimistic as the old image of Sad Sam would suggest. At times he indicates that happiness is indeed real and worthy of pursuit. In his blistering, almost point-​by-​point critique of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, for example, Johnson singles out for endorsement the author’s claim that “Happiness is the only thing of real value in existence.” He claims in Adventurer 126 that “Our Maker” “designed us all for happiness” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 475), and Boswell quotes him insisting that “happiness should be cultivated” (Life, vol. iii, 164). In Rambler 81, one of many essays advocating the philosophical practices of self-​reflection and deliberating on one’s ends, Johnson even suggests that the good is at least partially within our control: “An idle and thoughtless resignation to chance, without any struggle against calamity, or endeavor after advantage, is indeed below the dignity of a reasonable being, in whose power providence has put a great part even of his present happiness” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 159). Such lines may be less familiar than those quoted above, perhaps harder to square with our overall impression of the author, but they too are genuine expressions of his beliefs. Before we can begin to make sense of Johnson’s rich meditations on happiness—​and to my mind few authors have written on the subject with as much insight or acuity—​we must sort out this apparent inconsistency.2 Does Johnson think happiness is possible or does he not? Should happiness be cultivated or given up as fruitless? On this issue, I suggest, the inconsistency is more semantic than substantive. When Johnson declares, emphatically and categorically, that happiness is not to be found in this world, we should understand by this what he sometimes calls “perfect happiness,” a pure, unalloyed happiness that answers all our expectations, is invulnerable to loss and contingency, and never manages to grow stale or tedious. Such a blessed condition, Johnson was sure, is nowhere to be found on earth. But this does not mean we are incapable of experiencing a less exalted form of well-​being. When Johnson therefore speaks of happiness as something we would be foolish not to take into consideration in life choices large and small, 1 

Howard D. Weinbrot, “Johnson Rebalanced: The Happy Man, the Supportive Family, and His Social Religion,” in Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, eds., Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 196–​8. 2  Keeping in mind, of course, Imlac’s proviso that “Inconsistencies . . . cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true” (Rasselas, in Yale Works, vol. xvi, 33).

Happiness   619 as something valuable and at least partially within our control, he is perforce speaking of whatever happiness is possible for beings like us. This qualified, human form of happiness is on display in the Dictionary’s first illustration of the term: “Happiness is that estate whereby we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full possession of that which simply for itself is to be desired” (second emphasis added). It may not be perfect, and it certainly won’t be heaven on earth, but it is still happiness. The question for Johnson, then, is not whether or not perfect happiness is possible—​it clearly is not—​but why we seem to have such trouble attaining the happiness that is possible. The reasons are manifold. As Johnson observes in Rambler 7, “almost every thing about us conspires against our chief interest” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 38). But at the heart of his meditations is the suspicion that our ideas of even this limited form of well-​being are overblown and unrealistic, in excess of what life affords. “The reigning error of mankind,” he writes, is “that we are not content with the conditions on which the goods of life are granted” (Rambler 178, vol. v, 174). Two of these conditions are especially relevant for happiness: (1) human desire, as Johnson understands it, is infinite in its demands, which means that no matter how much we attain in life, how much we enjoy, it will never seem to be enough; and (2) all human goods are fragile and impermanent, which means that whatever happiness we find in this world can always be taken away and that even the happiest life will be filled with sorrow and pain. These are sobering ideas, to be sure. A recent critic, in fact, has called Johnson’s among “the most pessimistic views of earthly human happiness to be encountered in the European history of ideas.”3 This chapter gently (perhaps quixotically) pushes back against Johnson’s alleged pessimism. What Johnson demonstrates is not that earthly happiness is impossible (as this and many other critics contend), but that happiness is subject to conditions we’d be unwise to ignore.4 What he offers is a tempered happiness, one consistent with the basic facts of human existence. Such happiness will always be a work in progress and it will always be exposed to the possibility of loss. But it would be wrong to see the endlessness of desire and the fragility of the good simply as obstacles to happiness—​Johnson’s larger point is that there would be no happiness (as we know it) without these human realities. His program is unmistakably critical, but in scaling back our estimation of happiness, in fostering in us a more modest sense of “what possibly may be attained,” he does not seek

3  Rudolf Freiburg, “ ‘The Multiplicity of Agreeable Consciousness’: Samuel Johnson’s Sceptical Philosophy of Terrestrial Happiness,” English Literature 2, no. 1 (2015), 51. 4 According to Freiburg, Johnson ultimately demonstrates that “happiness is impossible” (“The Multiplicity of Agreeable Consciousness,” 64). This is a common reading. See also Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson, and Richardson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964), 55; Samuel T. Joeckel, “Narratives of Hope, Fictions of Happiness: Samuel Johnson and Enlightenment Experience,” Christianity and Literature 53, no. 1 (Autumn 2003), 19; Steven Scherwatzky, “Johnson’s Fallen World,” in Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S.J., eds., Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 125; and Nicholas Hudson, “The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler,” in Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2014), 258.

620   Brian Michael Norton to discourage. On the contrary, Johnson challenges us to come to terms with happiness as it is, not as we’d like it to be, and to ask no more from life than life can allow.

Defining Happiness Let us return to the Dictionary to clarify a cluster of terms, keeping in mind that what Johnson offers here is not a theory of happiness, his or someone else’s, but an account of how these words are used and understood. In this way, the definitions offer a window onto the culture’s pre-​reflective, everyday understanding of happiness, which is both the focus of Johnson’s critical ruminations outside the Dictionary and the reason their implications are so far-​reaching. Johnson defines happiness as “Felicity; state in which the desires are satisfied,” and happy as “Enjoying a state of felicity; state where the desire is satisfied.” Felicity, in turn, means “Happiness,” but also “prosperity,” “blissfulness,” and “blessedness.” To enjoy is, first, “To feel or perceive with pleasure; to have a pleasing sense of; to be delighted with,” and second, “To obtain possession or fruition of.” And fruition, finally, means “Enjoyment; possession; pleasure given by possession or use.” Putting all of this together, happiness is the enjoyment of having or attaining what I desire. There is a qualitative, feeling-​like aspect to this: happiness is a matter not only of possessing what one desires but also a matter of enjoying that possession, of being pleased with it, of feeling or perceiving it with pleasure.5 Outside the Dictionary, Johnson even insists that there is no happiness without consciousness of happiness: “Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known” (Adventurer 67, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 387), he writes, explaining elsewhere that “no man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it” (Rambler 150, vol. v, 35). But what underlies this feeling, this consciousness, is the satisfaction of desire. This conception of happiness combines the classical aim of securely possessing the good with a modern emphasis on the subjective nature of those goods and a psychological account of our desire for them. A life that is eudaimon is one that is objectively flourishing, well lived; it is not in possession of a good but the good. Modern happiness is strikingly subjective by comparison.6 This is on display in the Dictionary’s third 5  A number of scholars have remarked on Johnson’s generally positive view of pleasure. Nicholas Hudson explores Johnson’s “Christian Epicureanism,” in Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​ Century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 3; Paul K. Alkon examines his “theological Epicureanism” in Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), chap 2. See also Jean Ducrocq, “Aspects de l’idée du bonheur chez Samuel Johnson,” Revue de la Société d’études anglo-​américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 19 (1984), 126. 6  For a sweeping history of happiness, see Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006); for eighteenth-​ century happiness as an impoverished version of eudaimonia, see Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010; for the subjective nature of modern happiness, see Brian Michael Norton, Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012).

Happiness   621 illustration of happiness, derived from Locke, which observes that “the same thing is not good to every man alike” and that “every one does not place his happiness in the same thing.” Happiness, then, is the satisfaction of one’s desires, whatever the nature of those desires, and whatever the object. Johnson often frames this as a kind of equilibrium between what one wants and what one has. In Rambler 163, for example, he formulates the point in quasi-​mathematical terms: “Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession” (Yale Works, vol. v, 100). He does the same in Adventurer 119: drawing on Socrates’s identification of happiness with the “exemption of want,” he explains that this can occur either by an “amplitude of possessions” or “contraction of desire” (vol. ii, 461). This may sound crudely appetitive and acquisitive, especially given Johnson’s foregrounding of “possession,” but his terminology is more capacious and open-​ended than it appears. Desire refers to more than bodily drives and appetites, encompassing one’s larger aims and hopes and aspirations in life. In its verb form, desire means “To wish; to long for; to covet,” and as a noun, “Wish; eagerness to obtain or enjoy.” The vain longings of The Vanity of Human Wishes are thus desires in this broad sense, as would be the desire, say, to have close friends or to be a good teacher. Moreover, the unidentified thing obtained or possessed does not exclusively or even primarily signify a material good; rather, as in the “good” of classical philosophy, it refers more abstractly to anything of value. (For the Stoics, for example, virtue was the highest good.) Whatever good or goods one pursues, Johnson insists that happiness will always be subject to the exigencies of desire and the reality of loss.

The Endlessness of Desire (Or the Problem with Getting What You Want) In the simplest terms, we understand happiness to work like this: I desire something; I pursue it; I obtain it; my desire is satisfied; thus I am happy. I would be happy, I tell myself, if only I got what I wanted. Johnson is ruthless in pointing out the various ways in which this simply isn’t true. Forget for a moment the problem of not getting what we want—​we struggle even when we do get what we want. For starters, any good we acquire is not purely good. With wealth comes worry: “Increase his riches and his peace destroy” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 93). With marriage, strife: “how naturally every animal revenges his pain upon those who happen to be near” (Rambler 45, vol. i, 245). In possessing one good we necessarily relinquish other potential goods. “Those conditions, which flatter hope and attract desire,” Nekayah explains, “are so constituted, that, as we approach one, we recede from another.” Thus even in possession there is a kind of dispossession: “No

622   Brian Michael Norton man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring; no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (vol. xvi, 110). More perverse still are those instances where a good is rendered useless by its very possession: Johnson observes of Cowley, whose dreams of pastoral bliss he found particularly aggravating, that the poet “forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries, which he was so studious to obviate” (Rambler 6, vol. iii, 34). By dropping out of a busy life of work and social interaction, in other words, Cowley would no longer need the refuge he sought in the first place. Johnson in fact highlights a fundamental problem with satisfying the desires: namely, desire is never finally satisfied. Johnson’s understanding of this issue, as scholars from Paul Alkon to Claudia Johnson and Adam Potkay have demonstrated, draws directly on the psychological models elaborated by the British empiricists.7 According to Locke and Hobbes, the human mind is prey to a perpetual restlessness, what Locke called “uneasiness,” which makes it unlikely that we could ever achieve a “state” in which desire is satisfied once and for all. Happiness, according to this view, cannot be an endpoint but at best a moment in a cycle. As Hobbes writes, “Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.” Because this cycle never ends, there is no final happiness, no “perpetuall Tranquillity of the mind,” in Hobbes’s phrase, only more or less success “in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth.”8 For Locke, too, the pursuit of happiness is endless: “For who is content is happy. But as soon as any new uneasiness comes in, this Happiness is disturb’d, and we are set afresh on work in the pursuit of Happiness.”9 Johnson’s clearest articulation of this idea occurs in Rambler 6, the same essay in which he chides Cowley for his fantasies of rural bliss. He explains: “we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new persuit” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 35). Sooner or later, satisfaction fades. To adapt Rasselas’s line, things “that pleased me yesterday weary me to day, and will grow yet more wearisome to morrow” (vol. xvi, 13). When this occurs the cycle starts up again and we begin to want something more, or something different. Positive psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. Quickly adapting to every new acquisition, we have to run to stand still. Johnson clearly shares Hobbes’s view that happiness is not an endpoint but a “continual progress of the desire, from one object to another.” But he also puts his own spin on the idea. Hobbes presents desire as endless, eternal, punctuated by brief 7 Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline, chap. 3; Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel

Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 65–​8; Claudia L. Johnson, “Samuel Johnson’s Moral Psychology and Locke’s ‘Of Power,’ ” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 24 (1984), 563–​82. 8  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), vol. ii, 150, 96. 9  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 273.

Happiness   623 moments of satisfaction; Johnson goes a step further and hollows out even the moments of attainment. I have already quoted Johnson to this effect in an exchange with Boswell: “Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 53). I said that Johnson here sounds like Imlac, but in fact he is cribbing from himself. In one of his earliest Rambler essays, and with clear echoes of Hobbes, he writes: “The end therefore which at present calls forth our efforts will be found, when it is once gained, to be only one of the means to some remoter end. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope” (Rambler 2, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 277). According to Johnson, we do not move from satisfaction to satisfaction but from want to want or hope to hope (see Chapter 32, “Hope”). Satisfaction escapes us even in the moment of possession; as he puts it, “no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit” (Rambler 29, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 162). He makes a similar point in Sermon 12: “What appeared great when we desired it, seems little when it is attained; the wish is still unsatisfied, and something always remains behind, without which the gratification is incomplete” (vol. xiv, 131). Desire is unsatisfiable, then, not just because the cycle of desire is unending but because every individual desire exceeds its object.10 This is due in part to the way desires float free of our actual needs. Rambler 49 offers a developmental account of the mind that explains how this comes to be. The account is rather speculative, a term we rarely use to characterize Johnson’s work. But it sheds considerable light on his understanding of desire, and as such it is worth discussing in some detail. When we begin life, Johnson claims, our appetites are instinctive, creaturely, necessary for survival: The first motives of human actions are those appetites which providence has given to man, in common with the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. Immediately after our birth, thirst and hunger incline us to the breast, which we draw by instinct, like other young creatures, and, when we are satisfied, we express our uneasiness by importunate and incessant cries, till we have obtained a place or posture proper for repose. (Yale Works, vol. iii, 263–​4)

These appetites—​Johnson calls them “animal appetites”—​can be satisfied: thirst can be quenched, hunger sated, and when they are we find repose. Of course, even here Johnson can’t refrain from skepticism. In what is perhaps another dig at his empiricist forebears, he has the infant expressing Lockean “uneasiness” precisely at the moment of satisfaction. Nevertheless, the infant’s appetites do appear to be quieted; like other

10  As Walter Jackson Bate puts it: “The sheer capacity to desire is so much greater than any possible satisfactions that can be wrung from attaining what we want that satiety . . . provides no joy or durable contentment”: The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 66.

624   Brian Michael Norton young creatures, young humans are “satisfied” when their most basic needs are met. All of this changes, however, as the child develops. In time, these easily satisfied appetites are no longer enough to occupy the mind, which precipitates an inversion of the original order of things: But as the soul advances to a fuller exercise of its powers, the animal appetites, and the passions immediately arising from them, are not sufficient to find it employment; the wants of nature are soon supplied, the fear of their return is easily precluded, and something more is necessary to relieve the long intervals of inactivity, and to give those faculties, which cannot lie wholly quiescent, some particular direction. For this reason, new desires and artificial passions are by degrees produced; and, from having wishes only in consequences of our wants, we begin to feel wants in consequence of our wishes. (vol. iii, 264)

Originally our wishes are based on our wants (that is, what we lack); in time, we come to feel wants on account of our wishes. Such desires are wholly superfluous, in excess of what we genuinely need. Indeed, as Johnson describes the process, they are constitutively in excess. Because our faculties “cannot lie wholly quiescent,” the mind produces “new desires and artificial passions” to keep itself in motion.11 This points to yet another problem with desire. We have already noted two key ways in which desires elude satisfaction. The desire–​satisfaction–​desire cycle described by Hobbes is never-​ending, which effectively rules out the possibility of a permanent happiness. And because our capacity to desire is so much greater than our capacity to be satisfied, even these punctual moments of happiness tend to fall short of our expectations. Now we see a third problem: our desires are endlessly proliferating. What do we desire? More than anything else, Johnson tells us, we desire what others desire: “we trifle, because we see others trifle: in the same manner we catch from example the contagion of desire; we see all about us busied in persuit of imaginary good, and begin to bustle in the same chace” (Adventurer 119, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 463). Through this “contagion” our desires multiply, and as they do the ratio of our possessions to our desires keeps working against us. Attainment may only make things worse. “The desires of man increase with his acquisitions,” Johnson explains, “every step which he advances brings something within his view, which he did not see before, and which, as soon as he sees it, he begins to want” (Idler 30, vol. ii, 92). “It seems to be the great business of life,” he wryly observes, “to create wants as fast as they are satisfied” (Adventurer 119, vol. ii, 462). Since antiquity, of course, philosophers have been keen to argue that nature’s demands are actually quite modest; we don’t need that much to survive, indeed, to live a good life. The nearest way to happiness, therefore, is simply to contract our desires, keeping them as close to our real needs as possible. But in Johnson’s view, the mind can’t 11  We

might think of this as Johnsonian uneasiness: the mind’s aversion to stasis or inactivity. For a related developmental account of the mind, see Rambler 151.

Happiness   625 help itself: it is because our needs are met that we begin to desire what is not necessary. We invent “necessities for the sake of employment,” he explains, “because the mind is impatient of inaction” and “the tediousness of idle time cannot otherwise be supported” (Idler 37, vol. ii, 115). The more we attain, the more we must desire. There is no end to what we want (in both senses of the word). Because desire is ultimately unsatisfiable, whatever happiness we do experience in life will always feel at least partially incomplete, as if we were still moving toward a fuller version of the thing itself. Indeed, one of Johnson’s most distinctive and unsettling themes is that no one is completely happy in the present. As he puts it in Rambler 2, “the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 9). Sheridan Baker neatly captures the “irony” of this situation, the “psychological irony of the mind itself, always wishing, always imagining happiness even in the midst of happiness, always, by its very nature, incapable of satisfaction.”12 But the flip side of this is that there can be no happiness without this longing. Desire may be endless, but it is also necessary for a happy life. This is the point of Rasselas’s superb line, “I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire” (vol. xvi, 16), as well as Imlac’s stipulation that “some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he, whose real wants are supplied, must admit those of fancy” (vol. xvi, 33). Always “losing itself in schemes of future felicity,” the mind must have something to look forward to, to work toward, to hope for.13 There is no eradicating this fundamental tendency of the mind, and there is no happiness without it.

The Fragility of the Good (Or the Problem of Holding on to What You Have) Soon after escaping the Happy Valley, Rasselas muses that happiness “must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 69). It’s a nice thought, surely, and not an uncommon one. Ever since Socrates, there have been philosophers who have championed the idea that happiness (eudaimonia) should be—​and perhaps even is—​largely or wholly within our control, “up to us,” as the 12 Sheridan Baker, “Rasselas: Psychological Irony and Romance,” Philological Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1966), 250–​1. 13  Because the future is “pliant and ductile” (Rambler 41, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 224), there is a danger that we will live only in imagination. Some of Johnson’s most moving passages depict time wasted in imaginary bliss: “by indulging early the raptures of success, we forget the measure necessary to secure it, and suffer the imagination to riot in the fruition of some possible good, till the time of obtaining it has slipped away” (Rambler 2, vol. iii, 11). Again: “Such is the pleasure of projecting, that many content themselves with a succession of visionary schemes, and wear out their allotted time in the calm amusement of contriving what they never attempt nor hope to execute” (Rambler 207, vol. v, 310).

626   Brian Michael Norton Stoic Epictetus put it.14 The philosophical tradition is filled with Stoic sages triumphing over immediate physical pain and impending exile, committed Epicureans gazing upon a tumultuous world with the serene indifference of one watching a shipwreck from the safety of shore. This ideal of unperturbedness (ataraxia) continued to appeal in the eighteenth century, as is clear from the period’s countless treatises on happiness. James Harris’s Three Treatises (1744), for example, holds that happiness “should not be transient” but “durable, self-​derived, and . . . indeprivable.”15 For Harris, a Neostoic, happiness is totally within one’s own power. This was an extreme position in the eighteenth century, as it was in antiquity, but treatise writers and moralists largely agreed that happiness should be in one’s power as much as this was possible. Thomas Nettleton, for example, in his decidedly Epicurean Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1742), holds that the greatest good “should be of a lasting, and durable nature,” which leads him to dismiss sybaritic and overtly worldly pleasures as “transient and momentary,” “precarious and uncertain.”16 Johnson would agree that happiness should be “lasting” and no more exposed to contingency than it has to be: “To make any happiness sincere,” he concedes, “it is necessary that we believe it to be lasting; since whatever we suppose ourselves in danger of losing must be enjoyed with solicitude and uneasiness, and the more value we set upon it, the more must the present possession be imbittered” (Rambler 53, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 288). But in no way does he endorse the young prince’s assertion that happiness must be “solid and permanent” or Harris’s claim that it should be “self-​ derived” and “indeprivable.” This is nonsensical to Johnson; it refuses the conditions on which the goods of life are granted. One of Johnson’s primary aims as a moralist is to reconcile us to these conditions. We must recognize and genuinely accept the fact that all human goods are fragile and impermanent. Everything we have, everything we value and enjoy, can and will be taken from us, including life itself. Things go one of two ways, Johnson remarks, “we must either outlive our friends” or “our friends must outlive us.”17 And this is no distant reality. Johnson reminds us, again and again, “that life cannot be long” (Rambler 134, in Yale Works, vol. iv, 349), and “he that lives longest lives but a little while” (Rambler 71, vol. iv, 11). Death is inevitable, and soon—​nothing more terrible, nothing more true, as Larkin has it. Of course, this is not news. We all know this, intellectually at least. The brute fact of death is one of those truths—​perhaps the truth—​of which we “more frequently require to be reminded than informed” (Rambler 2, vol. iii, 14). And we require to be reminded because we are prodigiously good at pushing it out of our minds. When 14  For an excellent study of happiness in ancient ethics, see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15  James Harris, Three Treatises: The First concerning Art; the Second concerning Music, Painting and Poetry; the Third concerning Happiness [1744], 2nd ed. (London, 1765), 121. For a comparative analysis of Johnson’s and Harris’s views on happiness, see Clive T. Probyn, “Johnson, James Harris and the Logic of Happiness,” Modern Language Review 73 (1978), 256–​66. 16  Thomas Nettleton, A Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1742), 3rd ed. (London, 1751), 21, 84. 17  Hester Thrale, “Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson,” in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 230–​1.

