UNIVERZITA PALACKÉHO V OLOMOUCI
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Martina Tesařová
The Times and Influence of Samuel Johnson
Bakalářská práce
Studijní obor: Anglická filologie
Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Ema Jelínková, Ph.D.
OLOMOUC 2013
Prohlášení
Prohlašuji, že jsem bakalářskou práci na téma „Doba a vliv Samuela Johnsona“
vypracovala samostatně a uvedla úplný seznam použité a citované literatury.
V Olomouci dne 15.srpna 2013
……………………………………..
podpis
Poděkování
Ráda bych poděkovala Mgr. Emě Jelínkové, Ph.D. za její stále přítomný humor,
velkou trpělivost, vstřícnost, cenné rady, zapůjčenou literaturu a ochotu vždy
pomoci. Rovněž děkuji svému manželovi, Joe Shermanovi, za podporu a
jazykovou korekturu.
Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness in his manner, but no
man alive has a more tender heart.
—James Boswell
Table of Contents
1.
Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1
2.
The Age of Johnson: A Time of Reason and Good Manners ......................... 3
3.
Samuel Johnson Himself ................................................................................. 5
3.1.
Life and Health ......................................................................................... 5
3.2.
Works ..................................................................................................... 10
3.3.
Johnson’s Club ....................................................................................... 18
3.4.
Opinions and Practice ............................................................................. 19
3.4.1.
Philosophy and Religion ................................................................. 19
3.4.2.
Humanity ......................................................................................... 22
3.4.3.
Women and Marriage ...................................................................... 24
4.
Loves and Friendships ................................................................................... 26
5.
Impacts He Made .......................................................................................... 29
5.1.
James Boswell: I Am Fond of Tea ......................................................... 30
5.2.
Jane Austen: Common Sense and Sensibility ........................................ 33
5.3.
Samuel Beckett: I Regret Everything ..................................................... 36
6.
His Presence in the Present ........................................................................... 39
7.
Conclusion..................................................................................................... 42
8.
Resumé .......................................................................................................... 44
9.
Annotation ..................................................................................................... 45
10.
Anotace....................................................................................................... 46
11.
Bibliography ............................................................................................... 47
1.
Introduction
Samuel Johnson (18th September 1709–13th December 1784) was a great
and colourful literary figure of the eighteenth century. He wrote essays, reviews,
sermons, biographies, travelogues, poetry, an edition of Shakespeare's plays and
his most famous work, the Dictionary of the English Language. A sociable
person, he had deep and long-lasting relationships with his renowned
contemporaries, such as David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, and
with his younger companion James Boswell. In many broadsheets, in
parliamentary debates, or in discussions on both radio and television, the remark
‘As Dr Johnson once said’ frequently occurs, followed by a witty and erudite
quotation proving his sharp insight. But if not for the biography of his friend
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, the name of Johnson could have been
mostly forgotten, forever lost in depth of the past.
Some facts, events, works, and friends of Johnson’s life I omitted in this
thesis due to the need to keep the size within limits.
After the introduction, the chapter ‘The Age of Johnson: A Time of
Reason and Good Manners’ provides an overview of the time when Johnson was
born. It was a period of rationalism and of the development of humanistic thinking
with emphasis on the individual in society. Several literary genres, such as the
novel, satire, and essay, gained importance and a new readership emerged from
the middle class. The chapter also briefly outlines the foreign affairs of England at
that time.
The second chapter, about Samuel Johnson, describes his life story and his
mental as well as physical conditions that steered his literary career. His early
years were affected by relative poverty which deeply influenced him and provided
him not only with empathy but also with a sense of charity towards the less
fortunate people whom he often took care of. The subchapter ‘Works’ presents
Johnson’s literary achievements and growing reputation that started with the
publication of the poem ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ and was sealed with the
Dictionary masterpiece. ‘Johnson’s Club’ gives the evidence of his influence on
the major contemporary personalities of wide-ranging professions who all desired
to become members of this conversational fraternity.
1
Chapter ‘Opinions and Practices’ focuses on three topics that were very
important to Johnson: philosophy and religion; humanity; women and marriage.
These subchapters complete Johnson’s portrayal; they draw the contours around
his views on evil and good, on his never-ending quest for happiness that echoes in
his works, and on his search for love.
‘Loves and Friendships’ reveals the attachment Johnson felt towards those
he considered the closest to him. It depicts his lighter as well as his darker traits
and inclinations within the relationships and it tells of his marriage to Elizabeth
Porter, and tries to explain why he felt guilty for the rest of his life when she died.
The chapter about Johnson’s impacts on the literary figures both in his
time and in the future analyses in detail what drew other writers to Johnson and
his work so that they felt compelled to replicate some of his ideas and attitudes in
their own writings. Aside from James Boswell (as Johnson’s contemporary) where
the purpose for choosing him has been already stated; I chose Jane Austen, as a
nineteenth-century representative, for her positivity and her willfulness to fight for
satisfaction and individual freedom. The third writer is Samuel Beckett, as the
twentieth-century master whose attitude to life and embrace of pessimism were
opposite of Austen’s. Nevertheless, Beckett was closer to the real Samuel Johnson
in term of pessimism. But all three, Johnson, Beckett and Austen shared a great
sense of humor.
The last chapter ‘His Presence in the Present’ traces the reasons why
nowadays Johnson is not very well-known in the public mind and stays alive
mainly in the world of academia. It also gives some suggestions for Johnson’s
revival in the broader public consciousness.
To sum it up, my thesis aspires to present a vivid portrait of Johnson as a
human being, an eccentric, opinionated, and lovable person. It also focuses on the
reasons why Johnson was so widely accepted and popular in various social circles,
how he influenced the period he lived in, and why we should still consider him an
important figure even in our own time.
2
2.
The Age of Johnson: A Time of Reason and
Good Manners
For understanding Samuel Johnson’ times, I will return even further back
to a period named the Augustan Age. This term refers to a period of literary fame
under the Roman emperor Augustus (27 BC–AD 14), during which Virgil,
Horace, and Ovid flourished. Marked by civil peace and prosperity, this golden
age reached its highest expression in poetry. With polished and sophisticated
verses ‘it celebrated patriotism, love and nature’.1 English literature re-used the
term and applied it to the early and mid-eighteenth century when Samuel Johnson
lived. The early usages date back to the reign of Charles II (1660–1685), and
include the publications of both Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and John
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke’s essay shows a
society in which ‘business is not to know all things, but those which concern our
conduct’.2 Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists (the eighteenth-century French
writers centered around editors Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert)
presented the idea of a ‘noble savage’ which was readily accepted by the society.
Another French humanist, Voltaire, ‘embraced the idea of the brotherhood of man
and the essential goodness of man’.3
The eighteenth century, prior to the French Revolution (1789–1779), is
often thought of as a period of effete politeness and intelligence, of cultured and
artificial decadence, of scepticism, atrophy, and want of enterprise. Revisiting the
era, the English Augustan writers greatly admired their Roman counterparts,
imitated their works and frequently drew parallels between the two ages. There
was a new reading public, which included upper-class women and a new
prosperous middle class. They were attracted to the new writing of popular
periodical essays, miscellaneous collections of verse and prose, newspapers and
magazines, such as Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator. This
literary epoch featured the rapid development of satire (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The
Rape of the Lock, 1714), prose (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 1719) and
1
Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 51.
2
Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason (New York: Doubleday, 1961) 5.
3
ibid. 10.
3
drama (e.g. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, 1728). In poetry the verse became
descriptive and didactic with emphasis on simplicity, a new restraint, clarity,
regularity and good sense (Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard, 1751).4
Though it is risky to give precise dates, the Age of Johnson was roughly
between 1748 and 1798. Only a couple decades earlier the English had conquered
Canada and half of India. They also rediscovered and began to settle Australia. On
an ever-increasing scale they traded around the inhabited globe. They reorganized
British agriculture on modern methods and began the Industrial Revolution, which
swept across the whole world. As for America, Turbeville (1968) suggests, ‘if the
thirteen American colonies were at the same time lost to the British Empire, it was
the result less of decadence in Great Britain than of young and mutinous energies
in English America’.5
During this time England produced not only the classical perfection of
Johnson’s conversations and Thomas Gray’s writings, but the intellectual
originality of men like Adam Smith (in his famous The Wealth of Nations, 1776,
he criticized the dominating empiricism and mercantilism—the sad triumph of
trade in the developing capitalism), and William Blake. Johnson’s England was
‘full of creative intellectual power both in the science and in the arts’.6 It was the
first great age of native English painting, led by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas
Gainsborough. The British Parliament was admired around the world, but even
more admired was the British freedoms of speech, press, and person, and religious
tolerance.
In that great time, travelers were few and often considered adventurers.
Travel was accessible almost exclusively to the English gentry, and they visited
the Continent was visited not once in a year, but once in a lifetime. On that trip
they often travelled for a year or more on end—it was called a Grand Tour.
However, the average Englishmen did not take the Grand Tour. They had little
information about foreigners. Across England, according to Turbeville’s book
Johnson’s England, there was ‘a certain contempt for, and ignorance of,
4
M.H. Abrams, ed. The Norton Anthology (New York: W W Norton, 1993) 1430.
5
A.S. Turbeville, ed. Johnson’s England, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) 10.
6
ibid. 12.
4
foreigners that was extended not only to the Irish, but even to the Scots—who
only became understood and admired in England in the age of Walter Scott, partly
through the powerful influence of his pen’.7
The novel, a literary form explored by Scott, Henry Fielding, Samuel
Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Frances ‘Fanny’ Burney, was to be the principal
instrument of literature in the next two centuries. Though it is impossible to date
the actual beginnings of the novel in England, it is quite safe to say that its firm
establishment and popularity date from the Age of Johnson. The novel was the
greatest cultural achievement of that age. In this era the ultimate literary oracle
was Samuel Johnson, ‘the most abnormally English creature God ever made’.8
3.
Samuel Johnson Himself
Three books that Johnson was never tired of were Robinson Crusoe,
Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘how few books there are of
which one can never possibly arrive at the last page’.9 He continued reading them,
he never exhausted them because his identification with them was almost
complete. The three wanderers in the novels—one a castaway, one a pilgrim, and
one on an impossible quest10—were prototypes of what Johnson felt to be his own
life. His career had unlikely beginnings.
3.1. Life and Health
Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on 7 September 1709 to Michael, a
bookseller, and Sarah, Samuel came to influence the world under rather
unfavorable conditions. A sickly, weak-eyed child, he developed early in his
infancy a tubercular infection of the skin and the lymphatic glands. The disease,
scrofula, was then popularly named the King’s Evil because the English
sovereigns were reputed to have the privilege of curing it by administrating their
‘royal touch’.
7
Turbeville, ed. Johnson’s England 13.
8
W.H. Hudson, An Outline History of English Literature (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008) 143.
9
G. Birkbeck Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol.1 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966) 276.
10
W.J. Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Hartcourt B. Jovanovich, 1977) 51.
5
In childhood, Johnson was taken to be touched by Queen Anne. In later
years, he said that he retained ‘a sort of solemn recognition’ of her as a lady
wearing ‘diamonds, and a long black hood’.11 But the Queen’s magical touch did
not cure much. Soon the disease, besides pitting and seaming his face,
irremediable harmed both his hearing and his eyesight. However, he was strong
and once he struggled through the perils of his childhood, he became a stout and
powerful boy.
Sarah was already forty-years old when her older son was born and
Michael was some twenty years older than she was. He was ‘a pious and a worthy
Man, he was wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with Melancholy’(Johnson
informed Mrs Thrale years later)12—the ‘vile melancholy’ that Samuel afterwards
accepted as a part of his inheritance. Sarah adored Samuel and, besides spoiling
him, she taught him to read and write. Yet it was a gloomy household: ‘My father
and mother had not much happiness from each other’.13 Michael’s business was
usually ill-starred and causing lots of financial pressure on his family.
Although Samuel’s defiant behavior often put him in troubles, his pride
and deep-rooted sense of his own value distinguished him in his whole existence.
‘That superiority over his fellows’, Boswell observed, ‘which he maintained with
so much dignity, was not assumed from vanity but was the natural and constant
effect of those extraordinary powers of mind…He was from the beginning Anax
andrōn, a king of men’.14
He received the traditional education at the grammar school in the village
of Lichfield—a place a writer like Henry James did not think highly of. When
James visited ‘the cathedral city of Lichfield’, he considered it ‘the dullest and
sleepiest of provincial market-laces’. But he immediately noticed ‘a huge effigy of
Dr Johnson, the genius loci, who was constructed, humanly, with very nearly as
large an architecture as the great abbey’ and ‘a row of huge elms, which must
have been old when Johnson was young, and between these and the longbuttressed wall of the cathedral, you may stroll to and fro among as pleasant a
11
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Doubleday, 1946) 14.
12
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 148.
13
ibid. 147.
14
Boswell, The Life 18.
6
mixture of influence as any in England’.15 But for Johnson this place worked well
enough to be later admitted to Pembroke College, Oxford. Here he soon made
himself the centre of appreciative friends.