Happiness   627 Boswell asks Johnson if the fear of death weren’t natural to humanity, he replies: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it” (Life, vol. ii, 93). Indeed, we live as though we’d never die. “We act as if life were without end, though we see and confess its uncertainty and shortness” (Rambler 71, in Yale Works, vol. iv, 11). This is true, Johnson claims, even when the end is near. “Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend” (Idler 41, vol. ii, 129). We sometimes think of Johnson, condescendingly, as being too concerned with death; and he himself acknowledges that there is a way of thinking about mortality, obsessively, self-​ tormentingly, that can be immobilizing. But Johnson suspected that he, like everyone else, actually thought of it too little. “That we must all die, I always knew,” he writes in a letter to Reynolds, “I wish I had remembered it sooner.”18 This is a key example of what Leo Damrosch describes as Johnson’s “determination to see life in a true perspective.”19 But Johnson never implies that such truth will spare us from suffering (see Chapter 29, “Suffering”). When he recommends the “sage advice of Epictetus” that we meditate on “what is most shocking and terrible” (Rambler 2), for example, he claims that the practice may help us manage our desires, not that it can shield us from pain. One is also reminded here of Bate’s characterization of Johnson’s “lifelong compulsion to get all possible evils anticipated in advance,” “to take [them] all into account beforehand.”20 But, again, to recognize the inevitability of loss is not be indemnified against it. Johnson emphatically rejects the Stoics’ claim that “externals” have no real bearing on our happiness. The reality of suffering—​the fact that what we lose is genuinely valuable, a true good—​is too obvious a feature of human life for Johnson to think it needs demonstrating. He dismisses the Stoic position without the compliment of argument: “The controversy about the reality of external evils is now at an end. That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are, sometimes at least, equal to all the powers of fortitude, is now universally confessed.” There are losses that no amount of “fortitude” can withstand, and when we experience them, Johnson maintains, the only suitable response is grief. Suffering is real and inescapable: “Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all attempts therefore to decline it wholly are useless and vain.” In place of Stoic imperturbability and the theodicy writer’s trick of recasting individual instances of evil into a grander blessing in disguise, Johnson recommends only “patience” (Rambler 32, in Yale Works, vol. iii, 176). When sorrow comes, and it will, Johnson has an essay to help us endure it.21

18 

Johnson to Joshua Reynolds, August 19, 1784, in Letters, vol. iv, 375. Damrosch, Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 105. 20  W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 374, 108. 21  For Johnson’s great essay on sorrow, see Rambler 47. As Damrosch puts it, “Johnson generally gives full weight to the burden of irrevocable loss” (Tragic Sense, 69). 19  Leo

628   Brian Michael Norton Even if we could shield ourselves from such pain, it is not clear it would be a good idea. This is because of what Potkay calls the “intrinsically social nature of happiness.”22 Far from being “self-​derived,” Johnson believes that happiness depends on other people. “To receive and to communicate assistance,” he writes, “constitutes the happiness of human life,” explaining that happiness “is not found in self-​contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another” (Idler 41, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 389). That happiness depends on other people is one of key ways in which it is beyond our control. This leads Nekayah, upon the kidnapping of Pekuah, to consider giving up the project altogether. What “is to be expected from our pursuit of happiness,” she exclaims, when “happiness itself is the cause of misery? Why should we endeavor to attain that, of which the possession cannot be secured? I shall henceforward fear to yield my heart to excellence, however bright, or to fondness, however tender, lest I should lose again what I have lost in Pekuah” (vol. xvi, 129). Johnson himself ponders these questions in Rambler 47, acknowledging that our attachment to others exposes us to inevitable grief, and that the more we care, the more we are likely to suffer: one feels “sorrow for the loss,” Johnson writes, “in proportion to the pleasure of possession.” Still, he maintains that it would be unreasonable “not to gain happiness for fear of losing it” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 258). While the distraught Nekayah vows never again to open herself up to such pain, Johnson understands such risk to be the price of admission. It is not simply that human felicity takes place in the context of inevitable loss and suffering; rather, it is our very exposure to loss that makes happiness possible in the first place. “He that regards none so much as to be afraid of losing them,” Johnson writes, sacrifices in advance some of the greatest blessings life has to offer: “the gentle pleasures of sympathy and confidence,” the “warmth of benevolence,” the “honest joys which nature annexes to the power of pleasing.” Through a “state of neutrality and indifference” we may contribute to our “tranquility,” Johnson explains, but we would effectively “debar ourselves from happiness” (Rambler 47, vol. iii, 256). So, while Johnson appreciates the “general precept . . . not to take pleasure in any thing, of which it is not in our power to secure the possession to ourselves,” he ultimately finds it unreasonable to live so defensively. It is tantamount, he writes, to advice “not to walk lest we should stumble” (Rambler 32, vol. iii, 178–​9).

Conclusion: A Happier Seat? Happiness will never be quite what we want it to be. Given the implacable, hydra-​headed nature of desire, we will never be satisfied once and for all. Human psychology, Johnson 22 Potkay, Passion, 64. According to Freiburg, “The first and most significant prerequisite for the state of happiness is the awareness of man as a social being” (“The Multiplicity of Agreeable Consciousness,” 47). See also Scherwatzky’s claim that “The happiness Johnson experienced, he experienced with others” (“Johnson’s Fallen World,” 125).

Happiness   629 insists, just doesn’t work that way. This means that happiness will always be a work in progress. And given the terrible fragility of the good, whatever happiness we do enjoy will always be vulnerable to loss, compromised by some degree of “solicitude and uneasiness.” Everything and everyone we care about can be taken from us. Indeed, loss is inevitable: it is really only a question of when. “By sudden blasts, or slow decline, | Our social comforts drop away” (Yale Works, vol. vi, 314). These are the “conditions on which the goods of life are granted.” To want happiness to be otherwise is to demand the impossible. From a certain perspective, of course, it is unsurprising that Johnson would see sublunary happiness this way. In a fallen world, we can never find the satisfaction we seek. All is vanity and a chasing after the wind. There are even moments when Johnson cites our struggles to be happy in this world as possible evidence that it awaits us in the next: It is scarcely to be imagined, that Infinite Benevolence would create a being capable of enjoying so much more than is here to be enjoyed, and qualified by nature to prolong pain by remembrance and anticipate it by terror, if he was not designed for something nobler and better than a state, in which many of his faculties can serve only for his torment, in which he is to be importuned by desires that never can be satisfied, to feel many evils which he had no power to avoid, and to fear many which he shall never feel: there will surely come a time, when every capacity of happiness shall be filled, and none shall be wretched but by his own fault. (Adventurer 120, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 269–​70)

Robert G. Walker has taught us to read this in terms of what he calls the “argument from desire,” the eighteenth-​century contention that “the insufficiency of the world to the spirit of man” served as evidence of the soul’s immortality.23 According to Walker, and a number of other critics, Johnson’s work ultimately points beyond this life to eternal life.24 Johnson did indeed hope a purer form of happiness awaited us in the afterlife (though, painfully, he had zero certainty that it awaited him personally).25 And there are no doubt times—​especially when he is writing on the theme of eternity—​when he draws our attention to the insufficiency of worldly enjoyments in order to wean us off of this world and persuade us that ultimate happiness can only be found in the next. 23   Robert G. Walker, Eighteenth-​Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson’s Rasselas (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1977), 36. One thinks here of Robert Browning’s wry line, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, | Or what’s a heaven for?” 24  According to Scherwatzky, Johnson believed that in our “fallen world” the “quest for happiness is transient and even misleading, a distraction at best from a more lasting state that awaits us” (“Johnson’s Fallen World,” 126). Hudson claims that what sets Johnson apart from empiricists like Locke and Hume is that he was a “committed Christian dualist who . . . saw no explanation for human behavior without assuming that we have aspirations beyond the senses or worldly passions” (“The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae,” 246). But as Potkay points out, “Johnson did not wholly relegate the hope of happiness to a world elsewhere” (Passion, 73). 25  For a discussion of both “hope” and Johnson’s personal worries about the afterlife, see Chapter 32, “Hope.”

630   Brian Michael Norton (Adventurer 120, from which Walker quotes, is a case in point.) But we risk missing the depth and subtlety of Johnson’s thinking about the challenges of earthly happiness if we take him to have dismissed it out of hand. This world is real to Johnson, irreducibly so, and he investigated the difficulties of living in it with uncompromising honesty. His insights extend far beyond the self-​evident fact that heaven is not be found on earth, and their cogency does not depend on our sharing his beliefs about whatever happiness is to come.

Further Reading Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. McMahon, Darrin M. Happiness: A History. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Norton, Brian Michael. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Revised edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Potkay, Adam. The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Soni, Vivasvan. Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Chapter 35

Virtue Nicholas Hudson

No reader of Johnson will need convincing that the problem of achieving and maintaining virtue is one of the most insistent preoccupations of his writing. The word itself occurs 238 times in the Rambler and 290 times in the definitions and illustrations of the Dictionary. Its frequency is much less in the Idler, only twenty-​ two times, but it appears eighty-​nine times in the Lives of the English Poets, thirty-​one of those in the Life of Savage. The more one examines Johnson’s understanding of virtue, however, the more complex and problematic this concept becomes. First, the great lexicographer defined this term in only the broadest and vaguest way. In the first edition of the Dictionary, he defined virtue as simply “Moral goodness,” adding “opposed to vice” in the fourth edition of 1773. Throughout his writing, as we will see, he indicated that the distinction between virtue and vice was immediately clear and therefore in need of no detailed explication. The closest he came to a full definition of virtue was in Idler 89, where he echoed the Book of Common Prayer’s division of “goodness” into “soberness, righteousness, and godliness.” This division nonetheless raises another problematic issue in Johnson’s moral writing. Whereas “Sobriety, or temperance” meant the individual’s restraint over his or her own passions, “righteousness” signified our “system of social duty,” which he further subdivided into “justice and charity” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 276). As this chapter will suggest, however, Johnson’s instructions on private virtue, the discipline of passions, fell into conflict with his teachings on the individual’s social duties, his or her participation in the world. For participation in the social world, though an essential part of virtue, inevitably placed the achievement of moral purity at serious risk. This conflict between the speculative recognition of virtue and its social practice remained an abiding and unresolved tension in his writings. “Godliness” raises yet another problem in understanding Johnson’s understanding of virtue. The promises and duties of religion always provide a larger context for Johnson’s moral writings and, as a devout Christian, he often evokes Christian teachings, though

632   Nicholas Hudson usually as an addendum to his secular instructions. It is nonetheless a significant fact that the word virtue (or its Latin equivalents) does not occur a single time in his extant prayers and meditations. His word in these private writings was sin, a concept that went well beyond the concept of “virtue” presented in his moral writings. For example, whereas sin concerned vicious desires, which Johnson evidently considered damnable, virtue meant only the control of worldly desires, and even their utilization to achieve the practical end of a good life. In his public writings, with the exception of the sermons he wrote for John Taylor (see Chapter 12, “Sermons”), he made the deliberate choice to treat the moral life without any consistent or systematic reference to the Christian revelation. As he wrote in Rambler 151, “I have in this view of life considered men as actuated only by natural desires, and yielding to their own inclinations without regard to superior principles by which the force of external agents may be counteracted, and the temporary prevalence of the passions restrained” (Yale Works, vol. v, 42). Johnson left us to conjecture why he decided not to rely on specifically Christian teachings in his moral writing: he perhaps thought that this field was inappropriate in periodical essays or that he lacked the official credentials to preach in the manner of an ordained priest. The same is true of Rasselas, where he sometimes refers to specifically Christian solutions to the problems he raises but does not finally make them his “conclusion.” Yet the subordination of Christian ideas of sin and redemption in his writings on “virtue” leaves a considerable gap. This gap is created by the deeply conflicted and even contradictory nature of Johnson’s moral teachings when considered apart from the promises and supports of Christianity. That he was not “systematic” in his treatment of ethical problems has long been agreed. Yet I will go further in indicating that his moral teachings raise a series of problems and dilemmas that he does not, and evidently cannot, fully resolve. As I will stress in my opening section, these problems and even paradoxes center on the conflict between the private recognition of moral duty and the actual practice of virtue in the world. His moral essays suggest that obedience to the dictates of virtue, though clearly understood by speculative reason, is not only difficult but indeed close to impossible, given the reliance of human nature on the senses and the corrupt standards of the world. If this analysis presents Johnson as distinctive for his insistence on the difficulty rather than the achievement of moral goodness, he does provide a range of partial solutions and encourages the ongoing effort to discipline the will. As I will go on to discuss, he stressed that the moral life is a continuing process of trial and error and not without the opportunity for achievement and satisfaction. The difficulty of living virtuously, moreover, led him to a generally compassionate and forgiving assessment of the human condition. At least theoretically, only Christianity provided a reliable safeguard to virtue and a path to happiness by reconciling the ideals of virtue with the desires and passions inherent to human nature. Yet here we need consider Johnson’s own highly demanding notion of “sin” as opposed to “virtue.” If Johnson was able to forgive the moral failings of others, he evidently found it very difficult to forgive himself.

Virtue   633

Virtue in Theory and Practice “Almost every man’s thoughts, while they are general, are right; and most hearts are pure, while temptation is away” (Lives, vol. iv, 58). This statement in Life of Pope epitomizes Johnson’s characteristic distinction between the mere “theory” of virtue, meaning what not only philosophers but also any person abstractly knows, and the actual attempt to practice a moral life. “When conviction is present, and temptation out of sight,” he wrote in the Idler, “we do not easily conceive how any reasonable being can deviate from his true interest” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 85). Johnson’s failure to define virtue in more than the vaguest way results from his general, if not entirely consistent, belief that the distinction between virtue and vice is clear, at least in speculation. As he wrote in Rambler 31, “Good and evil, when once they have been shewn, are so easily distinguished” that apologists for vice “seldom gain proselytes to their party” (vol. iii, 172). Quite simply, as he later stated, “Vice and virtue are easily distinguished” (vol. iii, 361). Obvious even to the untrained intellect of a servant, who can be relied on for a moral estimation of his or her master’s private conduct (Rambler 68), virtue does not need definition by philosophers or theologians: No man needs stay to be virtuous till the moralists have determined the essence of virtue; our duty is made apparent by its proximate consequences, tho’ the general and ultimate reason should never be discovered. (Idler 37, in Yale Works, vol. ii, 117)

As this passage suggests, his conviction in the clarity of the difference between virtue and vice committed him to no particular theory about the source of this knowledge. He did not state that the love of virtue was implanted in the senses, like Francis Hutcheson, or derived from some perfect understanding before birth, like Plato; he did not affirm, like the Stoics, that knowledge of virtue was gained through a rational contemplation of the nature of things. Although he did believe that virtue abetted general utility, for “the only uniform and perpetual cause of public happiness is public virtue” (vol. xiv, 253), he did not agree that worldly happiness was the necessary consequence of private virtue, as we will see. Johnson nonetheless indicated at many points that the knowledge of virtue, along with the desire to be virtuous, was unproblematic in so far as this quality was understood in abstraction from the temptations of active life. Virtue in action was quite a different matter. The individual emerging from private contemplation into the real world meets a confounding haze of disguised dangers, delusions, and corrupt standards. It is this distinction between theory and practice that Prince Rasselas must learn when he leaves the Happy Valley. In his state of isolation, the prince’s inherent love of virtue and desire to do right is uncomplicated by any other consideration. As Imlac tells him after he declaims passionately on restoring justice to the outside world, “your ardour is the natural effect of virtue animated by youth” (Yale

634   Nicholas Hudson Works, vol. xvi, 32). It is only when he enters the outside world that he realizes that teachers of morality “discourse like angels, but they live like men” (vol. xvi, 74). What is clear to reason, moreover, becomes clouded by the senses and the passions once the individual engages in social action. Despite a modern tendency to see Johnson as fashionably skeptical or existentialist, he avowed a traditional and generally consistent belief in “reason” as an autonomous and reliable source of knowledge. As he wrote in Rambler 162, “Reason is the great distinction of human nature, the faculty by which we approach to some degree of association with celestial intelligences” (vol. v, 95). The predominance of reason was nonetheless threatened by its dependence on the senses, which unlike reason was not subject to volition. Johnson regarded the individual as constantly bombarded by the senses whose involuntary impressions both obscured and outweighed the beauties of virtue: “The manner in which external force acts upon the body is very little subject to the regulation of the will; no man can at pleasure obtund or invigorate his senses, or continue the presence of any image traced upon the eye, or any sound infused into the ear” (vol. iv, 46). Every pleasurable sensation, at first involuntary and finally sought, gradually overbalanced the weaker and voluntary dictates of reason. Again and again, Johnson stressed the essential weakness of the will to virtue, and the possibility that even the slightest submission to pleasure would eventually lead to a life dominated by vicious habits: “He that once turns aside to the allurements of unlawful pleasure, can have no security that he shall ever regain the paths of virtue” (vol. v, 173). Even evidently harmless pleasures could eventually overwhelm the reason, becoming a habit and finally a vice. As he warned, “Every desire, however innocent, grows dangerous, as by long indulgence it becomes ascendant in the mind” (vol. v, 312). Johnson’s conviction in the precarious authority of reason, in contrast with the power and prevalence of the senses, led him repeatedly to counsel periodic retreat from the world in order to re-​enforce the motives to virtue. As he wrote in Rambler 28, “There are few conditions which do not entangle us with sublunary hopes and fears, from which it is necessary to be at intervals disentangled, that we may place ourselves in his presence who views effects in their causes, and actions in their motives” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 156). As he wrote elsewhere, we need to retire “into a state, where this life, like the next, operates only upon the reason” (vol. iii, 40). Yet retirement carried its own dangers. Removed from the world, the mind also engaged in “airy gratifications,” aimless and deceptive fantasies that endangered virtue. Hence, if retirement was necessary to restore the authority of reason in opposition to the senses, the senses were in turn necessary to tame the imagination: “in order to regain liberty, he must find means of flying from himself; he must, in opposition to the Stoick precept, teach his desires to fix upon external things; he must adopt the joys and the praises of others, and excite in his mind the want of social pleasures and amiable communication” (vol. iv, 107). The best-​known example of this cure in Johnson’s writing is the astronomer in Rasselas, whose isolation has convinced him that he controls the weather. This madness is corrected through conversation with the travelers, which brings him back to the stabilizing force of the senses and “intercourse with the world” (vol. xvi, 161).