Thomas Carlyle described Johnson’s student days in Oxford luridly: ‘What
a world of blackest gloom, with sun-gleams and pale tearful moon-gleams and
flickering of a celestial and infernal splendor, was this that now opened for him!’16
Witnesses nearer the time were more matter-of-fact: ‘I have heard [wrote Bishop
Thomas Percy] that he was generally seen lounging at the College gate, with a
circle of young students round him, whom he was encouraging with wit, and
keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the College
discipline, which in his mature years he so much extolled’.17
For a year and a half Johnson used to cross the road to the far more opulent
college of Christ Church, to pick up lecture notes from a friend there, until,
Boswell says: ‘His poverty being so extreme, that his shoes were worn out, and
his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating circumstance was
perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no more. He was too proud to
accept money, and somebody having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw
them away with indignation’.18 Leaving all his books behind in his room, he left
Oxford and did not return until many years later.
Then the ancestral malady struck him down. When he returned to
Lichfield, he suddenly experienced the full force of the disease and ‘felt himself
overwhelmed with horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness,
and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence
misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved’.19
Since then he was never a free man. His melancholia and the necessity of fighting
it (or conceal it) governed all his actions. It transfixed him with terrible sense of
dread that he was a sinner who sinned beyond redemption and was to be punished
for eternity. It also dulled his perceptions, crippled his faculties and gradually
15
Henry James, Collected Travel Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984) 70.
16
Jan Morris, ed. The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford UP) 130.
17
ibid. 131.
18
Boswell, The Life 30.
19
ibid. 32.
7
reduced him to a state of overpowering sloth and languor. In 1729 he said that he
‘was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour
upon the town-clock’.20
Several mundane years followed in the Midlands, where Johnson tried
unsuccessfully to become a schoolmaster, and also undertook some ventures in
writing.
Samuel, aged twenty-six, married Elizabeth ‘Tetty’ Porter, who was fortysix, and, as he said to his friend, ‘It was a love-marriage’,21 but apart from the
married pair, no one could explain their union. Her modest fortune he invested in
a boarding school, which soon failed. But one important friendship was founded
there, that with his pupil David Garrick (the future famous actor), who later
accompanied Johnson to London. Here Johnson tried to make a living in Grub
Street by his pen with ill-paid journalism (in the Gentleman’s Magazine).
In the 1730s and 1740s he wrote several political pamphlets, such as
Marmor Norfolciense, A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage,
contributed to Harleian Miscellany, and his biography Life of Savage was
published. When he was forty, he started to experience certain degree of success
by publication of his two long poems ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ and
‘London’, and his blank-verse tragic drama Irene (he wrote it long before but only
now it was produced through Garrick’s influence).
It was only in the 1750s when Johnson began to be recognized as one of
the most important literary figures of his time. He published highly-acclaimed
series of The Rambler essays (that were translated into Russian language), and his
great Dictionary of the English Language. Yet, he still was not relieved from
financial burden. Later chapter will deal with the whole process of making the
Dictionary for which he received amount of money but it was spent during the
eight years of work on it. During that time he was able to edit the Literary
Magazine and publish two other sets of periodical essays, The Adventurer and The
Idler. Moreover, he lost the two people dearest to him—his wife in 1752 and his
20
Boswell, The Life 69.
21
ibid. 353.
8
mother in 1759. His great story Rasselas was written ‘in the evenings of a week’22
to support his mother during her last illness.
Finally, when he was fifty-three (1762), he was granted a royal pension of
£300 per annum (according to Greene, nowadays the amount would be the
multiple of twenty-five, which is about £7,50023). The grant was unexpected
because it was from the government of Lord Bute, the prime minister of King
George III. Johnson had written ‘much in virulent opposition to the Whig regimes
of Walpole and the Pelhams in the previous reign which is surely not irrelevant’.24
Nonetheless it was extremely welcome and Johnson accepted it with good grace.
Having at last ensured a decent yearly income, Johnson was secure from want. It
is not coincidental that his edition (together with his annotation and emotional
responses to the plays) of Shakespeare, announced nine years before, appeared in
1765.
Yet the financial security nor public fame and honors (he received
honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin and Oxford University) could
elevate his moods of black depression. They recurred with hideous regularity and
severe power (in his Meditations he wrote, ‘I have made no reformation; I have
lived totally useless, more sensual in thought, and more addicted to wine and
meat’25).
Johnson, in his mid-fifties, was a huge man, nearly six feet tall, largeboned, broad-shouldered and thick-necked. By now, he was short-sighted on one
eye and lost the sight of the other one. Moreover, he suffered from convulsive tics,
a condition known nowadays as Tourette syndrome. Everyone who encountered
him for the first time was taken aback, often scared, by his appearance and
behavior: ‘While talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held
his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous
manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in
the same direction, with the palm of his hand…He made various sounds with his
mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes
22
Boswell, The Life 66.
23
Donald Greene, ed. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008) 27.
24
ibid. 28.
25
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 203.
9
giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof
of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his
upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too,
too…Generally when he had concluded a period in the course of a dispute, by
which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to
blow out his breath like a Whale’.26
Despite his depressions and physical difficulties, he was, fortunately,
rarely alone. Many friends had come his way, such as James Boswell, Joshua
Reynolds, Bennet Langton, and his new love Mrs Hester Thrale, the wife of a
wealthy brewer. For the rest of his life he cultivated friendships which were
lifesavers for him.
In 1765 he and Joshua Reynolds founded the famous ‘Club’ where many
brilliant conversations took place and were vividly reported by Boswell. He also
travelled quite a lot, be it his famous tour with Boswell to then remote and notmuch-known Scottish Highlands (Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland); his
travels with old school friends Edmund Hector and John Taylor; or travels with
the Thrales around Wales and France. Among his last masterpieces belong fiftytwo Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (commonly but inaccurately called The
Lives of the Poets27).* He lived to the respectable age of seventy-five and died in
December 1784.
3.2. Works
Johnson was not, and he did not pretend to be, a classical scholar who
could have ranked with the likes of Richard Bentley (an eighteen-century critic,
theologian and Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University). But, in
modern literature, he was among the best-rated men of his day. He very intensely
studied human life, from a variety of angles that reflected clearly in his works.
Bate identifies the years between 1748 and 1760 as a crucial period from which
Johnson emerged as the supreme moralist of modern times, ‘as one of the handful
26
Boswell, The Life 577.
27
Donald Greene, ed. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008) 28.
* The thesis refers to Prefaces as to The Lives of the Poets.
10
of writers who have become a part of the conscience of mankind’.28 During this
period Johnson published the powerful poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, the
periodical papers The Rambler (and later The Adventurer and The Idler), the
philosopical tale Rasselas and his masterpiece The Dictionary. These twelve years
were the high point of Johnson’s writing career. The second peak arrived in 1777
when Johnson agreed with booksellers to write prefaces to works of English poets
that led to publication of The Lives of Poets (1779-1781).