Virtue   635 Abstraction from the world is nonetheless also faulted for moral reasons, for “Society is the true sphere of human virtue” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 241). Although the hermit in ­chapter 21 of Rasselas does not go mad like the astronomer, he admits that “I am sometimes ashamed to think that I could not secure myself from vice, but by retiring from the exercise of virtue” (vol. xvi, 82). In his moral essays, Johnson generally gave subordinate attention to the theme of charitable duties, perhaps partly in correction of the tendency among contemporary authors, such as Shaftesbury and Fielding, to highlight benevolence and social virtues at the expense of moral purity. In Rambler 81, he urges that beneficence is “equally needful to the conciliation of divine favour” but adds that the exercise of charity is “elective and voluntary” (vol. iv, 63). We need not always give charity though we are always constrained to avoid vice. Nevertheless, Johnson’s active personal charity, his assiduous support of the helpless and abandoned, exemplified his conviction that “the great end of society is mutual beneficence” (vol. iii, 299). The individual was obliged not only by prudential reasons but also by virtue itself to participate beneficially in the world. At this point, however, we return to the moral dangers that confront the individual when he or she leaves contemplative solitude to engage in social life. If intercourse with others is necessary to stabilize the “dangerous prevalence of the imagination” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 150), re-​engaging with society threatens also to re-​establish the prevalence of the senses. Even friendship itself, offered to the astronomer as a healthful antidote to isolation, can seldom be conducted on entirely virtuous principles. As he warned in Rambler 160, It were happy if, in forming friendships, virtue could concur with pleasure; but the greatest part of human gratifications approach so nearly to vice, that few who make the delight of others their rule of conduct, can avoid dangerous compliances; yet certainly he that suffers himself to be driven or allured from virtue, mistakes his own interest. (vol. v, 89)

Whatever the beneficence of facilitating “the delight of others,” this task could seldom be undertaken without compromising virtue. This was because delight derives from sensual pleasure and must often cater to invidious social customs. “The influence of custom,” he warned, “is indeed such that to conquer it will require the utmost efforts of fortitude and virtue” (vol. v, 63). According to the standards of the world, qualities such as power, wealth, and beauty are prized far above virtue itself: “We see multitudes busy in the pursuit of riches, at the expense of wisdom and of virtue.” Yet this avidity is hardly surprising since people “see the rest of mankind approving their conduct, and inciting their eagerness, by paying that regard and deference to wealth, which wisdom and virtue only can deserve” (vol. iv, 352). Similarly, “female goodness” can hardly compete with “that ardour which beauty produces whenever it appears” (vol. iv, 353). Hence, as the attractions of virtue are incessantly intermingled with other more widely approved attractions, the difference between good and evil

636   Nicholas Hudson becomes confused and uncertain. We cannot always be sure that we have made a choice on the basis of some quality that we have mistaken for virtue. “In this state of universal uncertainty,” he wrote, “. . . none can tell whether the good he chooses is not evil in disguise” (vol. v, 205). Nor are the standards of what the world calls “virtue” consistent, for what is regarded as praiseworthy or deplorable varies with time and place: “So much are the modes of excellence settled by time and place that men may be heard boasting in one street of that which they would anxiously conceal in another. The grounds of scorn and esteem, the topicks of praise and satire are varied according to the several virtues and vices which the course of life has disposed men to admire and abhor” (vol. v, 283). This passage is difficult to square with Johnson’s statements elsewhere on “the everlasting and invariable principles of moral and religious truth” (Yale Works, vol. ii, 396). At least in the experience of the world, it seems, the distinction between virtue and vice is, in fact, not very clear at all. Nor can the individual be assured that he or she is always securing the greatest worldly happiness by adhering closely to the principles of virtue. In situations where he felt obliged to enforce the motives to virtue, Johnson insisted with great vehemence on the happiness of a moral life. As he proclaimed in a sermon written for Taylor, “virtue, and virtue alone, is the parent of felicity” (vol. xiv, 13). Nevertheless, he elsewhere declaimed with equal vehemence against the naive assumption that the virtuous life was always happy. In The Vanity of Human Wishes, he disabused the reader of the belief that “the virtues of a temp’rate prime” (line 291) or a “congratulating Conscience” (line 296) would lead to happiness, for the virtuous, like the vicious, are subject to “Misfortune” (line 299), grief for loved ones, broken friendships, and the afflictions of disease. The travelers in Rasselas must similarly face the truth that, as Nekayah concludes, “we do not always find visible happiness in proportion to visible virtue” (vol. xvi, 101). In conversations recorded by Boswell, where Johnson evidently did not feel obliged to insist on the felicity of virtue, he repeatedly denounced this belief as cant. In one dialogue, for example, he “strenuously opposed an argument by Sir Joshua [Reynolds], that virtue was preferable to vice, considering this life only and that a man would be virtuous were it only to preserve his character” (Boswell, Life, vol. iii, 342). However admired and longed for in private, virtue could not assure the actor of happiness in this life. And this lack of incentive was particularly damaging given Johnson’s understanding of the will, which, like Locke, he regarded as determined by the greatest perceived pleasure or the avoidance of uneasiness. “Every man is conscious,” he wrote in Sermon 14, “that he neither performs, nor forbears any thing upon any other motive than the prospect, either of an immediate gratification, or a distant reward” (vol. xiv, 149). Offered the prospect of advantage or pleasure in this world, the will would even inevitably lean toward immediate gratification even at the expense of distant reward. The deluded and transient pleasures of riches, for example, had been denounced both by classical and Christian moralists. Notwithstanding, “their arguments have been, indeed, so unsuccessful, that I know not whether it can be shown, that by all the wit and reason which this favourite cause has called forth, a single convert was ever made” (vol. iii, 310). As he stated elsewhere, “In opulent states

Virtue   637 and regular governments, the temptations to wealth and rank . . . are such as no force of understanding finds it easy to resist” (vol. ii, 463). What I have presented here are a series of perplexities and contradictions that become apparent when we examine Johnson’s moral thought as a whole, rather than by isolating individual declarations. Although he stated that the distinction between virtue and vice was so clear that it did not need explanation, this difference was in fact obscured by the experience of the world, where standards of praise and blame vary. Although he urged retirement from the world as a means of strengthening the motives to virtue, retirement both harbored the dangers of “airy gratification” and contradicted our duty to participate in society, “the true sphere of human virtue.” Although he sometimes advised that virtue was the most certain means to happiness even in this world, he elsewhere flatly contradicted this claim. Given the inevitable preponderance of the senses over reason, as well as the necessary determination of the will by anticipated “gratification,” the frequent choice of immediate desire over virtue seemed not only likely but also inevitable. Together this assessment of human motivations and weakness presented a fairly discouraging prospect for achieving a moral life, however valued and longed for. Nevertheless, Johnson did provide reasons for hope and continued effort, solacing the trials and dilemmas of the virtuous life with compassion and reassurance. These reasons might be divided between those of secular philosophy and those of religious enlightenment.

Secular Solutions: The Moral Discipline of the Mind In perhaps Johnson’s most concise statement of his own moral philosophy, the task of achieving a virtuous life was difficult and ongoing but by no means impossible: Nature will indeed always operate, human desires will be always ranging; but these motives, though very powerful, are not resistless; nature may be regulated, and desires governed; and to contend with the predominance of successive passions, to be endangered first by one affection, and then by another, is the condition upon which we are to pass our time, the time of our preparation for the state which shall put an end to our experiment, to disappointment, and to change. (Yale Works, vol. v, 42)

As stressed in previous studies of Johnson’s thought, such as those of Paul Alkon and Adam Potkay, the perpetual challenge of temporal existence is “the moral discipline of the mind” (vol. iii, 42).1 This discipline involves a perpetual wariness of the moral 1  See Paul K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 146–​79; Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 76–​100.

638   Nicholas Hudson dangers that lie in every state of life, whether private or public, and unending caution against the human tendency to self-​delusion. Johnson’s essays are characterized by insistence on total truth and candor about the difficulty of the virtuous life and the dangers that prey on the lack of honesty. At his most positive he advises that this effort itself, or what he interestingly calls the “experiment” of life, is more important than the actual achievement of perfection. “Having first set positive and absolute excellence before us,” he writes, “we may be pardoned though we sink down to humbler virtue, trying, however to keep our point always in view” (vol. iii, 78). With regard to ourselves and others, we must be patient and realize that whatever we achieve, morally and otherwise, will be faulted and limited. Idler 89 concludes with one of his most undemanding statements of this principle: “He that has improved the virtue or advanced the happiness of one fellow-​creature, he that has ascertained a single moral proposition, or added one useful experiment to natural knowledge, may be contented with his own performance, and with respect to mortals like himself, may demand like Augustus, to be dismissed at his departure with applause” (vol. ii, 275). In pessimistic moments—​ and they are quite frequent—​ Johnson described the passions as “diseases” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 253). Reason and the passions are opposed: “The general voice of mankind, civil and barbarous, confesses that the mind and body are at variance, and that neither can be made happy but at the expence of the other” (vol. ii, 161). This statement, we should note, is not “Stoic.” Johnson did not repeat the error of the “wise and happy man” in Rasselas who advises the prince to achieve an absolute “conquest of the passions,” only to be found grieving for his deceased daughter (vol. xvi, 70–​6). A truthful understanding of human nature must accept that “Nature will indeed always operate,” and that reason will always need to negotiate with the senses and passions. Johnson often encouraged the rational utilization of the passions for the achievement of virtue and useful secular ends. In an encouraging moment in the sermons, he assures the congregation that “Our holy religion exalts, but does not violate, our affections; and directs us to practice every duty consistently with nature” (vol. xiv, 291). The moral essays often advise us to harness the passions in useful ways. “Fear,” he tells us, “is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it” (vol. iv, 307). Curiosity is similarly a natural incentive to knowledge, though, uncontrolled, it can encourage prurience and the waste of effort (Rambler 103). Johnson’s most famous advice on the channeling of the passions is his dissertation on the love of fame in Rambler 49. “Upon an attentive and impartial review of the argument,” Johnson wrote, “it will appear that the love of fame is to be regulated rather than extinguished” (vol. iii, 266). Although the love of fame is dangerous when “indulged by the mind to become and independent and predominant,” for it then becomes the drive of tyrants and conquerors, in a regulated and subordinate role this passion can be “accepted as the only recompense which mortals can bestow on virtue” (vol. iii, 267). Worldly desires and standards can be ideally utilized to make virtue more attractive. Although Johnson often indicated that all people long for virtue in private—​“No man yet was wicked without secret discontent” (vol. iv, 35)—​he elsewhere agreed that virtue without the attractions of good manners, fashion and even

Virtue   639 wealth could repel rather than attract the viewer. “Without good humour,” he instructed in Rambler 72, “virtue may awe by its dignity, and amaze by its brightness; but must always be viewed at a distance, and scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator” (vol. iv, 13). Virgil was right to believe that “Virtue is better accepted when it comes in a pleasing form” (vol. ii, 402). The theologian Robert Nelson should be applauded for adorning his pious and virtuous behavior with courtly manners and fine dress (Adventurer 131). What Johnson sets out, then, is a careful navigation of passions and worldly standards that, while unending and always incomplete, seeks realistically to make the best of one’s own and humanity’s faulty nature. He never abandoned the challenge, often repeated, of complete moral independence, a form of behavior that consults only one’s own conscience and rejects any worldly motive to conduct. “It is below the dignity of a reasonable being,” he exhorts, “to own that strength to necessity which ought always to act at the call of choice, or to need any other motive to industry, than the desire of performing his duty” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 327). Such independence, however, seems to loom as an ideal goal, necessary to steel the mind against complacency, rather than an end that we can reasonably expect to achieve in any pure form. Ultimately, Johnson viewed life as an ongoing process, a system of trial and error filled with both failures and moments of triumph. “It is not but by experience, that we are taught the possibility of retaining some virtues, and rejecting others and of being good or bad to a particular degree” (vol. iv, 5). In a cogent essay, Fred Parker compares Johnson’s ethics with Alasdair Macintyre’s well-​known account of the modern state of morality in After Virtue (1981).2 A neo-​ Aristotelian, Macintyre rejects the Enlightenment project of establishing objective standards of virtue divorced from the teleological conviction that human nature, understood as part of a particular historical community, dictates a habitual practice of living well, the fulfillment of human potential in the best way we can manage. (It should be added Macintyre is ultimately a conservative who rejects natural rights and issues of public justice as “fictions,” stressing private fulfillment over public action in a way that the very political Johnson did not.)3 Although Johnson appears to reject any worldly telos in Rasselas, understood as a goal that might be completed, this fable seems to value above all the very process of searching for personal fulfillment.4 As Imlac interrupts the travelers during their debate on the nature of happiness, “It seems to me . . . that while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live” (vol. xvi, 111). By the end of the tale, “the choice of life” becomes rather the choice of living, day by day, in the most ample way possible. The purpose of temporal existence, as Johnson told Boswell, may be simply “driving on the system of life” (Life, vol. iv, 112).

2  Fred

Parker, “ ‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Johnson and Moral Philosophy,” in Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, eds., Johnson after 300 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15–​32. 3  See Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 70, 244–​55. 4 See most recently on this issue, Chance David Pahl, “Teleology in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas,” Renaissance: Essays on Values and Literature 64, no. 5 (2012), 221–​32.

640   Nicholas Hudson Nevertheless, it is so pleasant to dwell on the wise and tonic messages in Johnson’s moral writings that our attention can be diverted from all that is urgent, fearful, and pessimistic in his work. “The majority are wicked” (Yale Works, vol. v, 160), he declaims in Rambler 174, citing Bion, an assessment corroborated by Juvenal: “ ‘The good are few.’ Virtue is uncommon in all the classes of humanity” (vol. ii, 398). From the beginning of his career, Johnson’s assessment of society’s moral condition is distinctive for its bleakness and even its anger. Although London (1738) is a political poem, filled with the Opposition verbiage of political virtue, its vision of a world corrupted by money and vice would be re-​echoed in his later work: “Behold rebellious virtue quite o’rethrown, | Behold our fame, our wealth, our lives quite your own” (lines 63–​4). In contrast with Johnson’s measured acceptance of the love of fame in the Rambler, he lamented the preeminence of ambition over virtue shortly before in The Vanity of Human Wishes: “This pow’r has praise, that virtue scarce can warm, | Till fame supplies the universal charm” (lines 183–​4). The Life of Savage (1744) deserves closer analysis as it portrays, though with great compassion, many of the errors, self-​ delusions, and worldly temptations that would be elaborated in the moral essays of the 1750s. Richard Savage exemplified the contrast between speculative or theoretical virtue and a practical existence largely surrendered to passion and sensual indulgence. As Johnson observed, “The reigning error of his life was, that he mistook the love for practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much a good man, as a friend to goodness” (Lives, vol. iii, 154). In Rambler 14, Johnson famously defended the difference between an author’s writings and his life. Against those who condemn authors who praise virtue but live faulted lives, Johnson replied that “They never consider that they themselves neglect, or practice something every day, inconsistently with their own settled judgment” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 77). Yet Savage illustrated this divergence between principle and practice to an extraordinary degree. Having killed a man in a bar fight, Savage himself saw the error of depicting him as an example of how “the best may sometimes deviate from virtue,” as was done in a contemporary poem: “Savage remarked, that it was no very just representation of a good man, to suppose him liable to drunkenness, and disposed in his riots to cut throats” (Lives, vol. iii, 199). Curiously, Savage embodied even a parody of Johnson’s principle of moral independence. In the Rambler, Johnson presented a life constantly regulated by conscience as the highest goal of the virtue: “That every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience, without any regard to the opinions of the rest of the world, is one of the first precepts of moral prudence” (Yale Works, vol. iii, 125). Savage indeed accepted no criticisms or judgments on his actions, constantly proclaiming his own virtues and blaming his misfortunes on the vices of others. As Johnson observes, “Had he indeed made use of these expedients to alleviate the loss or want of fortune, or any other advantages . . . they might be mentioned as instances of a philosophical mind” (Lives, vol. iii, 152). Yet Savage’s refusal to judge himself by any standards but his own made him invulnerable to compunction or change. Although in the Rambler Johnson declared that “No man yet was wicked without secret discontent,” Savage was “always able to live at peace with himself,” not wicked in principle yet

Virtue   641 utterly unwilling to reform his vicious habits of drunkenness, idleness and ingratitude (Lives, vol. iii, 153). Johnson is indeed able to express compassion for Savage because he was not radically corrupted, always intoning what his biographer took as a genuine love of virtue. Johnson’s forgiveness ended only at the point where the vicious person, always excusing or justifying his or her own wicked behavior, totally rejected the principles of virtue and attempted to draw others into depravity and impiety. Such persons are infidels, “scoffers” at religion, and debauched authors who defended or celebrated vice. Savage was not such a man. Moreover, despite Savage’s own claims to moral independence, he was in fact a victim of circumstances and of the dishonesty of others. Johnson accepted Savage’s dubious claims to being the illegitimate offspring of the Countess of Macclesfield, subjecting that woman to unforgiving charges of unnatural cruelty, but failing to suspect that his friend’s role as the aristocratic poet, entitled to support by others, was the grandest of his impostures. Johnson preferred to see Savage as an example of the moral dangers of poverty and dependence on the great. This was a repeated theme in his moral essays, and one reason why he regarded Nonjuring as a morally imprudent stance, however admirable as a demonstration of political conscience. The poet Elijah Fenton, for example, was among the “wise and virtuous men” who, by refusing allegiance to George I, “consulted conscience, whether well or ill informed, more than interest.” Yet Fenton was unusual in his ability to remain both honest and virtuous in a state of political proscription, for he was never reduced like other Nonjurors “to mean acts and dishonorable shifts” (Lives, vol. iii, 89). Again, however, Savage embodied a kind of perversion of the principle that poverty is the root of vice. He was often helped by others with considerable sums, yet, convinced of his own righteousness, immediately spent what he was given at the tavern, eventually alienating all his benefactors. Johnson’s ability to be liberal-​minded about even such a wayward soul as Savage corrects any impression that he was puritanically intolerant of vice and error. The profound difficulty of the moral life, as revealed in his essays, informed his perception that almost any vice, short of radical depravity, manifested the precarious condition of fallen humanity. In his assessment of authors throughout the Lives of the Poets, Johnson showed almost uniform tolerance toward the moral failings of his subjects. In a famous passage in Life of Milton, he declared that “we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance,” criticizing Milton’s anti-​scholastic scheme of education (Lives, vol. i, 249). Yet his assessment of literary works was seldom predominantly moral, for he was quite able to separate the literary virtues of a work from the moral virtues of the author. He remarks on the immoral and even profane tendencies of Dryden’s writing, which he ascribed to the temper of his age, but this disapproval did not stop him from rating Dryden even more highly than Pope. In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, his criticism of this writer’s sacrifice of “virtue to convenience” (Yale Works, vol. vii, 71) did not stop him from rating him as the greatest English author of them all. It is striking, however, that Johnson seemed unable to extend this liberality to himself. And here I will venture a controversial point. Johnson often heralded the supernatural revelation of Christianity as the final solution to all the problems and dilemmas

642   Nicholas Hudson that I have described. Yet Johnson’s notion of “sin,” as opposed to secular “virtue,” was so profoundly demanding that it became a major source of his personal unhappiness.

Religious Solutions: The Quest for Salvation “In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire,” Imlac advises near the end of Rasselas, “there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 167). Although Johnson’s moral tale does not end with the final solution of a Christian afterlife, instead circling back to life in this world, this promise seems never far from his analysis of the precarious state of moral virtue. As he wrote similarly in his sermons, When the present state of man is considered, when an estimate is made of his hopes, his pleasures, and his possessions . . . it is natural to wish for an abiding city, for a state more constant and permanent, of which the objects may be more proportioned to our wishes, and the enjoyments to our capacities. (vol. xiv, 135)

The afterlife would resolve all the contradictions between reason and the passions, private conviction and public activity, that we have considered. Johnson often imagined the human soul as a traveler or probationer in a world too confined for our wishes and faculties. As he wrote in Rambler 80, “providence has made the human soul an active being, always impatient for novelty, and struggling for something yet unenjoyed with unwearied progression” (vol. iv, 55–​6). The restless and insatiable pursuit of the soul for celestial fulfillment was, ironically, one source of worldly impatience with the restraints of virtue. The desire for everlasting fame reflects our eternal destiny, our desire to live forever in a state of exaltation unavailable in this life. In the present world, however, this drive commonly dissipates its energies in “splendid madness, as a flame kindled by pride, and fanned by folly” (vol. iii, 265). It needed to be regulated and rechanneled toward virtuous ends. In a perfect future state, these lurching and capacious human desires would finally be satisfied, and the need for restraint and discipline, so difficult and tenuous in this life, would finally come to an end. Johnson’s belief in the restless yearning of the human soul, as I have argued elsewhere, was not consistent, and seems to have dwindled by the end of the 1750s, amidst the vacuous patriotism of the Seven Years’ War.5 The Idler was appropriately named, for

5  Nicholas Hudson, “The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler,” in Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014), 241–​61.

Virtue   643 Johnson’s abiding theme there was not the bounding energy of human nature but rather its deadening inertia, the heavy thickening of desire into sloth and aimless triviality: The vis inertiae, the faculty of resisting all external impulse, is hourly increasing; the restless and troublesome faculties of attention and distinction, reflection on the past, and solicitude for the future, by a long indulgence in idleness, will, like tapers in unelastic air, be gradually extinguished. (Yale Works, vol. ii, 31)

Significantly, the cast of characters portrayed in the Idler—​Jack Whirler, Dick Minim, Sam Softly, Miss Gentle—​are not especially characterized by a deficit of “virtue.” In fact, they lack the energy and ambition to be vicious. Dick Minim “has more vanity than ill-​nature, and seldom desires to do much mischief ” (vol. ii, 188); Miss Gentle “was universally allowed to be a good sort of woman” (vol. ii, 306). It is remarkable, however, that during the same years that Johnson was portraying these mediocre people, he himself was often in a state of personal crisis about his own idleness and failure to get ahead with his projects, particularly his edition of Shakespeare. The divergence between Johnson’s demands on himself, and his awareness that many other people were content with their trifling but largely innocent existence, suggests that his earlier descriptions of the trials and dangers of moral life had as much to do with his own character as with what he presents as “human nature.” For it was Johnson who felt the need for an afterlife to fulfill his leaping ambitions. And it was evidently Johnson who ultimately believed that mere reason, the teachings of classical and secular tradition, could not secure humanity from vice without the additional support of eternal rewards and punishments. In The Vision of Theodore, Hermit of Teneriffe (1748), Johnson presented an allegorical dream vision that stressed the inadequacy of mere reason to resist the lures of appetite and habit (see Chapter 10, “Fiction,” and Chapter 26, “Education”). Guided only by “Reason,” the travelers discover themselves insensibly enchained by “Habit.” Only “the votaries of Religion” are able to avoid the lures of the senses and passions by following the guidance of “Conscience” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 206). Johnson’s stress on the need for religion to supplement and strengthen the dictates of reason and secular education was consistent with his conception of the will as a balance of counterpoised desires. If human beings act or forbear for no other reason than “the prospect, either of an immediate gratification, or a distant reward,” then only the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment in the afterlife, repeatedly reinforced in the mind through prayer and meditation, could finally outweigh the solicitation of immediate desire. Yet in his surviving prayers and meditations, some of which he destroyed near the end of his life, his personal rules and his guilt extended far beyond avoiding bad habits. He indeed lamented his sinful inability to rise early and drink with moderation. In addition to these failings, however, his conscience was weighed down by his sinful “imaginations,” his failure to feel appropriate joy in the Christian message, and his presumed lack of industry. Hence his prayer on Easter Eve, 1757:

644   Nicholas Hudson Almighty God, heavenly Father, who desireth not the death of the sinner, look down with mercy upon me depraved with vain imaginations, and entangled in long habits of Sin. Grant me that grace without which I can neither will nor do what is acceptable to thee. Pardon my sins, remove the impediments that hinder my obedience. Enable me to shake off Sloth, and to redeem the time mispent in idleness and Sin by a diligent application of the days yet remaining to the duties which thy Providence shall allot me. (Yale Works, vol. i, 63)

“Sin” was evidently a far more capacious concept than lack of “virtue.” Although in the Rambler he had explicitly confined himself to “natural desires” without “regard to superior principles by which the force of external agents may be counteracted” (vol. v, 42), presumably meaning divine grace, the prohibitions of Christianity evidently extended to the “natural desires” themselves. If in the Idler he had comforted the reader with the assurance that “He that has improved the virtue or advanced the happiness of one fellow-​creature” might go off the stage of life with applause, his prayers reveal his fear that a dictionary of the English language, several volumes of essays, and his charity to a household of needy people would be insufficient to secure salvation. Dr. Levet’s “virtues” might walk “their narrow round” (vol. vi, 305), but Johnson’s could not. And although he counted on the Christian system of eternal rewards and punishments to strengthen his will, he could not convince himself, with all his virtues, that he had done enough to avoid damnation. It is interesting that Johnson seemed aware that this form of sorrowful and self-​tormenting Christianity was neither required nor helpful. Rambler 44 is another allegorical dream vision in which “Superstition” declares that “Misery is the due of all sublunary beings, and every enjoyment is an offence to the deity, who is to be worshipped only by the mortification of every sense of pleasure.” This advice is refuted by “Religion,” who assures the dreamer that “to enjoy the blessings [God] has sent, is virtue and obedience; and to reject them merely as means of pleasure is pitiable ignorance, or absurd peevishness” (vol. iii, 238–​9). There is little evidence in Johnson’s private writings, however, that he was able to take this advice to heart, for his misery seems all out of proportion with everything that we know about his life. Johnson’s unhappiness no doubt had much to do with a congenital disposition to depression that we are not, as literary critics, in a position to diagnose. What we can say on the evidence is that, at least for much of his life, Christianity was not helping. In his essays, which concentrated on secular “virtue,” he portrayed the moral life as a daunting and lifelong task threatened from various sides by sensual temptations and corrupt social standards. The dictates of “virtue” were nonetheless clear, at least to speculative reason. The difficulty of achieving virtue was such that Johnson could easily forgive human failures and portray life as an ongoing process of trial and error aimed at sustaining a good life, with all its pains and missteps. In his private ruminations on “sin,” on the other hand, his own efforts could never be adequate. He regarded his very desires and thoughts as vicious, the helps of Grace insufficient or withheld, and the prospect of eternal damnation real and imposing. There are reasons to believe that he was

Virtue   645 encouraging rather pacifying a sense of despair. We understandably concentrate on the public Johnson, the author of essays whose analysis of virtue, though in many ways traditional, distinguishes in original ways between the theory and the practice of ethical conduct. As we have seen, his writing is replete with incisive, complex, and original insights into the psychological process of trying to live according to one’s highest moral aspirations. Beneath this public surface, however, lay an understanding of Christian duty that far exceeded the requirements of “virtue,” turning his moral lapses, his lack of physical energy, and his private thoughts into a source of grief.

Further Reading Alkon, Paul K. Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Hudson, Nicholas. Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hudson, Nicholas. “The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler.” In Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, edited by Howard D. Weinbrot, 241–​61. San Marino: Huntington Library, 2014. Parker, Fred. “ ‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Johnson and Moral Philosophy.” In Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, edited by Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, 15–​ 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Potkay, Adam. The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Voitle, Robert. Samuel Johnson the Moralist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Chapter 36

G od Blanford Parker

A deep melancholy took possession of him and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion, he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium . . . and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide were too dim to cheer him.1

Macaulay’s words are not sympathetic, but they have a grain of truth. Macaulay himself, though a talented observer of life, had little enough insight into religion. He could not have imagined the solace that Johnson took from his own peculiar form of Christian devotion. But Macaulay’s misunderstanding is not unique. How many times has Johnson been simplified or distorted through the lens of psychological analysis, as if his fears were unique? Johnson in fact represents in an extreme form one of the major modes of Christian theology. But getting to that theology—​ one might say, mode of religion—​has been made difficult by the intrusion of psychoanalysis on the one side and uncritical historicism on the other. We are all familiar by now with the psychoanalytic tradition which explains Johnson’s religion as fearful pathology. We all indeed remember Johnson’s fears of melancholy and

1 

Macaulay’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Charles Lane Hanson (Boston, MA and New York: Ginn & Co., 1903), 5.

God   647 fits of madness. But it is now and has always been unfair to think of his thoughts on religion as a mere reflection on his habitual mental state. In any event, enough has been said of that matter. I will remark upon psychological issues only when they illuminate specific theological ideas. The historicism which I mentioned above is a more complicated problem. In works as percipient as Nicholas Hudson’s Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought, we are asked to place him in a grid of well-​known theological positions. By now it must be clear that there was a great variety of Christian and Deist views in Johnson’s period. And though there are minor elements of natural religion, Erastianism, and ceremonialism in his thought, none of these are dominant or even important. It is natural that he told Boswell that the citizens of any state need the guidance of a public religion, for he had a low enough opinion of man’s natural tendency to do good. His connection to the High Church and the controversies surrounding his family and his youth in the politics of royalism are, it seems to me, a false start. His religious character eschews almost every element of High Church Anglicanism. Like William Law, who was also a Nonjuror, he was not consistent in his church attendance, nor does he anywhere debate questions of public practice or liturgy. He seemed to have been unconcerned about the formal devotional issues of his period. He may have even agreed with Law (for whom he had an undeniable admiration) that “there is not one command in all the Gospel for Publick Worship; and perhaps it is a duty that is least insisted upon in Scripture of any other. The frequent attendance at church is never so much as mention’d in all of the New Testament.”2 At times he seemed to suggest a close likeness between Protestantism and Catholicism—​a view he shares with almost none of his contemporaries. The Bible certainly played a central, and sometimes mystifying role in his personal religion. The form and substance of his prayers might indicate an almost evangelical simplicity. It is important to remember that Hester Thrale, generally a fairly balanced critic of Johnson, remarks that he was “one of the most zealous [Christians] our nation has ever produced.”3 By “zeal” did she mean enthusiasm, and did she mean to indicate that Johnson’s religion was much warmer than her own rationalistic Anglicanism? In the heroic summary at the end of Boswell’s Life, a similar judgment is given: Though his imagination might incline him to a belief of the marvellous and the mysterious, his vigorous reason examined the evidence with jealousy. He was a sincere and zealous Christian, of high Church-​ of-​ England and monarchical principles, which he would not tamely suffer to be questioned; and had, perhaps, at an early period, narrowed his mind somewhat too much, both as to religion and politicks. His being impressed with the danger of extreme latitude in either, though he was of a very independent spirit, occasioned his appearing somewhat

2 

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 2nd ed. (London, 1732), 8. Lynch Piozzi, “Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson,” in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, 158. 3  Hester

648   Blanford Parker unfavourable to the prevalence of that noble freedom of sentiment which is the best possession of man. (Life, vol. iv, 426)

Boswell, representing the liberal Anglican spirit of his time, has fallen short in describing Johnson’s narrowness. Johnson believed that discussions of the truth and falsity of Christianity were always impious. Similarly, he considered the Bible with such reverence that he would not permit it to be analyzed in the modern way. Boswell does not seem to understand the emotional force of Johnson’s fidelity. In fact, a close examination of Johnson’s imaginative practice will show a Pascalian or Lutheran fideism. In one sense then, though he was dedicated to the political principles of the High Churchman, his theology opposed the norms of the via media. I will not repeat the familiar biographical summary of his childhood phases of faith and doubt, nor indulge in the scant evidence given by his other early biographers. It may be true that Johnson, who had such a vast store of information on nearly every subject, had read widely about Christian theology. It is not true that his own religion is a synthesis of that material. The summary of his theological reading given by Michael F. Suarez is largely based on the accidental subject matter that he was pressed into writing while working for Cave and tells us almost nothing of his mature religious beliefs.4 Owen Chadwick, who was abundantly capable of making the judgment, found no fixed theology in the works of Johnson and could not even decide, on balance, whether he was a Calvinist or Arminian.5 I intend to limit myself to his major works: a few of his Adventurer and Rambler essays, his remarks upon Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, The Vanity of Human Wishes, Rasselas, and The Vision of Theodore. There is a peculiar consistency in the religious plot that Johnson creates in these mature works, and this spiritual narrative seems to be the key to understanding Johnson’s particular spirituality.

Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress “The three books of which he never tired, said Mrs. Thrale, were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote. ‘Alas,’ he would say, ‘how few books there are of which one can ever arrive at the last page’; and ‘Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that one could wish longer than these three books?’ ”6 Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress form an interesting pattern in the Johnsonian imagination. First, 4 Michael

F. Suarez, S.J., “Johnson’s Christian Thought,” in Greg Clingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 192–​208. 5  Owen Chadwick, “The Religion of Samuel Johnson,” Yale University Library Gazette 60, nos. 3–​4 (April 1986), 127–​131. 6  W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 276.

God   649 in the case of Cervantes, we have a character whose life is dominated by the imagination. His fanciful considerations of the heroic ideal have so marred his judgment of everyday life that he can no longer function in the quotidian world. If we think of Johnson’s everyman—​a man who lives “from hope to hope” in a labyrinth of frustration, we may see how easily Don Quixote can furnish Johnson with a type. We are all deluded Quixotes because we fill the endless vacuity of our days on earth with a discourse of self-​deception and desire. How many of the Ramblers served to prove this point? This may be the chief lesson of Johnson’s peculiar morality. In Johnson’s view literature itself, as I have said elsewhere,7 is a bauble to distract, entertain, titillate, and enliven. In Don Quixote we have both the perfection of such an entertainment and the central insight into the contradictions of human character. The book is dangerously close to life even if it represents in a comical way the problem of the passage of time. Life is an endless concatenation of desires, wishes, and illusions. Desire is both the motive of change and the force that moves us to the goal. It is a rationalizing force only at the end. This may seem irrelevant to an understanding of Johnson’s religion, but it is not. There are two interlocking problems for the human person in Johnson’s morality: first, how to fill up the space in which each soul anticipates its end with a minimum of anxiety, and secondly, how that anticipated end may be reached with the promises of Christian salvation. The question is how does a character like Quixote, traversing the dangerous expanse of human experience, assure himself that he will enter the portal of eternity unharmed? Johnson also saw in Don Quixote the idea of a dominating obsession. Returning from his wonderful encounter with the lions in the company of Don Diego (the night of the green overcoat), Don Quixote sits down to a peaceful and friendly meal. Don Diego, the master of the house, comes perhaps closest to Cervantes’s idea of the perfect hidalgo—​practical, serious, sociable, and industrious. His wife and home are the proper ornaments of a minor rural aristocrat. Coming as it does before the wedding of Camacho, this episode makes us feel a moral contrast between the solid country gentleman and the flagrant energies of the folk. But the meal brings new complexity to Quixote’s short vacation in reality. Don Diego is caught uncomfortably between two fantasies to which he is almost equally unsympathetic. Quixote’s chief interlocutor for the evening is Don Lorenzo, the kindly and intelligent son of Don Diego. We soon discover that Don Lorenzo is a student poet and an aspiring classical scholar. As the conversation develops, we hear a full-​blown humanist debate about the nature of the knight and the poet. The youthful Lorenzo has already been informed of the guest’s madness and, at first, he merely toys with the knight of the mournful countenance. Shortly, both father and son are astounded by Quixote’s pointed eloquence and wide learning. Suddenly there is no trace of his madness. Quixote, who generally describes the knight’s life as one of asceticism, preternatural physical courage, and intense

7  Blanford

Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 244–​5.

650   Blanford Parker amorous devotion, cleverly reconfigures his knight as a humanist in accordance with Don Lorenzo’s own particular attitude. It is one of the tricks of Quixote’s sympathetic and protean imagination that he can fit his discourse to the language of his companions. Saying that knighthood compares favorably to poetry and other attainments of the humanist, Quixote defines the preparation of knight errantry as “the kind of study which embraces within it all, or most, of the world’s knowledge.”8 We discover that the knight must be a master of moral, civil, and spiritual law; he must study history, politics, and theology. He must have knowledge of natural medicine, astrology, and mathematics. All of this combined with eloquence (both rhetorical and poetic) and some extraordinary physical gifts (especially in horsemanship) is required of the humanist knight. A few moments later Quixote surprises Don Lorenzo with his subtle understanding of poetic imitation—​its beauties and limitations. We, the readers, know that Don Quixote’s whole life is a work of imagination—​of intricate fictions in which real insight is mixed with madness. Johnson traced the problem of obsession and the problem of fantasy through most of his mature works. The poet’s education in ­chapter 10 of Rasselas, for example, is on one side serious but on the other indicates the massive ambition and vanity of the poet’s project. It could be compared to Quixote’s summary of the poet knight in the scene just alluded to. So, in The Vanity of Human Wishes we find that the ambition of a young scholar, the vain designs of a famous prelate, the appetite for conquest of a Swedish general, are all modes of Quixote-​like self-​indulgence. If in the individual’s life there is a tendency to delusion, which in its more banal form might be called hope; so in the great man’s narrative the very source of his genius will tend to become the cause of his destruction. How do we get through life without being destroyed by either our vices or our virtues? How do we construct a life in which the primary goal is a saving eternity when we are so inclined as individuals to be distracted and even maddened by our desires? These are the central questions of Johnson’s moral theology. In the sad final scenes of Don Quixote’s life when he has reached the melancholy realization of his lifelong madness, his friends begin to urge him to return to his entertaining fantasies. They ask him if he will join them as a shepherd or a soldier. He simply responds that he must give himself over to God—​that he is not the Don Quixote upon whom they have wasted so many adventures, but a new man, simple, pious, resigned. That ending, so frustrating to most readers, must have been deeply moving to Johnson. For he could see in it the necessary escape which is the central moment in the spiritual narrative of men. If Don Quixote is a picture both sympathetic and penetrating of men’s vanity, if it lays out with great variety the fabric of things which men find attractive, if it in fact entertains the way that life itself entertains, then for all of its madness it becomes a useful image of this world. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress comes at the problem more directly. Bunyan shared with Johnson a sense of how pervasive the effects of Vanity Fair may be. No reader could

8 

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 441.

God   651 have read the stolid allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress with more sympathy than Johnson. For him, it must have had almost a sense of realism. After all, his own moral prose so depends on abstraction—​on the construction of immovable types—​that he shows a kinship especially in the Rambler to the Bunyan narrator. It is easy to forget that Christian carries on his back the burden of the Fall through all but the very final phases of his spiritual journey. His friends like Talkative, Mr. Worldly Wise-​man, Presumption, Timorous, and so many more constitute almost the whole family of man. The space between Christian’s home and the New Jerusalem is almost solid with dangers. Even the Delectable Mountains from which the shepherds can view the holy city deceive in part with its peacefulness. For the “Immanuel” which it worships is still far away from the tired pilgrim. Such pastoral retreat is but brief respite in a life shaped and determined by a single goal. From Bunyan, perhaps, Johnson derived, or at least perfected, the notion of a space in which we are tested as much by our joys as by our sufferings (see Chapter 34, “Happiness,” and Chapter 29, “Suffering”). Johnson reveled in the whole panoply of human invention—​literature, theater, games, and all modes of social relation. But upon reflection we see in Johnson’s prayers and meditations that all these joys were not without fear and doubt. Superimposed upon the carnival of life was Johnson’s powerful sense of a telos. As we shall see, he shared with Pascal and Kant a sense that we live in an atmosphere of waiting. Such expectation fostered and nourished faith. The formula of Hebrews, that faith is “the substance of all our hopes and the reality we do not see,” may be said to be the animating concept of Johnson’s religion. Far from the evidentiary theories of Locke or Clarke, Johnson’s religion was built upon an apocalyptic finality. His answers to contemporary debates, mostly found in Boswell and suited to Boswell’s personal program, were mere passing considerations. We see also from his citations in the sermons and essays how much Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and the more bitter Psalms are his key Biblical supports. How powerful it must have been when Johnson read in Bunyan the following dialogue between Christian and the Shepherd: Shep. These mountains are Immanuels Land, and they are within sight of his City, and the sheep are also his, and he laid down his life for them. Chr.  Is this the way to the Cœlestial City? Shep.  You are just in your way. Chr.  How far is it thither? Shep.  Too far for any, but those that shall get thither indeed. Chr.  Is the way safe, or dangerous? Shep.  Safe for those for whom it is safe, but transgressors shall fall therein.9

Johnson always had this brutal sense that the end was all or nothing, and he rebuked Boswell for equivocating on the concept of hell. The “too far” of the Shepherd’s response

9 

John Bunyan, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come,” ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 235–​6.

652   Blanford Parker might have filled him with terror. How powerful is the image of the ever-​approaching “thither” which can only be understood by those who have been elected to go there. One recalls the end of Johnson’s mature poem, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet.” The poem begins with “Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine | As on we toil from day to day, | By sudden blasts, or slow decline, | Our social comforts drop away.” In this opening, Johnson emphasizes the delusions of hope which move us forward in life and the slow decline which marks our days of life on earth. The poem ends with the following: His virtues walk’d their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And sure th’ Eternal Master found The single talent well employ’d. The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; His frame was firm, his powers bright, Tho’ his eightieth year was nigh. Then with no throbbing fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain And free’d his soul the nearest way. (Yale Works, vol. vi, 314–​15)

Here Johnson’s fondest hope is realized when the aging doctor is suddenly released from time into eternity and the chain is broken without further anguish. Johnson announces a kind of ideal escape from the world of desire. As we shall see, such a painless and consummate end is one of the chief terms in Johnson’s spiritual ideal.