The Vanity of Human Wishes
This remarkable satirical poem published in 1748 ended Johnson’s days as
an unknown scribbler. It was published, like all Johnson’s work, anonymously.
But the inner literary circle knew well that it was the work of ‘that Mr Johnson
who had made a strong impression with “London”, with The Life of Savage, and
with his work on the Harleian library catalogue [of Edward Harley, Earl of
Oxford, a collection of illuminated manuscripts from the early Middle Ages to the
Renaisssance. Later, the collection formed the basis for the British Library]’.29
One autumn morning in 1748 Johnson composed the first seventy lines of the
poem before putting them on paper. As Boswell says, ‘[Johnson] had developed a
remarkable ability to plan pieces in his mind without wasting time in jotting down
fragments’.30 The poem epitomizes Johnson’s life philosophy, his belief in ‘the
inability of human mankind to create a new world’.31 Yet, this realistic poem was
not tarnished with cynicism. It recognized the burden of life’s struggles and the
value of its pleasures. It deals with the sorrows of old age:32
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
28
Bate, Samuel Johnson 277.
29
John Wain, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1974) 145.
30
Boswell, The Life 69.
31
James Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1979) 3.
32
S. Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes,’ Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. D. Greene
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008) 12–21.
11
With the sufferings of neglected genius and warnings against being a scholar:
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail
And with implacable passing time:
Enlarge my life with multitude of days,
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays;
Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy
Soon this poem gave Johnson his public voice that was regularly heard
in The Rambler.
The Rambler
This ‘prose application of “The Vanity of Human Wishes”’33 contained
more than two hundred periodical essays that Johnson began to write in 1750
twice a week—every Tuesday and Saturday—consistently for two years. The
essays were published by Edward Cave, who paid him a weekly salary of four
guineas,34 and were again intended as a serious moral effort.
The origin of the title is unclear but given that one of Richard Savage’s
poems was named ‘The Wanderer’, Johnson might have taken his inspiration
there, or in the three books which he was constantly returning to (Pilgrim’s
Progress, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe). The only account from Johnson
himself was his remark to Reynolds: ‘I was at loss how to name it [and sitting at
the edge of his bed one night, he resolved that] I would not go to sleep till I had
fixed its title. The Rambler seemed the best that occurred, and I took it’.35 One
way or the other, the publications became immensely popular. William Rider
(1762) suggested that ‘the excellent collection of essays, which [Johnson]
published in periodical papers, under the title of The Rambler, would be sufficient
to immortalize his name. It is by many preferred to the Spectator’.36 Johnson
33
Bate, Samuel Johnson 289.
34
Peter Quennell, Samuel Johnson: His Friend and Enemies (New York: American Heritage
Press, 1973) 176.
35
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 286.
36
William Rider, ‘Mr. Johnson,’ The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, ed. Brack and Kelley
(Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1974) 13–17.
12
wrote the essays very quickly, with not much time to ponder upon the structure
and even less time to read them over more than once before they were printed. It
is ironic that one of the finest writings in English of idleness and procrastination
(No. 134) was ‘hastily composed [as Mrs Thrale observed] in Sir Joshua
Reynolds’ parlour, while the boy waited to carry it to the press’.37 Yet, this does
not mean that he merely dashed off whatever was in his mind at the time. As
Boswell shows, Johnson kept a book full of notes and suggestions for possible
essays.
The Rambler is often thought a sober, moral work, with only flashes of
humor. There are a fair number of light and amusing essays, though. Johnson was
quite willing to laugh at himself. There are amusing commentaries on the use of
philosophical words, disappointments of marriage, faulty education, prostitution,
disappointed fortune hunters, etc. Here are a couple of examples:38
On the vanity of stoicism (No. 32)
The cure for the greatest of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.
Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being;
all attempts therefore to decline it wholly are useless and vain.
On old age (No. 50)
It has been always the practice of those who are desirous to believe
themselves made venerable by length of time, to censure the new comers
into life, for want of respect to grey hairs and sage experience, […] for
disregard of counsels, which their fathers and grandsires are ready to
afford them, and a rebellious impatience of that subordination to which
youth is condemned by nature, as necessary to its security from evils into
which it would be otherwise precipitated, by the rashness of passion, and
the blindness of ignorance.
Many sentences from The Rambler have the proverbial character:
Almost every man has some real or imaginary connection with a
celebrated character…The safe and general antidote against sorrow is
employment…The natural flights of the human mind are not from
pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope…
37
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 290.
38
S. Johnson, ‘The Rambler No.32 & No.50’, Samuel Johnson: The Major Works 186 & 204.
13
The topical essays gave a certain distinction and clarity to Johnson’s prose
style. The themes of pleasure, sorrow, hope and happiness were to be explored
even more profoundly in his tale about Prince Rasselas.
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
This novel that he wrote in 1759, and declared that he never reread, was
much admired by eighteenth-century readers. It was translated into more
languages than any other of his works. In fact, the title was The Prince of
Abissinia. A Tale. The name ‘Rasselas’ never appeared in the title of any editions
published during Johnson’s life. Johnson took the storyline inspiration from
Voltaire’s Candide (1759).39
It is a simple story with little plot and rather episodic in form. A prince
named Rasselas is confined in a kind of earthly paradise in the highlands of
Ethiopia. In spite, or because, of having everything he desires, he is bored. He
wishes to see more of the world. Eventually, he, his sister Nekayah, her maid
Pekuah, and a philosopher Imlac are able to escape through a tunnel. They make
their way to the great city of Cairo, where they set about observing real life. What
they are most eager to find is the true source of human happiness. They gradually
examine everything which is supposed to bring satisfaction but nothing proves to
be the perfect solution. In the end, they decide to return back to their home in the
Happy Valley in Abyssinia.
Johnson did not provide any easy answer for the quest of happiness that
the optimists were searching for. The story received rather mix reviews, from the
elated compliments in the Gentleman’s Magazine to the quite poisonous remarks
from the Monthly Review. Yet, Johnson’s friends and his regular readers were
delighted.
Again, it is a story of a pilgrimage where in the end ‘nothing is concluded’
but, prior to that, each of the four travelers was challenged and ultimately was
changed. The implication is that happiness cannot be obtained in searching for it,
that it is a mirage that disappears in the very moment of reaching for it.
39
Clifford, Dictionary Johnson 212.
14
The appeal of the story lies in the emphasis on the stream of conversations
between the protagonists. Here is an excerpt of a dialogue of Imlac, Rasselas and
the hermit:40
At last Imlac began thus: ‘I do not now wonder that your reputation is so
far extended; we have heard at Cairo of your wisdom, and came hither to
implore your direction for this young man and maiden in the choice of
life.’