History No work of Johnson’s can clarify more completely the spiritual narrative we have been describing than The Vanity of Human Wishes. That part of life which we might call the durée, the extended narrative of desire, takes up the first 342 lines of the poem. But the narrative here is not Quixotic. The place of entertaining fiction and private madness is taken up by history. But history, it seems, is itself an interlocking web of delusion. Each of the major figures of the poem is connected to some pathology. The shared mode of moral confusion is ambition, but that ambition has many faces. Just as in Don Quixote, the characters are limited by their own obsessions. Far from the cynical lampooning of Juvenal, Johnson looks on mankind with sympathy. Johnson’s “Democritus,” though introduced as a source of “cheerful Wisdom and instructive Mirth,” soon departs from the jeu d’esprit of the Roman poet to an unabated moral seriousness. The Roman poem, like the Persian

God   653 tale in Rasselas, is a screen behind which Johnson’s Christianity is carefully hidden. Of course, by replacing Roman with modern scenes, he has already moved into the sphere of Christian culture. Each of Johnson’s representative heroes has a precipitous rise to, and sudden fall from, power. Just as Charles of Sweden is “baffled . . . in Honour’s flattering Bloom,” so Cardinal Wolsey is drowned at the very moment in which “the Stream of Honour flows.” The two elements of Johnson’s parent narrative, the story of desire and the story of doom, are never far apart. As in the elegy for Levet the chain of life is often broken suddenly and although there may be decline and shame there is usually a quick and fateful appraisal of the ambitious overreacher. No passage shows more pointedly the paradoxes of ambition than the couplet which connects Swift with Marlborough: From Marlb’rough’s Eyes the Streams of Dotage flow, And Swift expires a Driv’ler and a show.

Swift, of course, had been an enemy of Marlborough since the Examiner papers. His animus never cooled; a generation after their original conflict Swift could write the most pointed and lurid elegy for the duke. But as Johnson remarks, it was not long before Swift’s own dignity was shattered by Ménière’s disease and senility. The duke and the poet are caught in a circle of shame. But history does not enter the poem until line 129. The poem’s opening must be given special attention. It is perhaps Johnson’s most perfect statement of his conception of the human situation. In it, “Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate | O’er spread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,” these four nouns describe the whole territory of human expectation. Each of them can be fulfilled only in a future state. We hope for and desire that which is not present. We fear and hate that which is not understood. Although these impediments to immediate knowledge seem to cripple mankind, they are also part of Johnson’s religious formula. Fear is our proper relation to the unknowable God we meet in his response to Soame Jenyns. Hope and desire must always look to futurity. That which is debilitating in the realm of history or experience becomes fruitful in Johnson’s spiritual teleology. These crushing emotions force even the greatest temporal successes to lean upon a future resolution. Men’s hopes for immediate happiness are vain, and yet happiness is not impossible. Those things which seem most fruitful in civic or private life—​“reason,” “choice,” “courage,” “elocution”—​ are in the end untrustworthy. “The Maze of Fate,” like Bunyan’s earthly journey, is a place where “treach’rous Phantoms in the Mist delude.” “The Gifts of Nature” are not wholly stable. Johnson does not seem to accept in the end a conception of unquestioned natural law, or even sensus commmunis. Though in temporal matters they may be necessary guides, as he suggests in his Lives of the English Poets, they are not guides to the ultimate good. The temporal territory is so unlike the eternal, and the human so unlike the godly, that they seem to be connected by the merest thread. With such a construction Johnson is approaching Pascalian fideism.

654   Blanford Parker To clarify this important point we must look at the remarkable lines which end the poem. Like “the Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded” in Rasselas, or like the generally skeptical conclusions in the Soame Jenyns “Enquiry,” The Vanity of Human Wishes ends in a spirit which contradicts the implications of the body of the poem. Starting at line 343, we get the true Johnsonian question, “Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find | Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant Mind? | Must helpless Man in Ignorance sedate | Roll darkly down the Torrent of his Fate?” Johnson feels compelled to ask his reader if there is any escape from the vanity of the poem, which is to ask if there is any escape from the miseries of life. The answer is a resounding yes. There are true objects of our fear and hope, but those objects are in eternity. The only object which may end the dull suspense of the human intellect concerning the meaning of things in general is God. The ignorance which is sedate in an earthly realm may turn to knowledge simple and lucid in the other world. In the last verse paragraph of the poem, we find that there are moments, though few in this life, when we are fired by the “sacred presence.” At those bright openings we must pour forth prayers, not questionings. But even then, the result may not become rapturous until death: For Faith, still panting for a happier Seat, Counts Death kind Nature’s signal of Retreat; These Goods to Man the Law of Heav’n ordain, These Goods he grants who grants the Pow’r to gain; With these celestial Wisdom calms the Mind, And makes the Happiness she does not find. (Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 363–​8)

In this case, faith in its purest mode may make its own happiness. And this is easy to understand. For Johnson, an expectation of good to come and the substance of things unseen are the only objects worthy of our full human attention, whatever may be the weaknesses of human nature and the terror of human experience. Fervent faith may rise in a happy season to a shadowy form of divine presence. At the moment at which faith operates most purely it creates an object beyond the power of normal experience and outside the realm of nature. Such a fideism is but a glimpse at the promises fulfilled in death, and death remains the true and only aperture to truth itself.

The Anatomy of Futurity Although six Rambler essays directly address Johnson’s theological ideals,10 one in particular might be seen as a summary of what we have seen so far represented in various 10 In

Ramblers 7, 17, 44, 67, and 178 Johnson’s thesis is at least partially described. Each of these essays adds important elements to the argument. See Yale Works, vols. iii, iv, and v.

God   655 fictions. It is, in fact, the most complete statement of his theology. Rambler 203 may be considered an anatomy of futurity and everything in it emphasizes the concept of the end. In its first sentence, we find “It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity” and, in its last sentence several pages later, “On this therefore every mind ought finally to rest: hope is the chief blessing of man, and that hope only is rational, of which we are certain that it cannot deceive us” (Yale Works, vol. v, 291, 295). In between these two propositions, we find that there are three or four species of expectation. The first is the expectation of immediate goods—​wealth, pleasure, contentment. These expectations cannot be trusted at any age. The second expectation, one of a fine moral reputation, is more valuable but still tenuous. The next is that of true fame and has the benefit of only being perfected after death. All of these are dwarfed by the expectation of good to come from God. The divine promise is both final and certain. It is the end by which all other ends are weighted. Each of the imperfect goals of human life depend on vagaries beyond our control. The fulfillment of these goals never produces a cessation of desire but leads us to the next level of hoping. Only the last phase of expectation can cure an otherwise perennial discontent. It is not therefore from this world that any ray of comfort can proceed, to cheer the gloom of the last hour. But futurity has still its prospects; there is yet happiness in reserve, which, if we transfer our attention to it, will support us in the pains of disease, and the languor of decay. This happiness we may expect with confidence, because it is out of the power of chance, and may be attained by all that sincerely desire and earnestly pursue it. (Yale Works, vol. v, 295)

Here Johnson reiterates his powerful belief in the promise of the next world. Only something vouchsafed by a divine decree can be trusted. It is the only form of hope in which the desire is smaller than the object of fulfillment. God alone, in His eternal and unchanging sphere, can rise above the vacillations of time. This essay is the most complete statement of what might be considered the grand theme of most of his important narrative works. Although Christ or the specific theological language of Trinity does not appear, we may be sure from parallels in the daily journals that the context of final hope is Christian. It is important to remember one further element of Johnson’s religion—​the promise of teleological completion which we have been describing is found in the Bible. The Bible is the only trustworthy source of this formulation. When Johnson considered the ethics of everyday life it was the nihilism of Ecclesiastes and Lamentations which best described his sense of quotidian existence. But the great end which would cure men of their unhappiness is to be found for him in the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation. It was a peculiarity of Johnson to believe the Bible was by its nature unlike any other book: It is not only when the events are confessedly miraculous that fancy and fiction lose their effect; the whole system of life, while the Theocracy was yet visible, has

656   Blanford Parker an appearance so different from all other scenes of human action that the reader of the Sacred Volume habitually considers it a peculiar mode of existence of a distinct species of mankind.11

That is to say that the Bible is in some sense above and outside any human proclamation. Johnson imagines that its authorship must be supernatural and that the same powers which guided Moses or Jesus guided the authors of Scripture. Just as the next world is the now-​unknowable perfection of this world, so the Bible is a text that transcends all temporal imagination. The “visible Theocracy” is a kind of Eden in which innocent perfection may be perceived by the corrupted human reader. So, just as the Apocalypse cures all the limits of the hoped-​for, so the Bible clarifies all temporal matters. Johnson found the “familiarity with religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things” in Donne and his contemporaries as “offensive” to readers “far short of sanctity” (Lives, vol. i, 229). It was this scurrilous latitude that in part led Johnson to deride the entire Baroque era of English writing. With Milton his anxiety was more complex, for Milton overreached in understanding a world more perfect than our own but also seemed to be blessed with an almost Biblical insight into the human condition. It should not surprise us, then, that Johnson found no consolation in the hymns of Waller, Watts, or Wesley. He seemed to believe that the hymn could not add luster to our conception of God and, though it may show the particular devotion of an author, it cannot increase our insight into the divine. For this reason the religious lyric was for Johnson by nature a failed project.

The Vision of Theodore Approximately one year before the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson created a small allegorical prose romance entitled The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe. At the beginning Theodore, who apparently had been a man of the world, defends his retreat from society, “I at length found here, a place where all real wants might be easily supplied . . . Here I saw fruits and herbs and water, and here determined to wait the hand of death, which I hope, when at last it comes, will fall lightly upon me” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 195). Here again we see the motif of the deathly escape from quotidian affairs. Death is mentioned as the solution before the allegorical narrative is even begun. The telos of death so pronounced in the Vanity serves again as the primary and explanatory episode in a convoluted life’s story. The forty-​eight years of Theodore’s life

11  “Sacred

History has been always read with submissive reverence, and an imagination over-​awed and controlled. We have been accustomed to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative, and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence, as suppresses curiosity”: Life of Cowley, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 2006), vol. i, 224.

God   657 are not described in the terms of the modern novelist, but as a Bunyanesque journey of the soul. As in Bunyan, the landscape and characters (though few in number) are all understood as the moral furniture of salvation. At first Theodore imagined he was contemplating the wonders of nature with its high mountain peaks and its lonely rivers. But he soon found that Teneriffe was superseded in the moral space of the landscape by a mountain higher and more sublime, which even the human eye could not reach: “When I had tired myself with gazing upon its height, I turned my eyes toward its foot, which I could easily discover, but was amazed to find it without foundation, and placed inconceivably in emptiness and darkness.” This “Mountain of Existence” becomes the difficult goal of Theodore’s life. It is said to be without foundation or bottom, and with a height immeasurable because it is a metaphor for the person of God. As is true in so many of Johnson’s narratives, God is a remote or even absent presence. The Mountain of Existence, the home of the true divinity, is the mental landscape of the Deus Absconditus. Those high peaks “did not give much pleasure to the sight or smell, yet seemed to cheer the labor and facilitate the steps of those who were clamoring among them.” In other words, the attraction of the mountain was not sensual or immediate, but sublime in its moral magnetism. It was like the super essential heights of the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite—​inconceivable and insurmountable. In Theodore’s quest he was first guided by innocence, a white-​clothed maiden of pastoral provenance, but soon he discovered that innocence was inadequate as a guide to the higher peaks. It was by education, by which Johnson meant moral education, that Theodore was kept to the straight path. As it turns out, the great enemy of the seeker is “Habit.” This personified power is the distracting force which leads us away from God by our inclination to return to a life of pleasure and delusion. “Reason” might attempt to conquer Habit but it cannot be trusted to do so. Only the gracious protection of faith and the discipline of self-​denial could hope to reach the summit. This concept of habit, almost always negative, must not be confused with the Aristotelian hexis. In Johnson’s lexicon, it indicates an irresistible attraction to things of this world. It is the subject of at least three of Johnson’s Rambler essays, nos. 7, 44, and 67, written in the five-​or six-​year period following the Vision. There is a series of Idler and Rambler essays which could almost be taken as an extended comment on the implications of the three great Johnsonian narratives—​The Vision of Theodore, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and Rasselas.12

Rasselas The last but not the least of Johnson’s narratives that we have to discuss is Rasselas. We will note that Rasselas, like the two earlier narratives, is not a work of realistic fiction.

12 

Idler 24, 41, 66, 89; Adventurer 120; Ramblers 17, 203.

658   Blanford Parker All three depend for their effects on a screen which complicates their allegory. In the case of The Vanity of Human Wishes, the screen is Roman satire: Johnson’s Democritus is not the breezy Epicurean or the haughty persecutor of mankind but a participating critic. In The Vision of Theodore, the screen is a Bunyanesque fairytale—​a combination of folk narrative and religious allegory. In the case of Rasselas, the screen is the Oriental tale by which Johnson, though superficially in the land of the exotic, tells a moral story whose location might be anywhere. There are deeper structural similarities which have not often been noted. There are two chief actants in all three of Johnson’s narratives. In the Vanity, though the episodic space is taken up by history rather than fiction, it begins with a wandering traveler who is guided and instructed by the transformed Democritus that I have mentioned above. The episodic middle is illustrated by historical exemplars of genius collapsing into disaster. The needy traveler, however, is passing through a moral minefield not unlike that of Theodore or Rasselas. All three of these narratives may be placed in the same genus—​the quest—​though in the case of The Vanity the questing protagonist is only introduced in the first and final passages. He is instructed at a distance by pictures of men far from his circumstance to show how difficult any individual life must be. In The Vision of Theodore, there are also two essential actants: first the son of perseverance, who represents in some sense the reader, and second the guide and instructor, who has already reached the end of the difficult journey. The concluding vision of the peak of salvation is presented to the son of perseverance as a possibility proven by Theodore’s sacrifice. In the case of Rasselas, the prince represents the reader. He is the instructed actor and Imlac is a model of the instructor of youth. Whether we believe that Johnson may be transposed on the figure of Imlac or of Democritus is an open question. I want to speak briefly about the structure of the main body of Rasselas. It is obviously Johnson’s most thorough critique of human knowledge. This skepticism of human rationality plays a large part in Johnson’s religious theory. We saw in the vision of Theodore (and in numerous Ramblers) that reason was not adequate in itself to produce virtue. The general vanity shown in the fabric of history already extended to learning, rule, generalship, authorship, and religious vocation. In Rasselas, these limitations are described in greater detail. One way to look at the structure of the narrative is to see that at c­ hapters 10, 21, 32, and 40 are the major divisions by field of knowledge. Taken as a whole, it may be considered a brutal criticism of the claims of humanism. The poet, as Rasselas quickly remarks, must have powers of understanding and territories of knowledge which no mortal could master. Since Imlac himself was a poet and has gotten the praise of foreigners because of his capacious imagination we can see this as a satire upon the ambition of authors. The claims for what a good poet must know seem to exceed the wisdom of Solomon and it would be a mistake to think that Johnson, who seems to be parodying Sidney, believes in these sublime claims for the poet. Similarly, in ­chapter 21, the hermit shows us the pretenses of solitude. In many places afterwards (as in the Life of Cowley, for example), Johnson makes fun of the pretended benefits of solitude. The hermit in fact has already decided to return to society and whatever the pleasures of his cave may be, he can no longer accept the monotony and loneliness he

God   659 has found in remote nature. In the following chapter, 22, nature itself seems to come under attack. The simple pleasures and the Rousseauian rapture of the natural life are pointedly questioned. If we look closer at the hermit we may find him to be one who triangulates three modes of human existence. For he began as a soldier with due honors then proceeded to a pastoral existence of meditation. He now intends to enter the world of business, and by so doing he will complete the heroic, pastoral, and georgic rota.13 In ­chapter 32, we see the discourse of the pyramid. We are surrounded by the memory of the dead. It is obvious that this chapter introduces the concept of the value of history, but soon history itself seems to come under the general criticism. The solace of history is no greater than that of poetry or pastoral meditation. Finally, we meet the man of science, who represents at once the inventive and the rational side of human nature. Unfortunately his knowledge has turned to pathology. He now believes that he himself controls the movements of the planets and the course of the winds. His madness is only the ne plus ultra of all the other vanities of human education and with it we complete the circle of Johnsonian skepticism. The only thing left in the five-​part structure is the claims of last judgment and the promises of immaterial duration. It is most important to note that each of these three tales has an aperture to eternity. The clinamen or swerve in the Vanity comes with the question of “where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find.” And the answer is the heavenly space or the object of prayer. Death is “kind Nature’s signal of retreat”—​a retreat, that is, from all temporal impediments. This place of release appears in all of Johnson’s narratives. Those who have read his private meditations and prayers will note that, in seven out of ten, the final judgment or the end times is the dominant subject. Johnson, like Pascal, believed that we must understand the value of the trade we make when we hand over physical existence to eternal felicity. It is an infinitely beneficial bargain. The most difficult case is Rasselas. It seems to move in a circle but, if we look carefully, we will notice that Johnson has placed as the penultimate chapter Imlac’s “Discourse on the Nature of the Soul.” In it is a full repudiation of materialism. And the preservation of the eternal self then becomes a mere function of immateriality: “Immateriality seems to imply a natural power of perpetual duration as a consequence of exemption from all causes of decay: whatever perishes, is destroyed by the solution of its contexture, and separation of its parts” (Yale Works, vol. xvi, 172). And quickly thereafter Nekayah infers from this that “the being, whom I fear to name, which made the soul can destroy it.” By this, divine agency suddenly appears as the natural origin of immaterial existence and we have before the “Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded” an answer of the same order as that presented at the end of The Vision of Theodore and the Vanity. Although the main narrative is circular, which indicates that the cast of characters have not found

13 The rota (a Latin word for wheel) was a medieval scheme for recognizing the relation of the three parts of Virgil’s career—​eclogues, georgics, epic. The rota usually included the images of soldier, farmer, and shepherd each holding their appropriate tool to indicate the three fundamental modes of human activity.

660   Blanford Parker happiness in their travels, the intellectual conclusion is nonetheless certain—​that immateriality and divinity are necessary and saving ideas.14

Review of Soame Jenyns The only extended discussion of God’s nature and providence which might help us to understand Johnson’s religious peculiarities is his review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. It is the only work of Johnson’s maturity in which he addresses at length issues deeply connected to theology and metaphysics. Written two years before Rasselas, it is the only document of his mature period that can be trusted to give an outline of some of his deepest beliefs. His treatments of Cheney and other ecclesiastical figures are slight satires about the overreaching of Protestant divines. Like the biographies in the Lives of the English Poets, they are exercises in moral analysis. Insofar as he had already covered some of the questions of theodicy in his annotations to Crousaz, the review of Soame Jenyns is not completely new. But in the review he uses his dialectical powers to great effect. From the very beginning, he announces that Jenyns is too ambitious, and in all the parts of the essay Johnson repeats that his opponent has gone far beyond the reach of human wit. It has often been mentioned that Johnson was critical of super-​subtle metaphysical and cosmological arguments. But it would be false to imagine that he did not have a fine grasp of the general issues of philosophy. When he speaks of Locke, Malebranche, Berkeley, and others, he speaks with the certainty of a close and considered reader. It is also obvious that he has a wide familiarity with classical and Humanist texts. We are reminded how easily in his essays he may scatter representative sentences from Aristotle, Epictetus, and Boethius. Much of Jenyns’s argument was derived from Pope’s Essay on Man, which Johnson was later to describe as affording “an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendor of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised” (Lives, vol. iv, 76). Probably no question haunted Johnson so powerfully as why God permitted such abundant evil. It was natural for Johnson, whose fideism we have already begun to describe, to be a complete voluntarist in respect to God’s power. We remember that the Mountain of Existence on which God lives has neither foundation nor summit, and so is beyond human apprehension. In Jenyns’s argument, all of God’s providential designs are

14 Many have noticed the importance of the thought of William Law for Johnson. Passage after passage of The Serious Call remind us of central Johnsonian ideals. In ­chapter 12 we find: “The dull and heavy soul, may be content with one empty appearance of happiness, and may be interminably trying to hold one and the same empty cup to his mouth all his life. But then, let the wit, the great scholar, the fine genius, the great statesman, the polite gentleman, lay all their heads together, and they can only shew you, more, and various, empty appearances of happiness” (204).

God   661 knowable and rational. He stresses the scholastic conception of the great chain of being in which all things that could exist must exist. Jenyns’s argument, such as it is, seems to lack most of the scholastic subtlety with which the great chain was originally invested. Johnson responds, This doctrine of the regular subordination of beings, the scale of existence, and the chain of nature, I have often considered, but always left the inquiry in doubt and uncertainty. That every being not infinite, compared with infinity, must be imperfect, is evident to intuition; that whatever is imperfect must have a certain line which it cannot pass, is equally certain. But the reason which determined this limit, and for which such being was suffered to advance thus far and no further, we shall never be able to discern. Our discoverers tell us, the Creator has made beings of all orders, and that therefore one of them must be such as man. But this system seems to be established on a concession which if it be refused cannot be extorted. (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 403)

So Johnson goes on to explain that, between the lowest created being and non-​ being, there must be an infinite space and below God to any created being there must be an equally infinite space, and furthermore that, even in the “vacuities” between existences, there could be an infinite number of divisions. These he illustrates by the example of Cheyne’s cone. The whole method seems to imply a reference to Zeno’s paradox. Why is this argument important to us? We may recall that in all of our narrative analyses, the temporal, though connected by the portal of death with the eternal, has almost no other connection to it. The temporal world is unstable, vacillating, and in some sense unknowable, but the eternal world with the simplicity of eternal duration and immaterial existence is perfectly knowable and so makes happiness possible. It is not therefore surprising that Johnson finds all of Jenyns’s arguments about the plenitude of existence, the transparency of providence and the simplicity of God’s design to be a fiction. Johnson’s fideism is such that he never reaches beyond what is either revealed in Scripture or self-​evident. This gives a very small space to theological speculations. In truth, Johnson’s chief objection to Jenyns is moral in nature. Jenyns tries to prove that poverty and anguish and want are all neutral and acceptable because part of the art of God. He says at one point that the difference in education among men is part of God’s design from high to low and is a necessary effect of providence. Johnson’s remarks on this conclusion are no longer clever and facile. They are deeply compassionate: I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to with-​ hold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and under the appearance of salutary

662   Blanford Parker restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed. (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 410)

On the other hand, Johnson was fulsome in his praise of the conclusion of Jenyns treatise, and this is not surprising. Jenyns begins his denouement, “Death, the last and most dreadful of all evils, is so far from being truly evil that it is the infallible cure of all others.” Jenyns went on to say in his final paragraph: The instability of human life, or of the changes of its successive periods, of which we so frequently complain, are no more than the necessary progress of it to this necessary conclusion . . . And at last death opens to us a new prospect, from whence we shall probably look back upon the diversions and occupations of this world with the same contempt we do now on our tops and hobby-​horses. (Yale Works, vol. xvii, 416–​17)

Johnson says he would not “willingly detract from the beauty of this paragraph.” We see from this the centrality of death in Johnson’s theology. As in Socrates’s phrase, life seems to be no more than a practicing for it. As for the place of experience itself, our answers are less certain. The problem of evil seems to be beyond our ken and the analysis of moral life is always dangerous and uncertain. The most undoubtedly important moment of life is death itself. Johnson’s fideism seems to go back to the formulation of the book of Hebrews with an absoluteness which is rarely found among Christians. “An expectation of good to come” constitutes for him almost the whole motive of living life and of accepting injustice. The “substance of things unseen,” like the invisible depth of Theodore’s Mountain of Existence, constitutes a faith almost entirely removed from quotidian experience. In fact, for Johnson, the sensitive existence is almost completely comprised of temptations and all our sustaining habits tend toward our own destruction. Faith in such a religious view has a power without bound, for it is “the only gracious tool,” as he says in his seventh sermon, that can be trusted to lead us forward toward the good (Yale Works, vol. xiv, 79). Johnson seems through a long development to have doubted most of natural theology and all of the theological optimisms of his period. This does not mean that we see in Johnson as we might expect a complete contemptus mundi: he seemed to revel in social and aesthetic experience. No one seemed more attached to the daily details of life than Johnson. He brought energy and delight to every conversation. He had knowledge of almost every human activity and he was sympathetic to almost every human situation. That he might have considered these qualities in himself as spiritual indolence or damaging “habit” as understood in the Ramblers may seem unfortunate to us, but most men’s lives are divided and paradoxical. That he was a citizen of this world and knew its delights only adds force and rigor to his moral self-​criticism. His daily prayers are a model of the painful self-​analysis of a man of the world.

God   663 Johnson’s fideism was in a sense an answer to the empirical prejudices of his age. Although he could accept the implications of a Lockean universe, he came to see it as inadequate in the development of spiritual understanding. Though he was skeptical of both scholastic and Protestant systems, he was not skeptical of God’s presence and intimate demands. The journey through personal experience or history described in his narratives leaves a pattern akin, but not identical, to Bunyan’s quest. Johnson seemed to have imagined that moving through time and moving through eternity were two incommensurate activities, and unlike the visionary authors of the seventeenth century—​the Metaphysical poets, for example, with whom he had so much trouble sympathizing—​he did not see in the glimpse of the creature or the language of nature a sure sign of divine presence. It was in this that he defected from modern opinion about so many authors whose religious habits were analogical, visionary, or mystical. Faith and faith alone for him was always the instrument of salvation. And the only opening he trusted as an aperture to true wisdom was death itself. “God alone,” said Pascal, “is man’s true good and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place. Stars, sky, earth, elements . . . since losing his true good, man is capable of seeing it in anything especially in his own destruction, although it is so contrary to God, to reason and to nature.”15 This is the true Johnsonian note. God as both end and source of all valuable knowledge—​ hidden from nature and experience. Elsewhere Pascal remarks, “let us then judge on that score those who live without a thought for the final end of life, drifting wherever their inclinations and pleasures may take them, without reflection or anxiety as if they could annihilate eternity by keeping their minds off it, concerned solely with attaining instant happiness.” This is the second note of Johnson’s moral theology—​that an eye for eternity and eternity alone is the rational choice of wandering man.

Further Reading Bate, W. Jackson. The Achievement of Samuel Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Chapin, Chester F. The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Hudson, Nicholas. Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-​Century Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Suarez, Michael F., S.J. “Johnson’s Christian Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 192–​208. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

15 

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. J. A. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 148.

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

A

academies, 193–​94, 302, 309, 311 Adams, George, 57 Adams, William, 20, 481, 554–​55 Addison, Joseph Cato, 122–​23, 540 on criticism, 195 on death, 561–​62 didacticism, 143–​44, 494 on hope, 590 mixed metaphor, 195–​96 news, 230–​31 originator of the periodical essay, 137–​38, 139–​40, 330 style, 149–​50 Adventurer, The, 44, 46, 145–​47, 150–​51 editions, 87 no. 67, 398–​400, 620 no. 69, 582–​83 no. 95, 509 no. 111, 81 no. 115, 281 no. 119, 620–​21, 624–​25 no. 120, 629–​30, 657 no. 126, 618 no. 131, 638–​39 afterlife, 553–​56 happiness in, 629–​30 heaven, 585–​87, 642–​45, 654–​56 hell, 26, 27–​28, 224, 410, 532, 543, 551, 644–​ 45, 651–​52 in the sermons, 212 Johnson’s obsession with, 551, 552, 557–​58 mystery, 554 Akenside, Matthew, 200

Alexander, Samuel, 529–​30 Alkon, Paul K., 76–​77, 512–​13, 522–​23, 622, 637–​38 allegory dream vision, 488–​90 in The Fountains, 189 in The Rambler, 183–​84, 592–​93, 644 in Vision of Theodore, 40–​41, 180–​83, 488–​90, 643, 656–​57 Allestree, Richard, 26, 597 Almond, Philip C., 558–​59 Americans, 240 as colonizers, 58, 403, 404–​5 as “drivers of negroes,” 240–​41, 345–​46, 364–​65 independence, 58, 240, 367 taxation, 364–​65, 393 trade, 398 anecdotes, 7, 14, 68–​69, 521, 569 Annals, 13, 551 anonymous publication, 111 Aristotle, 336, 499, 524, 657 on friendship, 427–​29, 431–​36, 452 mimesis, 125–​26, 201–​2 Nicomachean Ethics, 427, 433–​34, 452 Poetics, 199, 201–​2 Astell, Mary, 411–​12, 413 authorship, 281–96

B

Bacon, Francis, 431, 464, 502–​3, 507–​8, 523, 574–​75, 576 Bailey, Nathan, 160–​61, 306–​7 Baker, David Erskine, 149–​50 Baker, Henry, 291

666   Index Baker, Sheridan, 625 Balaev, Michelle, 386 Balderston, Katharine C., 53n.9, 81 Baldwin, Barry, 91–​92 Baratier, Jean-​Philippe, 32–​33, 114–​15 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 422–​23 Barber, Francis, 43, 46, 55, 61, 429, 443, 452 beneficiary of Johnson’s will, 65, 344–​45 Basker, James G., 414, 415, 420 bastardy, 446–​52 Bate, Walter Jackson, 19, 29, 530 as biographer, 73, 76–​77, 627 Burden of the Past, 121–​22 on the Idler, 147 on Johnson’s poetry, 532 on Johnson’s sense of humor, 456–​57 psychological readings, 14, 19–​20, 22–​23, 27, 517–​18 Bathurst, Richard, 94–​95 Bayle, Pierre, 317–​18, 519–​20, 524, 529 Beauclerk, Diana, 343n.31, 414–​15 Beauclerk, Topham, 356, 470 Berglund, Lisa, 504–​5 Berkeley, George, 521, 523, 576–​78, 579 Bible, 217, 647, 648, 661 foundation of ethics, 655–​56 Gaelic translation, 316–​17, 421–​22 in Harleian Catalogue, 154–​55 Johnson’s early reading, 9–​10 on philosophy, 533–​34 on salvation, 554 biography, 260–77 lives by Johnson Baratier, Jean-​Philippe, 32–​33, 114, 261–​62 Blake, Robert, 32–​33, 113–​14, 115, 180, 228, 261–​62, 263 Boerhaave, 32–​33, 114–​15, 261, 307, 458–​59 Burman, Pieter, 32–​33 Drake, Sir Francis, 32–​33, 113–​14 Dryden, John see Lives of the Poets Frederick the Great, 113–​14 Milton, John see Lives of the Poets poets see Lives of the Poets Pope, Alexander see Lives of the Poets Sarpi, Paolo, 33 Savage, Richard see Lives of the Poets lives of Johnson, 67–82

reflect authors’ concerns, 7–​8 see also Lives of the Poets Blackburne, Francis, 195 Blackwell, Thomas, 117–​18 Blake, Robert, 32–​33, 113–​14, 115, 261–​62 Bloom, Harold, 121–​22 Boerhaave, Herman, 32–​33, 499–​500 as scholar, 114–​15, 261 source of Johnson’s interest in chemistry, 497 Boethius, 123, 310, 584 Boileau-​Despréaux, Nicolas, 125–​26, 206, 529 booksellers, 9, 284–​86, 290–​91 Boothby, Sir Brooke, 107 Boothby, Hill, 35, 43–​44, 45, 78, 445 Borlase, William, 117–​18 Boswell, David, 339–​42 Boswell, Euphemia, 339–​40 Boswell, James arrival in London, 50 Auchinleck dispute, 339–​44 Club member, 51–​52, 65 cries on seeing Garrick, 614–​15 friendship with Johnson, 51, 70, 79–​80, 251, 428, 429–​30, 470 Hebrides trip, 59, 250–​57, 322, 528 humor, 454–​55, 521 Jacobitism, 328, 356–​57, 366, 372 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 59, 252 compared with Journey to the Western Islands, 251–​52 composition, 251–​52 direct speech in, 254 first substantial biography of Johnson, 68 on oral tradition, 317n.2 publication, 59 Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 68, 69–​70 abridgments, 2 biography of a biographer, 260 editions, 72 flaws, 70 narrative technique, 69–​70, 426 Macaulay’s review, 70 quotations, 2 reception, 71 London Journal, 50–​51 meets Johnson, 50–​51, 429–​30

Index   667 No Abolition of Slavery, 346 on damnation, 551–​52, 554–​55, 651–​52 on death, 551–​52, 554–​55, 563–​64, 626–​27 on education, 480, 492 on hope, 585–​86 on Johnson as teacher, 24, 478–​79 on Johnson’s childhood, 8 on Johnson’s conversation, 194, 198, 227 on Johnson’s friendships with women, 71–​72, 410, 415, 451 on Johnson’s health, 11–​12, 14, 23–​24 on Johnson’s marriage, 23–​24, 42 on Johnson’s mental health, 551–​52, 603, 617–​18 on Johnson’s philosophy, 521–​22, 525 on Johnson’s politics, 349–​50, 353 on Johnson’s poverty, 21 on Johnson’s reading, 28, 188, 481 on Johnson’s religion, 27, 558–​59, 560–​61, 595, 647–​48 on Johnson’s “vile melancholy,” 9, 13, 22 on law, 333 on Savage, 34 on “savage life,” 470–​7 1, 520 on slavery, 345–​46 petition for Joseph Knight, 94 satirized by Peter Pindar, 79, 564–​65 Boswell, Veronica, 339–​40 Boulton, James, 420–​21 Bowers, Fredson T., 93 Bravery of the English Common Soldiers, 377–​79 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 371n.15, 386 Bronson, Bertrand, 12n.13, 529–​30 Brooke, Henry, 34, 172–​73, 360–​61 Brown, Marshall, 430–​31 Browne, Isaac Hawkins, 16 Bundock, Michael, 65 Burke, Edmund, 51–​52, 248, 337, 354–​55, 405, 417, 428 Burke, John J., 267 Burke, William, 357 Bunyan, John, 180–​81, 189, 488–​89, 585–​86, 648–​49, 650–​52 Burchfield, Robert, 302, 305 Burlamaqui, Jean-​Jacques, 333–​34 Burman, Pieter, 32–​33

Burney, Charles Club member, 51–​52 friendship with Johnson, 62–​63 History of Music, 62 Johnson writes dedication to his Account, 64–​65 Burney, Frances, 106–​7 Evelina, 227, 289–​90 friendship with Johnson, 62–​63, 412, 430 remarks on Rasselas, 435–​36

C

Carlyle, Thomas, 29 Carmichael, Poll, 61, 443 Caruth, Cathy, 385–​86 Cave, Edward, 31–​37, 69, 111, 172–​73, 175–​76, 229, 260, 287 Gentleman’s Magazine, 105, 113 Johnson volunteers to contribute, 23 Johnson’s life of, 267 Parliamentary Debates, 361 Sarpi’s History, 26 and women writers, 411, 445–​46 Cervantes, Miguel de, 648–​50 Chalmers, Alexander, 149–​50 Chambers, Ephraim, 302 Chambers, Sir Robert, 44, 334, 335–​36, 337, 345 Charles I, king of England, 209, 374–​75 Charles II, king of England, 351, 540 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of approached as patron, 38 Johnson’s letter to, 78, 111, 283–​84 on Johnsonese, 300 praises the Dictionary, 44 Cheyne, George, 500, 516, 527 Cheynell, Francis, 267, 269–​70, 271 Cicero, 429, 442, 524–​25 Clara the rhinoceros, 475–​76 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of, 368–​69 Cleeve, Bourchier, 117–​18 Clifford, James L., 295 Dictionary Johnson, 74, 245–​46 on guilt, 10–​11 on Johnson’s health, 16, 21–​22 on Johnson’s poverty, 19 on psychoanalysis, 14

668   Index Clifford, James L. (cont.) on Tetty, 23n.43 Young Sam Johnson, 8, 17, 19, 26, 74 Clifford, Martin, 198–​99 Club see Literary Club Collins, A. S., 294 Collins, William, 134, 135–​36, 267, 615–​16, 617 colonization, 403–​6 commerce, 389–406 colonialism, 403–​6 terminology, 391–​95 Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the State, 172–​73, 174–​75, 177, 360–​61 Confucius, 114, 261–​62 Congreve, William, 453, 614 Cooke, William, 67–​68 Corbet, Andrew, 19 couplets see heroic couplets Cowley, Abraham, 584–​85, 591, 600 Crabbe, George heroic couplets, 121–​22 Crashaw, Richard, 584–​85 criticism, 191–7 of character, 202–​3 evaluative, 194–​95 historicist, 197–​98 of the novel, 204–​5 representative meter, 193–​94 textual, 204, 206–​7 “theory,” 192, 193, 205–​6 Croker, John Wilson, 72 Cunningham, Andrew, 499

D

damnation see afterlife Damrosch, Leo on biography, 274–​75 on the Club, 429–​30 on Johnson as moralist, 143–​44, 529–​30 Davenant, Charles, 395 death, 551–65 ars moriendi, 561–​65 of Boothby, 45 fear of, 553–​56 of Dryden, 562–​63 of Garrick, 64–​65 of Hume, 551–​52, 561–​62

of Elizabeth (“Tetty”) Johnson, 215–​17, 557–​58, 603 of Samuel Johnson, 455 of Robert Levet, 443–​44, 560–​61 of Thrale, 603 Debates in Parliament, 35–​36, 229–​38 accuracy, 229, 232 Cave’s role, 229 edition, 229 as fiction, 175–​80 humor, 461 legal concerns, 334 as polemic, 228–​31 as reflection of Johnson’s opinions, 231, 234, 235, 361–​62 as Swiftian satire, 175–​76 Defoe, Daniel, 186–​87, 204 Tour thro’ Great Britain, 254 “True-​Born Englishman,” 448 DeMaria, Robert, Jr. as biographer, 77–​78 as editor, 107–​8 on Johnson as student, 20–​21, 28 on Johnson’s childhood, 11, 459 on Johnson’s health, 14–​15 on Johnson’s marginalia, 327 on Johnson’s politics, 238, 239 on Johnson’s reading, 17, 18, 22–​23, 492–​94, 543–​44 on Rasselas, 187 on “The Fountains,” 189 Democritus, 520 Denham, John, 121–​22, 193–​94 Derrick, Samuel, 471 Desmoulins, Elizabeth, 39, 61, 300–​1, 443 Desmoulins, Jacob, 43 Deutsch, Helen, 12n.12, 14, 15n.23, 324, 569 diary, 52–​53, 224n.23, 300–​1, 603 Dickie, Simon, 455–​56 diction see language Dictionary of the English Language, 153–​64 audience, 156–​59 Chesterfield’s role, 44, 283–​84 composition, 37–​39, 42, 113, 285, 467, 543–​44 definitions, 158–​63 editions, 85–​86 humor, 465

Index   669 philosophical terms, 523–​24 preface, 193–​94, 272, 324–​25, 409–​10 publication, 45–​46 quotations, 38–​39, 156–​59, 203, 272, 305–​9, 324–​26, 523–​24 from Crashaw, 585 from Dryden, 591 from Newton, 510 from Shakespeare, 163–​64, 203, 466–​67, 494 from Swift, 466 from Watts, 492–​93 revised 4th edition, 58–​59, 358, 395, 532 sales, 289–​90 scientific terms, 497–​98 in Yale Works, 85–​86 Dille, Catherine, 24–​25 divine right of kings, 350, 356–​57 Dixie, Wolstan, 21–​22 Dixon, Peter, 95n.23 Dodd, William, 62, 215–​16, 217, 334 Dodsley, Robert, 40–​41, 84, 89–​90, 180–​81, 290, 291, 302 Preceptor, The, 180–​81, 211, 389, 481–​91, 494, 524–​25 dogmatism, 2–​3, 206–​7, 469–​70, 503, 505–​9, 528–​29 doubt, 567–81 in essays, 505–​8 Hume, 533–​34 Johnson’s commitment to, 522–​23 lack of faith, 552 in metaphysics, 521 in The Rambler, 526 warnings against, 538–​39, 567–​68 Drake, Sir Francis, 32–​33 “Drury Lane Prologue,” 123–​24, 222 Dryden, John, 202 Annus Mirabilis, 391–​92 Aureng-​Zebe, 591–​92 diction, 121–​22, 308–​9, 311–​12 imitation, 127 immorality, 641–​42 Metamorphoses, 159 mixed metaphor, 196 “not often pathetick,” 599–​600 translation, 128, 130, 156, 590, 591 Dyer, John, 391–​92

E

economics see commerce Eddy, Donald, 86–​87, 113n.27 Edial School, 24 editions of Johnson’s works, 83–98 Dictionary, 85–​86 Journey to the Western Islands, 87 Lives of the Poets, 87–​89 London, a Poem, 91 modernization, 89–​91 “Oxford Edition” of 1825, 83–​84, 92–​93 Poems, 89, 91–​92, 121 The Rambler, 86–​87 Rasselas, 92 The Vanity of Human Wishes, 41, 89–​91 Yale Edition, 84–​98, 107–​8 education, 477–94 corporal punishment, 477–​78 Johnson as student and teacher, 477–​79 reading, 479–​81, 491–​94 Edwards, Oliver, 530 elegies, 135, 559–​61, 653 Elegy Written in a Country Church-​Yard see Gray, Thomas for Levet see “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” Lycidas, 133, 600 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 128–​29, 153–​54 emotion, 599–616 excessive, 600–​4 grief, 609–​10 happiness, 617–30 opposed to reason, 638–​39 pity, 614–​16 empire, 403–​6 English Civil Wars, 369–​7 1, 372–​73, 377–​78 enthusiasm, 124–​26, 647 Epicureanism, 130–​32, 528, 584, 590, 600, 625–​26, 657–​58 epitaphs, 135, 556–​57, 559–​60 essays, 137–51 fiction in, 183–​85, 414 models in Bacon and Montaigne, 431, 505–​6, 507–​8 periodical essays, 138–​40

670   Index essays (cont.) on skepticism, 505–​8 women in, 416–​20 see also Adventurer; Idler; Rambler Euripides, 20–​21, 612