‘To him that lives well,’ answered the hermit, ‘every form of life is good;
nor can I give any other rule for choice than to remove from all apparent
evil.’
‘He will remove most certainly from evil,’ said the prince, ‘who shall
devote himself to that solitude which you have recommended by your
example.’
‘I have indeed lived fifteen years in solitude,’ said the hermit, ‘but have
no desire that my example should gain any imitators.’
It was not a book in which Johnson himself took much pride. He said that
he put it together, hurriedly and casually, to earn the thirty pounds he then needed
to pay the expenses of his mother’s funeral.41 If The History of Rasselas revealed
him as an accomplished master of the English language, this might be partly due
to the experience he had gained while he was building up The Dictionary,
reviewing his material word by word.
The Dictionary of English Language
When William M. Thackeray opened his novel Vanity Fair (1848–1849)
with a scene of Becky Sharp throwing Johnson’s Dictionary out of the carriage
window, as she was leaving behind the oppressive walls of a girl boarding school,
‘the gesture was a symbolic overthrow of traditional, masculine authority, and of
Englishness, and it was a great evidence of what Johnson’s work embodied’.42
The need for an English dictionary had been obvious for a long time. There had
been many proposals and plans, and by 1736 there was available a huge
40
S. Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (London: Routledge, 1967) 45.
41
Quennell, Samuel Johnson 178.
42
Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary
(New York: Picador, 2006) 6.
15
Dictionarium Britannicus by Nathan Bailey, but ‘he and others left much to be
desired. None really tried to define all the words or to provide a certain
grammatical advice’.43 Therefore, Johnson was approached by a group of
publishers and in 1746 he agreed to prepare a full dictionary of the English
language which took many years to complete.
He approached the creation from a fresh direction, different from what was
then common. Usually, lexicographers made a list of words they wanted to
include and then started filling the terms up. In contrast, Johnson hired six men
and the team grazed through all existing writings, and made a catalog of all words
they could come across. They quickly realized that it would be impossible to look
through everything, and so Johnson set limits. The language, he decided, had
probably reached its peak with the translation of the Bible and writings of William
Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser. There was little
need to go look further back than their lifetimes. The starting point would be the
works of Sir Philip Sidney (who died in 1586) and the end point were the last
books published by newly dead authors.44
Johnson read through the books, then underlined and circled words he
wanted, and annotated the pages he had chosen. Then his helpers copied into slips
of paper the full sentences that displayed his chosen words; and these he then
filed. Thus, he came up not only with the entries but with examples right at hand.
Here is an entry example:45
Fa'lconer. n.s. [faulconnier, Fr.] One who breeds and trains hawks; one
who follows the sport of fowling with hawks.
Hist! Romeo, hist! O for a falc’ner’s voice,
To lure this tarsel gently back again.
Shakespeare.
I have learned of a falconer never to feed up a hawk when I would have him fly.
Dryden’s Don Sebast.
A falconer Henry is, when Emma hawks;
With her of tarsels and of lures he talks.
Prior.
The list is almost endless and ‘it was a mark of Johnson’s genius that,
armed with references from 150 years of English writings, he was able to find and
43
Clifford, Dictionary Johnson 46.
44
Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman ((New York: Harper Collins, 1998) 96.
45
S. Johnson, ‘A Dictionary of the English Language’, Samuel Johnson: The Major Works 331.
16
note almost every use of every word of the day’.46 He finished amassing his list of
the English word stock in 1750. He did not publish the completed work until 1755
when Oxford University granted him a degree.
One of his constant problems was money—how to keep himself alive and
also pay regular wages to his helpers. The contract for the dictionary was worth
£1,575. But at that time there was no copyright law so Johnson never received any
additional money after completing the dictionary which continued to sell
extremely well. The book, which went into four editions during Johnson’s
lifetime, was to remain the standard work, an unrivaled repository of the English
language for the next century until the first unbound editions of The Oxford
English Dictionary in 1884.
The Lives of the Poets
This collection of prefaces published between 1777 and 1781 was,
according to Johnson ‘not…only for poets and philosophers, but to educate the
common readers’.47 Johnson’s accounts of Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, John
Milton, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, and others are lively and entertaining
portraits with strong personal taste. On William H. Lyttleton he remarked that
‘Lord Lyttleton’s poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment,
devoting part of his life to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and
little to be admired’.48 He also questioned the genius of Gray, writing that
‘[Gray’s] “Ode on Spring” has something poetical, both in language and the
thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and the thoughts have nothing new.’
Though, by the end of the preface, he consented that ‘to say that Gray has no
beauties would be unjust…he could not but produce something valuable’.49
Samuel Johnson’s works have been a never-ending source of information,
advice, opinions and views. For generation after generation they have provided
intimate personal reflections and philosophical ideas to debate. Johnson himself
was a born debater who enjoyed sharpening his wit against the opinions of others.
46
Clifford, Dictionary Johnson 97.
47
Boswell, The Life 384.
48
S. Johnson, ‘Prefaces, Biographical and Critical: Pope,’ The Major Works 752.
49
S. Johnson, ‘Prefaces: Gray,’ The Major Works 769.
17
3.3. Johnson’s Club
‘Fancy a number of distinguished men, among whom were Edmund Burke
and Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Colman and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sir
William Forbes, and Dean Barnard, James Warton and Edward Gibbon, hesitating
to approach Johnson, except in a round robin, like sailors to their captain, or boys
to their master!’50 Many of the eighteenth-century distinguished men belonged to
the Literary Club because they were Johnson’s admirers. Among the founding
members were Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, Thomas Percy, Bennet Langton
and others.
In fact, it was Joshua Reynolds who, in the winter of 1763-64, first
proposed to Johnson the idea of a club where the members would meet and
converse on regular basis. He probably did so to distract Johnson from his
returning melancholic waves and to help him keep his mind occupied among
challenging company. At first, the group was relatively small, counting only nine
members. They agreed to meet every Monday in London. But within a few years,
The Club became ‘very much sought after and was embraced with members of
diverse talents; all for the purpose of conversation’,51 but also for drinking and
dining. The Club was the space were competitive, often humorous, debates took
place, which many were recorded by Boswell:52
E.: I understand the hogshead of claret, which this society was favored
with by our friend the Dean, is nearly out; I think he should be written
to, to send another of the same kind. Let the request be made with a
happy ambiguity of expression, so that we may have the chance of
sending it also as a present.
Johnson: I am willing to offer my services as secretary on this occasion.
P.: As many as are for Dr. Johnson being secretary hold up your hands.
Boswell: He will be our dictator.
Johnson: No, the company is to dictate to me. I am only to write for wine;
and I am quite disinterested, as I drink none: I shall not be suspected of
having forged the application. I am no more than humble scribe.
50
James Macaulay, Doctor Johnson: His Life, Work and Table Talk (London: Fisher Unwin,
1884) 12. Google Book Search. 30 July 2013.
51
Bate, Samuel Johnson 366.
52
Boswell, The Life 441.
18
E: Then you shall prescribe.
Johnson: Were I your dictator you should have no wine. Wine is
dangerous and Rome was ruined by luxury…
The Club was still functioning in the eighteenth century, with members
such as Lord (James) Macaulay, William Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew
Arnold, and Thomas Huxley. Winston Churchill was interested in joining The
Club but his advance was refused—it was feared that he might be too
controversial a member. Therefore, in 1911, Churchill founded his own political
dining society named The Other Club,53 which set up its rules and membership,
and still has regular meetings in London.
3.4. Opinions and Practice
Johnson focused on a variety of topics (which are impossible to cover in
this work due to its length), involving matters of historical, scientific,
bibliographic, legal, educational, and political, about which he was highly
knowledgeable, and on which he often held strong views. He was concerned about
the power of the people, ethical problems, basic questions of individual liberty and
civic morality. He was always intent ‘on a larger design’, on universal principles.
This subchapter focuses on specific areas in which Johnson took unrelenting
interests— philosophy and religion, humanity, women and marriage. And, as
usual, he based these opinions on his personal experience, intuition and feelings.
3.4.1. Philosophy and Religion
Carl G. Jung warned that ‘there are times in the world’s history—and our
own time may be one of them—when good must stand aside, so that anything
destined to be better first appears in evil form. This shows how extremely
dangerous it is even to touch these problems, for evil can so easily slip in on the
plea that it is, potentially, the better’.54 Johnson was similarly aware of the thin
line between evil and good. This duality was the center of his religious struggle.
53
‘The Rules of The Other Club,’ 17 July 2013 <http://www.winstonchurchill.org>.
54
C.G. Jung, Psychological Reflections (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 231.
19
The problem of evil, as he tried to come to terms with it and ‘to turn his
aggressive protests inward rather than outward’,55 was one of the triggers of his
psychological distress during his fifties. In his famous review (1757) of Soame
Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil his bitterness became
open. Jenyns presented the old optimistic argument that evil is an inevitable part
of life that helps good to shine out by contrast. Johnson did not like this attempt to
excuse the evils of life. Jenyns imagined ‘superior beings’ who could watch the
mankind and its struggles as the humans do towards the animals. Johnson
developed the analogy even further: and says Jenyns might have carried the
argument further:56
He might have shown that these hunters whose game is man have many
sports analogous to our own. As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse
themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and stand around the fields of
Blenheim or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cock-pit. As we shoot a
bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or pleasure, and
knock him down with an apoplexy.
Johnson belonged to the Church of England but he was very broad-minded
towards other religions. What he always stressed the most was self-criticism, selfawareness and moral attitude; and he warned that ‘to be of no church is
dangerous’.
This self-responsibility led him to another struggle. He knew that he often
became impatient at ‘publick worship’ and that he relied on private devotion,
particularly prayer. Yet, he stressed the importance of organized and communal
worship. Public worship was thus counter to his habit of ‘managing his own
mind’. He once admitted to Boswell that he ‘went more frequently to church when
there were prayers only than when there was also a sermon’. The reason for this,
he added, was that people generally ‘required more an example’ and that ‘it was
much easier for them to hear a sermon, then to fix their minds on prayers’.57 Bate
argues that to someone who thought about religion and human life as much as
Johnson did, most sermons at church could be viewed as an insult to the intellect,
distracting him from his habit to answer his own inner objections and settle his
55
Bate, Samuel Johnson 450.
56
David Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2009) 168.
57
Boswell, The Life 547.
20
mind—it could have been the source of his impatience. Due to this individualism
and interiority, Bate identified Johnson as an example of a man in modern times
who made ‘the transition to the modern inwardness of the religious life and the
problems of elusiveness and self-doubt that attended it’.58 Johnson, aware of his
neglect of public worship, said that he ‘will once more form a scheme of life for
that days such as alas I have often vainly formed which, when my mind is capable
of settled practice, I hope to follow [here at least the first four points]’:59
1. To rise early and in order to it to go to sleep early on Saturday
2. To use some extraordinary devotion in the morning
3. To examine the tenor of my life and particularly the last week and to
mark my advances in religion or recession from it
4. To go to church twice
Johnson also wrote down a prayer ‘On the Study of Philosophy, as an
Instrument of Living’:60
O Lord, who hast ordained labour to be the lot of man, and seest the
necessities of all thy creatures, bless my studies and endevours; feed me
with food convenient for me; and if it shall be thy good pleasure to
instruct me with plenty, give me a compassionate heart, that I may be
ready to relieve the wants of others; let neither poverty nor riches
estrange my heart from Thee, but assist me with thy grace so to live as
that I may die in thy favour.
His psychological complication was ‘the surprising anger that he could
suddenly shoot to anyone who denied—or might not even fully admit—the radical
unhappiness of human life. It could be almost brutal in its heady suddenness’,61
but he gradually learned to ease it for himself and others by humor and wit. Yet,
given that he could easily get so angry, only shows the frustration he tried to
overcome.
58
Bate, Samuel Johnson 455.
59
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 56.
60
ibid. 58.
61
Bate, Samuel Johnson 374.
21
3.4.2. Humanity
Johnson found one way to sublime evil into good, at least in his immediate
surroundings. He was known for his humanitarian streak directed towards the
needs of others; this attitude (and practice) often turned his own life upside down.
He was well aware of the difficulties of those who made a living from their
writings. As Macaulay pointed out, ‘All that is squalid and miserable might now
be summed up in the word Poet…even the poorest pitied him; they well might
pity him. To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs, to dine in a cellar among
footmen out of a place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to
be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from
Grub Street to St George’s Fields, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish
vaults was the fate of more than one writer…’62 Grub Street was inhabited by
printers and booksellers, who found it convenient to concentrate in one
neighborhood. Johnson lived in this underworld, he shared its life, and some of its
most picturesque and wretched inhabitants were his associates and friends who
were often living in his households. Among the inhabitants of his house were:
Richard Savage (a poet and convicted murderer), Anna Williams (a writer turned
housekeeper; she was almost blind), Francis ‘Frank’ Barber (a former black slave
turned manservant), Elizabeth Desmoulins (a daughter of Michael Johnson’s
surgeon; and Tetty’s companion), Poll Carmichael (a prostitute), Robert Levet
(one-time a Parisian waiter; later ‘an obscure practiser in physick amongst the
lower people’63), etc. Often all these people had nothing in common except that
they were poor and all quarrelsome, ‘drifting into Johnson’s life by one route or
another, and staying there because—excellent reason!—he could not imagine how
else they could be provided for’.64 But the scene was not always black. Though
the household was rather gloomy, he took genuine pleasure in Levet’s company:
‘The two men breakfasted together and this made Johnson’s habitual point of
departure for the day. Anna Williams had too a well-stocked and lively mind
which went far to compensate for her fiery temper’.65 He never looked down on
62
Macaulay, Doctor Johnson 219.