F

Faden, William, 113n.27 faith, 595–​98 False Alarm, 57–​58, 238–​39, 355–​56, 362–​63, 365–​66, 378 family, 442–​44 Fenwick, Eliza, 420–​22 Ferry, David, 601–​2 fiction, 169–89 criticism of, 204–​5 Dictionary definitions, 169–​70, 174, 181 in essays, 183–​85, 414 mirror of manners, 169, 170–​7 1, 172 morality, 170–​7 1 novel, 169–​70 Orientalism, 183–​87 political, 172–​75 realism, 170–​72 romance, 170–​7 1 fideism, 648, 653, 654, 660–​61, 662–​63 defined, 124–​25 and skepticism, 572 in The Vanity of Human Wishes, 124–​25, 130–​31 Fielding, Henry Amelia, 285–​86 as blockhead, 170–​7 1 benevolence, 635 censored, 360–​61 characterization, 205, 463 on hypocrisy, 464 plots, 186–​87, 189, 319 Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington, 191 Fix, Stephen, 472 Flanagan, Roy, 195 Fleeman, J. David Bibliography, 95–​98 edition of A Journey, 87 edition of Poems, 89, 91–​92 on editions of Johnson’s works, 83–​87 on Johnson’s income, 33n.5

Folkenflik, Robert, 71, 73, 263 Ford, Cornelius, 16–​17, 73, 333–​34 Ford, Phoebe, 13 forgery, 567, see also Ossian “Fountains,” 189 France, 60, 248–​50, 309 Johnson’s hostility toward, 250 libraries, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 75, 76, 443, 517–​18 friendship, 425–​26 in Aristotle, 427–​30 “Further Thoughts on Agriculture,” 394–​95 Fussell, Paul, 13, 26, 369–​70, 453, 461, 548–​49

G

Garrick, David, 41, 50, 123–​24, 614–​15 death, 64–​65 friendship with Johnson, 18–​19 inspiration for Rambler 200, 435 journey to London, 25 model for Rambler 200, 435 on Tetty, 23n.43 praises Johnson’s Dictionary, 309 production of Irene, 40 student at Edial School, 24 Gatrell, Vic, 457–​58 Gay, John, 139–​40, 448 Gentleman’s Magazine, 23, 105, 106, 108–​9, 110–​11 George II, king of England target of satire, 127–​28 George III, king of England, 350 allegiance to, 359, 365–​66 meets Johnson, 56–​57 a “usurper,” 356 Gibbon, Edward, 317, 428 Club member, 51–​52 Gil, Alexander, 304 God, 646–63 Goldsmith, Oliver, 51–​52, 137–​38 dealings with booksellers, 285 Distresses of a Common Soldier, 379–​81 heroic couplets, 121–​22 History of England, 378 on Johnson’s argumentative style, 227 Johnson’s contributions to his works, 57, 94 Gordon Riots, 400

Index   671 Gower, John Leveson-​Gower, 1st Earl, 104n.2 Gray, Thomas, 64, 134, 453, 469–​70, 471, 606 Elegy Written in a Country Church-​Yard, 135–​36, 200, 471 Greek Anthology, 104, 549–​50 Greene, Donald, 13, 25, 92–​93, 96–​97 anthology of Johnson’s writings, 85n.5, 119n.39 Politics of Samuel Johnson, 20, 27, 236, 237–​ 38, 345, 373 Samuel Johnson’s Library, 524 grief on the death of Boothby, 45 on the death of Elizabeth (“Tetty”) Johnson, 215–​16, 557–​58, 603 on the death of Levet, 443–​44, 560–​61 on the death of Thrale, 603 in Hamlet, 609–​10, 613 in Henry VIII, 614 inauthentic, 600 inevitable, 557, 627, 628 in King Lear, 216, 609–​10 in London, 128 in Lycidas, 600 in Rasselas, 433, 606 in The Vanity of Human Wishes, 636–​37 see also death; emotion; suffering Griffin, Dustin, 283–​84, 559–​60 Grundy, Isobel, 549n.9, 562n.23 Guthrie, William, 228–​29, 233

H

Hagstrum, Jean H., 522–​23, 552n.1, 553–​54 Hale, Matthew, 305, 307–​8 Hall, John, 61 Hamilton, William Gerard, 455 Hanway, Jonas, 116, 467–​68 happiness, 617–30 in the afterlife, 629–​30 and desire, 129–​30, 621–​25 God’s plans for, 214, 221 Hobbes on, 622–​23, 624–​25 Jenyns on, 618, 660–​62 Locke on, 622, 623–​24, 636–​37 in Rasselas, 185, 538–​39, 625–​26, 636–​37, 638–​39 terminology, 620–​21

in Vanity of Human Wishes, 40–​41, 129–​30, 132–​33, 225 Harleian Library, 36–​37, 109–​10, 112, 154–​56, 317 Harris, James, 625–​26 Harrison, Elizabeth, 118 Hart, Kevin, 401–​2 Hartley, David, 203 Hastings, Warren, 428 Hawes, Clement, 405 Hawkins, Humphry, 15–​16 Hawkins, Sir John Club member, 39–​40, 51–​52 executor of Johnson’s will, 32 friendship with Johnson, 39 Life of Samuel Johnson, 34, 35, 40, 55 errors, 23, 563–​64 on False Alarm, 57–​58 on Elizabeth Johnson, 42 on Johnson’s early life, 17, 24 on Johnson’s indolence, 13 on Johnson’s time at Oxford, 28 on law, 333 tedious, 69 on Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands, 57–​58 Hays, Mary, 420–​22 Hazen, Allen T., 84, 92–​93, 481–​82 health, 11–​15 scrofula, 11–​12, 73, 77–​78 Tourette’s syndrome, 14–​15, 76, 77–​78 heaven see afterlife Hector, George, 29 hell see afterlife heroic couplets, 121–​22, 128 Heyrick, Elizabeth, 423 Hill, George Birkbeck Johnsonian Miscellanies, 72 Life of Johnson, 72 Lives of the Poets, 88–​89 historicism in criticism, 134, 197–​98 in religion, 647 history, 315–31 Hoadley, Benjamin, 118 Hobbes, Thomas deceived by visionary theories, 501 on happiness, 622–​23, 624–​25 on hope, 589–​90

672   Index Hobbes, Thomas (cont.) hostility to metaphysics, 124–​25 omitted from the Dictionary, 523–​24 on skepticism, 574–​75 Hodge, 61, 191 Hogarth, William, 73, 220n.20, 527 Holmes, Richard, 79, 449, 450–​51 Homer in Harleian Library, 155–​56 invoked in Skye, 258 Johnson reads, 20–​21 Pope’s translations, 121–​22, 287–​89 Hooker, Richard, 203, 212 hope, 582–98 Christian, 582–​85 for happiness, 621–​25 psychology of, 587–​90 for salvation, 585–​87, 642–​45 unreasonable, 592–​94 worldly, 582–​85 Horace, 64–​65, 122–​23, 125–​28, 201, 245, 484–​ 85, 584, 590 Hudson, Nicholas, 373, 376, 390–​91, 400, 523, 533–​34, 647 Hume, David death, 551–​52, 561–​62 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 502–​3 History of England, 317, 318–​19, 570–​7 1 “Of Interest,” 514–​15 skepticism, 522–​23, 529, 532, 533–​34, 576, 578–​79 Treatise of Human Nature, 501, 511–​13 humor, 453–76 in even Johnson’s serious writing, 112 laughing philosophy, 520–​22, 534 Hunter, J. Paul, 230–​31 Hunter, John, 15–​16, 18 Hyde Collection, 603–​4 Hyde, Donald, 93 Hyde, Mary, 93

I

Idler, The, 46, 108, 146–​49 compared with The Rambler, 148, 149 editions, 87 reception, 150

no. 4, 444, 523 no. 5, 419 no. 6, 419 no. 10, 523, 528 no. 20, 375–​76 no. 22, 371 no. 23, 434–​35 no. 24, 523 no. 28, 418–​19 no. 30, 374–​76, 624–​25 no. 31, 76, 517–​18, 531 no. 37, 624–​25, 633 no. 41, 528, 532, 557, 626–​27, 628 no. 55, 281–​84, 289–​90, 291–​92, 294, 296–​97 no. 60, 148–​49, 193–​94 no. 61, 88–​89, 148–​49 no. 64, 468 no. 66, 523 no. 73, 399–​400 no. 78, 148–​49 no. 81, 404–​5 no. 83, 148–​49, 526 no. 84, 7–​8, 187, 268, 269 no. 89, 538, 631, 637–​38 no. 97, 245 no. 101, 521 no. 102, 271–​72 no. 104, 149 illegitimacy, 446–​52 imagination, 183, 235, 246, 255, 416–​17, 514–​15 dangers of, 235, 515–​16, 542–​43, 552, 594, 634–​35 “hunger of imagination,” 120–​21, 186–​87, 398–​99 imperialism, 315–​16, 367, 403–​6, 428 Irene, 25, 360, 368–​69, 413, 590–​91 production, 40 irony, 194, 228, 456, 530, 625 and happiness, 129–​30 in the Idler, 147–​48 unstable, 194 Irwin, George, 75–​76 Ivy Lane Club, 39–​42, 44, 356, 497

J

Jacobitism, 34, 315–​16, 328, 356–​57, 360, 372, 402 James, P. D., 423

Index   673 Jenkins, Elizabeth, 423 Jenyns, Soame, 425–​26, 548–​49 on friendship, 425–​26 on happiness, 618, 660–​62 Johnson’s review, 241–​42, 528–​29, 531 on poverty, 401 on the problem of evil, 116–​17, 546–​47 publication, 45, 116–​17 on skepticism, 567–​68, 575–​76 on suffering, 544–​45 Johnson, Claudia, 622 Johnson, Elizabeth Jervis Porter (“Tetty”) marries Johnson, 23–​24 on Johnson’s sensibility, 78 prayers on her death, 75, 603 sermon on her death, 215–​17 Johnson, Michael, 7, 8–​9, 10–​11, 21–​22, 247, 330, 352–​53 Johnson, Nathaniel, 8, 10–​11, 21–​22, 444 Johnson, Sarah childbirth, 29 educates Samuel, 13–​14, 26 Samuel never visits, 444 “Johnsonese,” 299–​302, 472 journalism, 103–19 Birmingham Post, 22, 97–​98 Journey to the Western Islands, 59, 250–​58, 315–​16, 400 composition, 59 editions, 87 historical evidence in, 319–​22 publication, 287 Juvenal, 125–​26, 133, 276, 287, 413, 601, 640, 652–​53 Satire 3, 32, 127–​28, 459–​60 Satire 10, 123, 129–​33, 322–​23, 584, 588, 596

K

Kairoff, Claudia Thomas, 254–​55 Kaminski, Thomas, 22n.39, 33n.5, 36n.12 Kass, Thomas, 27n.56 Keats, John, 121–​22 Kemmerer, Kathleen Nulton, 439 Kenney, William, 12n.14 Kenrick, William, 54 Kersey, John, 160–​61 Knight, Joseph, 94, 344–​46

Knowles, Mary, 61, 118, 425–​26, 492–​93 Knox, Vicesimus, 149–​50 Kolb, Gwin J., 92, 96n.32, 457 Konstan, David, 427 Korshin, Paul J., 563–​64 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 9n.6, 73, 552

L

La Capra, Dominic, 385–​86 Langton, Bennet, 44, 55, 245–​46, 527, 593–​94 language, 159–​63, 298–314 colloquial, 215, 416, 466–​67, 469 figurative, 195–​96, 213–​14, 385–​86 history of, 310, 324–​31 Johnson’s, 299–​302 legal, 335–​36, 339 low, 196–​97 of sermons, 212, 215 of war, 377–​78 philosophical, 534, 579 poetic, 121–​22, 129, 135–​36, 429 reform, 302–​5 register, 312–​13 study of, 24, 333–​34, 467, 478–​79 see also diction; Dictionary of the English Langauge Lascelles, Mary, 87, 251 laughter, 475 law, 332–47 as a profession, 332–​34 ethics, 337–​39 Law, William, 80, 81–​82, 123, 358, 492–​93, 553–​ 54, 647, 659–​60 Lennox, Charlotte Female Quixote, 96n.33, 187–​88, 429–​30 friendship with Johnson, 292, 410–​12, 429–​30 Greek Theatre, 57, 96 Leonard-​Roy, Thomas, 195 Levet, Robert, 43, 55, 61, 64–​65, 118–​19, 443–​44, 496 Life of Savage see Lives of the Poets Lintot, Bernard, 26, 282–​83, 284, 288–​89, 292, 293–​94 Lipking, Lawrence as biographer, 78–​79 on death, 562

674   Index Lipking, Lawrence (cont.) on Dictionary, 303–​4 on Johnson’s criticism, 197, 274–​75 on literary careers, 40–​41 on Lives of the Poets, 317–​18 on patronage, 283–​84 on Vision of Theodore, 41n.21, 181–​82 Literary Club, the, 39–​40, 51–​52 literary criticism see criticism Literary Magazine, 45, 110–​11, 113, 116 Lives of the Poets, 63–​64, 271–​77 canon of poets, 63, 272–​73 editions, 87–​89 humor, 469–75 payment, 63, 272–​74 reception, 64 Life of Akenside, 111–​12 Life of Collins, 617 Life of Congreve, 453 Life of Cowley, 63–​64, 88–​89, 439–​40, 584–​ 85, 600–​1 editions, 89 clichés, 120–​21, 622 Life of Dryden, 121–​22, 197, 274, 275–​76, 328, 330–​31, 440–​41 Absalom and Achitophel, 330 Alexander’s Feast, 599–​600 comparison with Pope, 63–​64, 248 death, 562–​63 humor, 474–​75 Life of Fenton, 16–​17, 641 Life of Milton, 120–​22, 195, 274–​75, 472, 600, 641–​42 Life of Pomfret, 63–​64 Life of Rowe, 171n.6 Life of Savage, 264–​66, 268, 285, 542 as literary biography, 191–​92, 266–​67, 274–​75 reception, 191–​92, 266–​67 separate publication in 1744, 63–​64, 191–​92, 263–​64 treatment of Savage’s illegitimacy, 446–​51 Life of Shenstone, 247, 472–​75 Life of Smith, 18–​19, 273 Life of Swift, 441 character sketch, 274 treatment of “Vanessa,” 441

Life of Waller, 135, 328–​29, 440–​41 treatment of marriage, 439–​42 Lock, F. P., 97n.37 Locke, John, 528–​29 on education, 477, 478, 482–​84, 489–​91, 523 on enthusiasm, 124–​25 on empiricism, 569–​70, 663 on language reform, 303 on law, 342 on liberty, 344–​45 on materialism, 512–​15, 590 on happiness, 622, 623–​24, 636–​37 on philosophy of mind, 513–​14 on politics, 340 Lobo, Jeronimo, 22, 104, 185, 246 London Boswell in, 50–​51 commercial center, 398, 400 Johnson’s arrival in, 25–​26, 31, 35, 360 literary culture, 281, 455–​56, 462 London: A Poem, 31–​32, 127–​28, 250, 459–​61, 640 editions, 91 imitation of Juvenal, 32, 125–​26, 127–​28 publication, 31–​32, 287 reception, 32, 41 London Chronicle, 110–​11 London Magazine, 110, 228–​29 Longinus, 125–​26 Lonsdale, Roger, 87–​89 Lucas, Charles, 118 Lucretius, 131, 156, 160–​61, 257, 524, 532 luxury, 120–​21, 391, 396–​400 Lynch, Jack, 153–​54, 157–​58, 579 abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary, 85–​86 on Johnson and Shakespeare, 164–​65 on Johnson and skepticism, 522–​23, 572, 575

M

Macaulay, Catharine, 411–​12 Macaulay, Thomas Babington on Boswell, 70 on Johnson’s contempt for travel, 245–​46 on Johnson’s oddness, 12 on Johnson’s philosophy, 529–​30 on Johnson’s religion, 646–​47 on Johnson’s style, 300

Index   675 on Lives of the Poets, 469 on “universalism,” 405 MacBean, Alexander, 38 MacBean, William, 38 MacDonald, Sir Alexander, 320, 343 MacDonald, Helen, 605 Macintyre, Alasdair, 639 Macpherson, James see Ossian Madden, Samuel, 409–​10 magazines, 105, 113–​18 Johnson’s preferred medium, 108–​9 Mandeville, Bernard, 28–​29, 391, 398, 523, 590 Maner, Martin, 567, 570 Mannion, David, 95n.23 Marmor Norfolciense, 34, 172–​73, 177 imitation of Swift, 228 politics, 262 publication, 173 satirical form, 360 marriage, 436–​42, 446–​52 Martin, Benjamin, 160–​61 Martin, Martin, 251–​52 Martin, Peter, 76, 80–​81, 83n.2 Mason, Tom, 193–​94 McAdam, E. L., Jr. abridgment of the Dictionary, 85–​86 edition of Johnson’s diaries, 93 edition of Johnson’s poems, 89 on Johnson’s interest in law, 56n.17, 333 on Vanity of Human Wishes, 556 McCarthy, William, 273n.29, 422–​23 McDermott, Anne, 85–​86 McGuffie, Helen Louise, 106n.10 McNair, Arnold, 333 mental health in Rasselas, 536, 538–​39 Johnson’s breakdown after Oxford, 14 Johnson’s fear of death, 551–​52 Johnson’s melancholy, 9, 12–​14, 21, 22–​23, 614–​15, 646–​47 Johnson’s occupation to avoid melancholy, 382–​83 mercantilism, 395 metaphor, 123, 240, 258, 336, 657 for quarrels, 227 for war, 309, 369–​70, 373–​76 “harsh,” 199, 204

in Boswell, 256 in the Dictionary, 157–​59, 166–​67 mixed, 195–​96, 204 Metaphysical poetry, 63–​64, 123, 124–​25, 195–​96, 584–​85, 600, 663 Meyers, Jeffrey, 73, 81–​82, 436–​37, 443 Middendorf, John, 87–​89, 390 Milbourne, Luke, 220–​21 Milne, George abridgment of the Dictionary, 85–​86 edition of Johnson’s Poems, 89 on Vanity of Human Wishes, 556 Milton, John, 195, 472 as teacher, 198–​99 biography, 274–​75 blank verse, 122, 200 cited in the Dictionary, 162–​63, 164 Lycidas, 120–​21, 133, 172, 600 Paradise Lost, 363, 554 Miner, Earl, 398 Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth see Observations on Macbeth misogyny, 414–​15 see also women Mitford, Marry Russell, 422 Montagu, Elizabeth, 295–​96, 412, 443, 471 Montaigne, Michel de, 431, 505–​7, 531 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 317–​18, 394 More, Hannah, 171n.6, 412, 445, 549–​50, 563 More, Henry, 523–​24 Morrissey, Lee, 107–​8 Mun, Thomas, 396 Murphy, Arthur, 44, 497, 529–​30, 531, 557–​58 as biographer, 71 on Dissenters, 355–​56 on Johnson’s death, 67 on the Rambler, 150–​51 source of biographical information, 106, 176 Murphy, Kathryn, 505–​6 Murray, James A. H., 310 Murray, T. J., 15n.23

N

nationalism in Dictionary, 309 in London, 128–​30

676   Index natural philosophy, 499–​500, 530–​32 neoclassicism, 121–​23, 206, 523, 540 Neuberger, Joan, 438 newspapers, 104–​5, 106, 107 Newton, Sir Isaac, 499–​512, 517–​18, 531 Opticks, 499–​502, 510–​12 Principia, 499–​500, 501–​2, 510–​12 Nichols, John, 25n.48, 113, 285–​86, 293–​94, 473 Nokes, David, 80 Nonjuring, 351, 352–​53, 358–​59, 641, 647 Norris, John, 212, 543–​44 Nourse, Charles, 295–​96 Nourse, John, 295–​96 Nourse, Peter, 212

O

Observations on Macbeth, 37, 53–​54, 197, 202–​3, 204 “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” 123–​25, 443–​44 anticipates Romanticism, 135–​36 treatment of death, 559–​61, 652, 653 treatment of virtue, 644 Oldham, John, 126 orthography see spelling Ossian, 59, 95–​96, 567 Ovid, 159, 532 Oxford University, 19–​21