63
Boswell, The Life 541.
64
Wain, Samuel Johnson 266.
65
ibid. 267.
22
unfortunate people who ‘snatched at immediate pleasure to make their lives
tolerable’.66 For example, nothing could irritate him more than the opinion that it
was a mistake to give money to beggars because they only spent it on drink.
According to him, ‘Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without
gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed
to show even visible displeasure if even the bitter taste is taken from their
mouths’.67
He went against the views of upper class society for whom being poor
meant a shelter from many annoyances that swoop on the rich; being ill was to
know certain kinds of enjoyment denied to those who were well; being foolish—
or even mad—could be quite pleasant when seen from the inside; that ignorance
was a positive advantage in people born to low station because the poor were
made comfortable by ignorance, and they should not be robbed of it. Johnsons
dealt with these points in his own way:
On poverty:
In that sense almost every man may be poor. But there is another poverty
which is want of competence, of all that can soften the miseries of life, of
all that can diversify attention or delight imagination. There is yet
another poverty which is want of necessaries, a species of poverty which
no care of the public, no charity of particulars, can preserve many from
feeling openly, and many secretly.68
Life must be seen before it can be known. The poor indeed are insensible
of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and
pollute the enjoyments of the rich. They are not pained by casual
incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this
happiness is like that of a malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that
bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.69
On the happiness of madmen:
As the case is not very frequent, it is not necessary to raise a disquisition,
but I cannot forbear to observe that I never yet knew disorders of mind
66
Bate, Samuel Johnson 103.
67
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 109.
68
ibid. 115.
69
ibid. 120.
23
increase felicity: every madman is either arrogant and irascible, or
gloomy and suspicious, or possessed by some passion or notion
destructive to his quiet. He has always discontent in his look, and
malignity in his bosom. And, if we had the power of choice, he would
soon repent who should resign his reason to secure his peace.70
Johnson was very aware of the suffering that went on around him. His
patient care for his fellows was an instinctive answer for need within him. He
enjoyed the financial independence and the comfort of living, he accepted the
advantages which his fame brought him. But poverty, illness and misfortune were
to him ‘basic facts of life, and he felt saner and stronger as long as he kept
bedrock facts well in sight’.71 Thus, his help extended from the young men for
whom he tried to get jobs, and the needy writers for whom he wrote prefaces and
dedications, to the prostitute he found crouching in a doorway and who he ‘slung
across his shoulders and carried home and nursed back to health’.72 To all of them
Johnson gave his time, energy and money. But it is true that as his dependants
needed him, he also needed them.
3.4.3. Women and Marriage
Johnson liked women. He enjoyed arguing with an intelligent woman quite
as much as with an intelligent man. According to Wain, ‘Johnson, like many
roughly masculine men, had a strong feminine streak in his nature, and this made
him at ease with women, and able to see their point of view’.73 Intelligence, at
least in those he loved, was never a quality he found essential. But, if he came
across it, it was not unnoticed.
Many of his female friends belonged to a little group of learned women,
known as ‘the literary ladies’ or ‘The Bas Bleu Ladies’.74 The Bas Bleu—the
Bluestockings—was established in the 1750s by Mrs Montagu, but the group had
70
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 121.
71
Bate, Samuel Johnson 267.
72
ibid. 502.
73
Wain, Samuel Johnson 169.
74
Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2006) 303.
24
no single leader or unified concept. The purpose was to emphasize education and
cooperation of women, to lead discussions about literature and art, and to invite
notable personalities for conversations. They shared contempt for card-playing.
The name probably came from the azure stockings worn by Madame de Polignac
when she visited Mrs Montagu’s drawing-room. Some of the members, and
visitors, included Frances Burney, Catherine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Mary
Delaney, Sarah Fielding, Hannah More, Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, Hester
Thrale, and Anna Williams. Many were writing and publishing books, as was
Mary Wollstonecraft, the great writer, philosopher, feminist and advocate of
women’s rights.
Wollstonecraft met Samuel Johnson only once but they made a deep
impression on each other. William Godwin, her husband, wrote about their
meeting, ‘the Doctor treated her with particular kindness and attention, had a long
conversation with her and desired her to repeat her visit often’.75 Wollstonecraft
agreed but before there could be more visits, he had fallen seriously ill. Thus she
was one of the last women who entered Johnson’s magic circle. Unfortunately, he
did not live to read and discuss her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792).
Johnson had a sympathetic regard for women who laid no claim to virtue.
Sometimes he would amuse the virtuous women, such was Fanny Burney, with
anecdotes about the vicious:76
Johnson: Oh, Bet Flint was a fine character, madam! She was habitually a
slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot.
Fanny: And, for heaven’s sake, how came you to know her?
Johnson: Why, madam, she figured in the literary world, too!
Similarly, he also spoke of marriage in a way that could have left a wife a
little uneasy if she had been present. Of another man’s second marriage Johnson
declared that ‘it represented the triumph of hope over experience’.77 Boswell said,
‘When a gentleman talked to [Johnson] of a lady he greatly admired and wished to
marry, but was afraid of her superiority of talents, Johnson replied, “You need not
75
Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003) 41.
76
Quennell, Samuel Johnson 164.
77
Bate, Samuel Johnson 149.
25
be afraid; marry her. Before a year goes about, you’ll find that reason much
weaker, and that wit not so bright”’:78
Boswell: ‘Then, Sir, you are not of opinion with some who imagine that
certain men and certain women are made for each other…’
Johnson: ‘…[M]arriages would in general be as happy, and often more
so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due
consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties
having any choice in the matter’.
Johnson regarded marriage as frequently the cause of misery. In The
Rambler No. 1879 he pointed out that ‘both sexes have the equal power to either
established happiness or unhappiness’, that ‘married persons are not very often
advanced in felicity’ and that ‘marriage fails to obtain happiness, for want of
considering that marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship; that there can
be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity’. But in
Rasselas he lighted the matter up a little when he said, ‘Marriage has many pains,
but celibacy no pleasures’.
4.