P

Pahl, Chance David, 639n.4 Pardies, Ignace-​Gaston, 485–​86 Parker, Blanford, 130–​31, 571–​72 Parker, Fred, 433, 569, 609–​10, 639 Parkins, Charles, 117–​18 parliamentary debates see Debates in Parliament Parnell, Thomas 248 Pascal, Blaise, 529, 574–​75, 648, 650–​51, 653, 659, 663 passion see emotion pastoral, 120–​21, 133, 172, 434, 472–​73, 600–​1, 658–​59 Patriot, The, 58, 239–​40, 362 patriotism, 58, 177, 239–​40, 363–​64, 375 patronage, 283–​84 Pearce, Zachariah, 94

pension, 47, 49–​50, 105, 238, 283–​84, 356 Percy, Thomas on authenticity in poetry, 133 Club member, 51–​52 friendship with Johnson, 44 on Johnson’s reading, 188 negotiating with booksellers, 290 supports Johnson’s request for pension, 47 visits, 245–​46 periodicals, 103–​5 personification, 90–​91, 164, 386, 409, 449, 489, 657 Peyton, V. J., 38 philosophy, 519–35 natural, 530–​32 terminology, 522–​25 Pindar, Peter see Wolcot, John Piozzi, Gabriel, 65, 68 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 32, 52–​53, 55–​56, 65, 82, 517, 647 as biographer, 68–​69 as dominatrix, 52–​53, 78, 81–​82 Boswell’s rivalry with, 70 friendship with Frances Burney, 62–​63 friendship with Johnson, 52–​53, 72, 78, 410, 411–​12, 430, 444 on biographical details, 7 on common law, 347 on Johnson as philosopher, 517, 530 on Johnson’s education, 15–​16, 17, 20, 21 on Johnson’s family, 8, 9–​11 on Johnson’s humor, 520 on Johnson’s journalism, 107 on Johnson’s political opinions, 350 on Johnson’s reading, 28–​29, 256n.34, 281, 543 on Johnson’s religious beliefs, 543, 582–​83 on Johnson’s scientific studies, 497 on Johnson’s writing habits, 12–​13 marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, 65, 68, 603–​4 satirized by Peter Pindar, 79, 564–​65 Thraliana, 52–​53, 68, 299, 350 travel to Wales and France, 59–​60, 247–​48 Pitt, William, the Elder, 364 Pittock, Murray, 527 Plan of a Dictionary, 158, 298, 303, 310–​11, 368–​69

Index   677 poetry, 120–36 business of a poet, 186, 192–​93 devotional poetry, 543 Latin, 584 Lives of the Poets, 63–​64, 191–​92 Metaphysical, 63–​64, 123, 124–​25, 195–​96, 584–​85, 600, 663 on death, 559–​60 religious, 135 review of Warton’s Essay, 117–​18 polemic, 226–42 defined, 226–​27 in conversation, 226–​27 in Debates in Parliament, 228–​31 rhetorical form, 232–​38 Politian, Angelus, 458–​59 politics, 56–​58, 349–66 Johnson and Jacobitism, 34, 315–​16, 350, 356–​57, 360, 372 Johnson and Toryism, 18–​19, 28, 349–​56, 365–​66 Poovey, Mary, 500 Pope, Alexander “Augustan” poet, 121–​22 comparison with Dryden, 63–​64, 122, 248, 641–​42 Eloisa to Abelard, 133 Essay on Criticism, 574 Essay on Man, 124–​25, 131, 157–​58, 544–​47, 586–​87, 660 criticized by Crousaz, 33, 85, 104 genius, 122, 469–​70 heroic couplets, 121–​22 Homer translations, 159, 276 publishing history, 281–​83, 286–​89, 291, 292, 293–​94 on hope, 586–​87 imitations, 32, 120–​21, 127–​28, 133–​34 life, 472 on London, 31 Messiah, 20–​21 patronage, 283, 284 Rape of the Lock, 329–​30 Shakespeare edition, 198–​99, 204, 325–​27 on skepticism, 573, 574, 575 style, 63–​64

supports Johnson’s M.A. degree, 11–​12 versification, 121–​22 Potkay, Adam, 505, 522–​23, 578, 622, 628, 629n.24, 637–​38 poverty, 396–​97, 401, 504–​5, 546–​47, 641, 661 Powell, Manushag, 184, 230–​31, 235 prayer, 27–​28, 41, 42, 216–​17, 595–​98, 659 for the dead, 358, 557–​59 self-​inspection, 600–​1, 643–​44 on his studies, 521 on Tetty’s death, 557–​59, 603 in verse, 122–​23, 132–​33 in the Yale Edition, 93 Preceptor, 40–​41, 180–​81, 389, 481–​88, 524–​25 pronunciation, 301–​2, 304 psychoanalysis, 14, 646–​47 in biographies of Johnson, 14, 75–​77, 443, 517–​18 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 333–​34, 345, 524–​25 punctuation, 83, 86–​87, 300–​1

Q

Quintero, Ruben, 126

R

Radner, John, 68, 69–​70, 79–​80 Rambler, The, 41–​42, 108, 137–​45, 149–​51, 462 compared to the realistic novel, 186–​87 editions, 86–​87 form, 140–​42 Johnson’s greatest work, 71 reception, 150 religion in, 144–​45 source for Johnson’s biography, 76 topicality, 142–​44 women in, 416–​18 no. 2, 276, 592–​93, 622–​23, 625, 626–​27 no. 4, 169–​72, 180–​81, 432–​33 no. 6, 249–​50, 621–​22 no. 7, 619–​20 no. 10, 526 no. 12, 183, 416–​17 no. 14, 274–​75, 512, 523, 640–​41 no. 17, 592–​93 no. 18, 417, 437, 525–​26 no. 19, 374–​76, 521 no. 20, 416, 464

678   Index Rambler, The (cont.) no. 21, 271–​72 no. 24, 526 no. 28, 634 no. 29, 144–​45, 622–​23 no. 31, 633 no. 32, 132–​33, 627, 628 no. 34, 417 no. 35, 417 no. 39, 419, 438–​39 no. 40, 409 no. 41, 343 no. 44, 644 no. 45, 621–​22 no. 46, 369–​70 no. 47, 614–​15, 628 no. 49, 399, 503–​4, 622–​23, 638–​39 no. 52, 257, 399–​400 no. 53, 397–​98, 625–​26 no. 57, 397–​98 no. 60, 77, 267–​68, 269, 416–​17, 565 no. 64, 435 no. 65, 439 no. 66, 462 no. 67, 183, 409, 588–​89, 592–​93 no. 68, 633 no. 69, 512–​13, 555–​56 no. 71, 626–​27 no. 72, 638–​39 no. 79, 375, 537 no. 80, 642 no. 81, 618, 635 no. 85, 419–​20, 523 no. 92, 206 no. 93, 198, 200 no. 95, 526 no. 103, 638–​39 no. 106, 463–​64 no. 107, 142, 418 no. 109, 419 no. 110, 555–​56 no. 112, 419 no. 113, 525–​26 no. 114, 114, 257 no. 120, 184–​85, 505 no. 126, 417 no. 127, 409

no. 128, 420 no. 129, 409 no. 130, 417–​18, 439, 463 no. 131 145 no. 133, 417–​18, 439, 463 no. 134, 626–​27 no. 141, 465 no. 145, 463–​64 no. 148, 142, 420 no. 149, 142 no. 150, 620 no. 151, 187–​88, 631–​32 no. 153, 504–​5 no. 160, 635–​36 no. 162, 633–​34 no. 163, 620–​21 no. 168, 121, 196–​97 no. 170, 231, 418, 437–​38 no. 171, 231, 418, 437–​38 no. 173, 417 no. 174, 640 no. 178, 619–​20 no. 179, 464, 526 no. 180, 528 no. 183, 399–​400 no. 184, 548–​49 no. 190, 184–​85 no. 191, 418 no. 196, 617–​18 no. 199, 419, 437 no. 200, 231, 435 no. 203, 583, 654–​55 no. 204, 184 no. 205, 184 no. 208, 462, 533 Rasselas, 185–​87, 237, 405, 430–​34, 516–​17, 594 as satire, 186, 434 astronomer, 517–​18, 542–​43, 634 compared with Candide, 580 composition, 46, 185, 580 editions, 92 friendship, 431, 434, 435–​36 gender relations, 431–​32 happiness, 185, 538–​39, 625–​26, 636–​37, 638–​39 imagination, 235, 246, 398–​99 Imlac, 192–​93, 231, 499–​500, 593–​94, 617–​18, 642

Index   679 inconclusive conclusion, 186, 580, 594, 654, 659–​60 marriage debate, 413, 436–​37, 448 Nekayah, 413, 421–​22, 431–​33, 594, 621–​22, 628, 636–​37, 659–​60 on poetry, 192–​93, 650 Orientalism, 185–​87 Pekuah, 186–​87, 413, 431–​33, 436–​37, 449, 628 philosophy, 527, 545, 658–​59 plot, 580, 658–​59 realism, 186–​87, 432–​33, 657–​58 reception, 46 relation to the novel, 186–​87 religion, 652–​53, 654, 657–​60 sources, 185 structure, 658–​59 suffering, 536–​37, 605, 606, 617–​18 virtue, 633–​35 women in, 413 Reckford, Kenneth, 532 Reddick, Allen on authors cited, 524n.13 on Johnson’s reading, 317n.3, 467 on Nonjurors, 358n.19 on reception of the Dictionary, 45n.24 on writing the Dictionary, 42n.22, 113n.25, 157n.14, 325 relationship status, 445–​46 religious poetry, 135 Reynolds, Frances, 410–​11 Enquiry concerning the Principles of Taste, 294–​96 friendship with Johnson, 49–​50, 445 Johnson urges her to publish, 412 “Recollections of Dr. Johnson,” 71–​72 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 471, 564–​65, 636–​37 advises Johnson on pension, 47 on arguing with Johnson, 227 Blinking Sam, 61 founds the Club, 51–​52 friendship with Johnson, 44, 49–​50 on Johnson’s physical and mental health, 11–​12, 13, 532, 603 portraits of Johnson, 61 travels with Johnson, 49–​50, 245–​46 rhinoceros, 475–​76

Richardson, Charles, 88–​89 Richardson, Samuel characterization, 186–​87, 189, 205 helps Johnson with debts, 45, 49 plots, 319 Richardson, William, 203 Ricks, Christopher, 602–​3 Rizzo, Betty, 107 Rogers, Pat, 11n.10, 14, 24n.44, 27–​28 Rolt, Richard, 404–​5 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of, 267, 296–​97 Rothschild, Loren, 61n.22 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 470–​7 1, 520–​21, 528, 529, 534 Rowe, Elizabeth, 411n.7, 558–​59 Rudd, Niall, 91–​92, 601–​2 Ryder, Sir Dudley, 232

S

Saintsbury, George, 193 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 198–​99 Sarpi, Paolo, 33, 115, 261 Savage, Richard Bastard, The, 285–​86 death, 37, 562–​63 friendship with Johnson, 34–​35, 79, 105–​6 illegitimacy, 446–​47 poverty, 447–​48 virtue, 640–​42 Scanlan, John T., 333–​34 Scarry, Elaine, 367–​68, 373–​74, 386–​87 scholarship, 153–68 Schultens, Albert, 458–​59 science, 496–518, 530–​32 and experimentalism, 503–​8 of the mind, 501–​3 vitalism, 508–​18 Scotland Boswell’s homeland, 50–​51, 454 Hebrides tour, 59, 250–​57 Secker, Thomas, 232 Selden, Raman, 193 sermons, 209–25 for William Dodd, 215–​16, 217, 334 lost, 98 Methodist, 212

680   Index sermons (cont.) style, 212–​14 terminology, 210–​17 theology, 217–​19 Seward, Anna, 74, 422 sexuality, 39, 52–​53, 70, 74, 78, 81–​82, 615n.26 Shakespeare, William, 53–​55 and neoclassical unities, 121 “dignity of an ancient,” 200–​1 Falstaff, 204, 207, 466–​67, 468–​69 Hamlet, 203, 326, 479–​80, 551–​52, 609, 612–​14 ghost scene, 120–​21, 202, 479–​80, 613 Johnson’s early reading, 120–​21, 202, 479–​80 Johnson’s edition, 86, 163–​68 King Lear, 164–​68, 540–​41 Cordelia’s death, 206–​7, 216, 538, 609–​10 Macbeth, 196, 204, 251–​52, 539 Measure for Measure, 544 Othello, 54–​55, 609–​10, 614 Troilus and Cressida, 391–​92 Twelfth Night, 541–​42 Shaw, William, 7, 9n.7, 23n.43, 67–​68, 150, 293 Shenstone, William, 472–​74, 559–​60 Sherbo, Arthur, 86 Sherlock, William, 553–​54, 558–​59 Shiels, Robert, 38, 198–​99 Sibelius, Jean, 191 skepticism see doubt Skinner, Stephen, 307 slavery, 240–​41, 344–​46, 390, 403–​6, 423 Boswell’s support, 70, 346 “yelps for liberty,” 240–​41, 364–​65 see also Barber, Francis; Knight, Joseph Smallwood, Philip, 202, 456 Smart, Christopher, 471 Smith, Adam Club member, 51–​52 Lectures on Jurisprudence, 337 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 428, 528 Wealth of Nations, 341, 389–​90, 397–​98 Smith, Charlotte, 420 Smith, David Nichol, 89, 103n.1 Smith, Justin E. H., 519–​20 Smith, Sir Thomas, 304 Smollett, Tobias calls Johnson “Great Cham,” 109–​10

History of England, 176 Humphry Clinker, 381 on war, 381–​83 Roderick Random, 378, 381–​82 sociability, 425–52 social mobility, 400–​2 Somerville, Edith, 423 South, Robert, 211–​12, 465 spelling “fixed,” 304–​5 in editions of Johnson, 84, 86–​87, 89, 91–​92 Johnson’s, 300–​2, 305 reform, 302–​5 regulation by an academy, 193–​94, 303–​4 Spenser, Edmund, 163–​64, 193–​94 Spingarn, J. E., 193 Sprat, Thomas, 198–​99 Steele, Sir Richard, 139, 143–​44, 149–​50, 230–​ 31, 447–​48, 494, 506–​7 Steevens, George, 58–​59, 86, 165–​66, 541, 612 Stephen, Leslie, 71 Sterne, Laurence, 189, 201, 370 Stewart, Francis, 38 Stoicism, 129–​30, 542, 563–​64, 584, 590, 592–​ 93, 627, 638–​39 Christian Stoicism, 530 satirized in Rasselas, 434, 545 Streatham, 52–​53, 62, 68, 444, 497, 531, 604 Suarez, Michael F., S.J., 212n.12, 284n.6, 427n.3, 523, 648 sublime, 125–​26, 134, 248, 256–​57, 311–​12, 440–​ 41, 555–​56, 657 subordination, 346, 360–​61, 400–​2, 547 subscription publication, 291–​94 Suetonius, 121–​22, 127–​28 suffering, 536–50 for art, 539–​44 in King Lear, 538 in Macbeth, 539 in Measure for Measure, 544 in Rasselas, 536, 542–​43 in The Life of Savage, 542–​43 morality of, 538–​39 terminology, 537 Swift, Jonathan autobiographical fragment, 370 “Battle of the Books,” 575

Index   681 cited in the Dictionary, 157–​58, 466, 487–​88 “driv’ler and a show,” 653 Gulliver’s Travels, 201 on language change, 302–​3 marginalia, 327, 368–​69 misogyny, 413–​14 model for Johnson’s satires, 173, 175–​76, 228–​29, 360 on physical suffering, 388 Tale of a Tub, “Digression on Madness,” 531, 537 Swynfen, Elizabeth see Desmoulins, Elizabeth Sydenham, Thomas, 11–​12, 114–​15

T

“talking for victory,” 40, 194, 226–​27, 414–​15, 528 Tankard, Paul, 191–​92 Tate, Nahum, 201, 538, 609 Tave, Stuart, 467 Taxation No Tyranny, 58, 240, 364, 365, 393, 403 Taylor, Charles, 569 Taylor, Jeremy, 210, 553–​54 Taylor, John, 16, 81, 248, 353, 359, 557–​58, 603 sermons, 209, 216 Tetty see Johnson, Elizabeth Jervis Porter Theobald, Lewis, 141–​42, 164–​65, 199, 325–​27 Theocritus, 254, 434 Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands, 57, 58, 239, 362, 363 Thrale, Henry death, 64–​65, 603 friendship with Johnson, 52–​53 Johnson ghostwrites for, 108–​9 scientific experiments, 497 travels with, 59–​60, 247 Thrale, Hester see Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale, Hester Maria (“Queeney”), 53, 59–​60, 62, 444, 452, 611 Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, 300 Tinker, Chauncey Brewster, 469–​70, 471, 474–​75 Todd, William B., 105n.5 Toryism defined, 351–​54 and Jacobitism, 356–​57 and religion, 354–​56

and Nonjuring, 358–​59 out of government, 351–​52 compared with Whigs, 349–​50 Towers, Joseph, 67–​68, 149–​50, 558–​59 Tracy, Clarence, 451 trade see commerce tragedy, 608, 611–​14 translations Crousaz’s Commentary, 104 Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, 104 Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, 104 Trapp, Joseph, 211–​12 travel, 58–​60, 244–59 to Devonshire, 50n.3 to France, 248–​50 imagined, 246 to Oxford, 245–​46 to Scotland, 59, 250–​57 terminology, 244–​45 to Wales, 59–​60, 247–​48 Turnbull, George, 501–​3, 511–​12 Turnbull, Gordon, 51n.4, 337n.19, 454 Tyers, Thomas, 67–​68, 358–​59, 549–​50, 552

V

Vance, John A., 324, 328, 456, 561n.17 Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 123, 132–​33, 313, 409 on beauty, 413 composition, 40–​41 on death, 556, 659 on desire, 398–​99 editions, 41, 89–​91 as imitation, 125–​26, 130, 601 as satire, 129–​30, 456–​57, 588, 596–​97 historical examples, 322–​23 metaphors, 123, 375 on philosophy, 124–​25, 129–​30, 131, 520 on religion, 654 reception, 41 Venturo, David F., 429, 443–​44, 459–​60, 601n.2 Vermeule, Blakey, 266 versification, 121–​22, 193–​94, 429 representative meter, 193–​94 virtue, 631–45 Christian, 642–​45 in Rasselas, 642

682   Index virtue (cont.) in The Life of Milton, 641–​42 in The Life of Savage, 640–​42 in The Rambler, 631 secular, 637–​42 in theory and practice, 633–​37 in The Vision of Theodore, 643 Vision of Theodore, 180–​83, 481–​82, 488–​91, 643, 656–​57 Voitle, Robert, 503n.21, 522–​23, 530, 538–​39, 549–​50, 555n.8 Voltaire, François-​Marie Arouet, 580

W

wages, 396 Wain, John, 13–​14, 17n.26, 27, 74, 195, 201–​2 Wales, 59–​60, 129, 247–​48 Walker, Robert G., 629–​30 Waller, Edmund, 121–​22, 135, 193–​94, 328–​29, 540 Walpole, Horace, 67 Walpole, Robert, 127–​28, 360 in A Compleat Vindication, 172–​73, 177, 360–​61 in Debates in Parliament, 175–​77, 229–​38 in London, 32–​33, 128, 129 in Marmor Norfolciense, 34, 173–​75, 360 praised by Savage, 265 war, 261–​62, 363, 367–88, 393, 404 civil war, 369–​7 1, 372–​73 foreign war, 58, 129, 368–​7 1, 387–​88 just war, 342 Seven Years’ War, 147, 404 and trauma, 373–​88 Warner, Michael, 447n.54 Warton, Joseph, 44, 49–​50, 117–​18, 195–​96 Warton, Thomas, 44, 133–​34, 197–​98 Watts, Isaac, 244–​45, 422–​23, 492–​93, 553 wealth, 145, 389–​91, 394–​400, 442–​43, 504–​5, 621–​22

Weinbrot, Howard D., 520, 618 Wendorf, Richard, 90n.10 Whigs and America, 364–​65 in Debates in Parliament, 176, 234, 361–​62 devilish, 363 and entail, 341 government, 177–​78, 365–​66 and history, 373, 380–​81 and liberty, 362 and marriage, 438–​39 in Marmor Norfolciense, 172–​73 compared with Tories, 349–​50, 354–​55 White, Stephen, 117–​18 Wildermuth, Mark E., 143–​44 Wilkes, John on Johnson’s pension, 47, 356 subject of The False Alarm, 57–​58, 238–​39, 355–​56, 362–​63, 365–​66 Wilson, Benjamin, 118 Wiltshire, John, 12n.12, 70, 71–​72, 75 Wimsatt, William, 85n.5, 497–​98, 512–​13, 523–​24 Winks, Robin W., 438 Wolcot, John (“Peter Pindar”), 67, 79, 564–​65 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 412, 417–​18, 420–​22 women, 408–23 Johnson’s friendships with, 410–​12 Johnson’s writing about, 413–​14, 416–​20 in the periodical essays, 416–​20 preaching, 415 terminology, 409–​10 Woolf, Virginia, 111n.23, 408, 423 World Display’d, The, 403–​4

Y

Yolton, John, 523–​24

Z

Zuabi, Amir Nizar, 611