Loves and Friendships
Johnson was married only once but, as other anecdotes from his life
proved, the marriage was an unusual one. When Johnson had been about ten years
old, he visited his uncle in Birmingham. A short distance away from his uncle’s
house was a shop where Harry Porter, his wife Elizabeth and their three children
lived. It is interesting to speculate that Johnson, then a small boy, and Elizabeth
Porter, a mature woman of thirty, might have passed each other on the street
without knowing that sixteen years later they were to be husband and wife.
When Johnson left Oxford in 1729, he tried to make a living as a teacher.
He was still quite poor. After his father’s death in 1731, he inherited a nearly
bankrupt business and his mother and younger brother to take care of. While still
visiting his relatives in Birmingham, he finally encountered Elizabeth, called
Tetty, and fell deep in love.
78
Boswell, The Life 562.
79
S. Johnson, ‘The Rambler No.18, Samuel Johnson: The Major Works 179–183.
26
‘Though Mrs Porter was double the age of Johnson, […] she must have
had a superiority of understanding and talents,’ Boswell said.80 Johnson did not
want obedience. He did not like ladies who were soft and ‘sleepy-souled’, or did
not envy any husband with a clinging, ‘honeysuckle’ wife. He admired Tetty’s
forceful intelligence and wit. Lucy, Tetty’s eldest daughter, reported that her
mother ‘was so engaged by Johnson’s conversation that she overlooked all these
disadvantages, and said, “This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my
life”’.81 Though one account described her as a woman of ‘unbecoming excess of
girlish levity and disgusting affectation’, the only surviving portrait shows her as
an attractive young woman. As a tolerably good-looking woman with money, she
found Johnson appealing (as other women did), and yet she could not have known
that one day he would be famous. It seems the attraction was mutual and
genuine.82 But her family and friends were horrified and her older son refused to
see his mother again. Yet, ten months after the death of Harry Porter, the couple
married on 8th July, 1735.
With Tetty’s personal fortune, Johnson— as previously mentioned—set up
a school of his own in Edial where he tried to be a teacher and where one of his
three students was the future actor David Garrick, who was to reign in London
theatre stages. Unfortunately, the school did not last long nor did the money.
Once the school failed, the money left was just enough to allow Johnson
and Tetty to move to London. There he met Richard Savage, a poet,
conversationalist and disreputable sponger. The friendship with Savage, which
reinforced Johnson’s indolence and other bad habits, caused a temporary
separation from Tetty. Refusing to live on her money, Johnson left and was
rambling streets with Savage, eating in inns if their budget allowed them to do so,
and sleeping in ‘night cellars’.83 This lifestyle of his provoked resentment in Tetty.
She also was showing open jealousy as a response to Johnson’s flirtations with
80
Boswell, The Life 27.
81
Quennell, Samuel Johnson 29.
82
James Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York: Oxford UP, 1961) 153.
83
Richard Holmes, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (New York: Vintage, 1994) 137.
27
‘ladies of beauty and intelligence’, like Molly Aston about whom Johnson said,
‘She was the loveliest creature I ever saw!’84
In these years Tetty’s health began to deteriorate. She was increasingly
turning to drink, hypochondria and occasionally medically prescribed laudanum—
opium mixed with alcohol. The combination set a vicious circle in motion. She
spent most of her time in London ill. With no friends of her own and her
remaining money melting away, she still tried to keep her good humor and repress
her disappointment. She often stayed indoors, reading romances in her bed. 85 In
1752 she decided to return to the countryside while Johnson stayed in the city
working on his Dictionary. But that does not mean that Johnson stopped caring for
her—he joined her whenever he could: ‘Johnson proved a most affectionate and
indulgent husband to the last moments of Mrs Johnson’s life […], his regard and
fondness for her never ceased, even after her death’.86 She died on 17 March
1752. Johnson felt guilty about the poverty in which he believed he had forced
Tetty to live, and blamed himself for neglecting her.87 After her death, he was
again surrounded by loneliness. He lived a life of inns and taverns, of journeys
and visits. At the same time, he filled his empty rooms with picturesque homeless
characters so that his life appeared to have some purpose. But he was still alone
and stayed so until he met the Thrales in 1765.
Johnson’s friend Arthur Murphy (‘Dear Mur’) introduced Johnson to
Henry and Hester Thrale when he was invited to ‘a delicious dinner and a flow of
good talk’. Soon after that he became almost a constant presence in their house in
Streatham Place where he even had his own rooms. Henry Thrale was a Member
of Parliament and a son of a rich brewer, and Hester Thrale was a charmer,
diplomatist, and what today would be called a socialite. She hosted renowned
friends, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, the king of the eighteenth-century English
painting. A popular portraitist and the first president of the Royal Academy of
Arts, Reynolds was also the artist who, eighty years later, was ridiculed by the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and nicknamed Sir Sloshua.
84
Quennell, Samuel Johnson 141.
85
Bate, Samuel Johnson236.
86
Boswell, The Life 28.
87
Wain, Samuel Johnson 169.
28
On the recommendation of Johnson, Mrs Thrale kept a form of diary, a
book of anecdotes, where she wrote down ‘all the observations [she] might make
or hear’. She filled it over next three decades and the result was a sort of
autobiography, known as Thraliana, with vivid writing. She described Johnson
with his gifts and oddities, saying that ‘his influence had transformed [her] whole
life’. She was not uncritical; she admitted that ‘being a friend of Johnson was now
and then a painful privilege’.88 His attachment was passionate and possessive as
well as romantic and paternal. She was his confidante. The polite English society
did not suspect that there might be a darker side to their friendship: Though she
respected Johnson, from her diaries came out that she sometimes chained and beat
him, at his own request.89 Thus, it seems, Johnson was not only the first great
English lexicographer but also a pioneer of sadomasochism. In any case, he found
himself quickly in love again. Now, a part of every week he spent with his ‘new
family’, the Thrales, and the rest with friends in taverns and at dinner parties.
When Henry Thrale died in 1781, Johnson hoped to marry Mrs Thrale, but
instead, she married Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian adventurer and a music master.
Though she did not forget Johnson, still regarding him her dear friend, she became
a bit exasperated by his oddities and sometimes offensive table talks which
evidently worsened with age.
As he grew into his seventies, Johnson’s idea of misery was to sit alone,
his greatest happiness to join his friends. Through his friends he exercised his
genius and some he taught to live, work and think.
5.
Impacts He Made
One of those who Johnson influenced directly was Joshua Reynolds. He
claimed that ‘No man had, like [Johnson], the faculty of teaching inferior minds
the art of thinking. Perhaps other men might have equal knowledge, but few were
so communicative. The observations that he made on poetry, on life, and every
thing about us, I applied to our art’.90 Another ‘pupil’ was Sir William Weller
88
Quennell, Samuel Johnson 83.
89
Bate, Samuel Johnson 386.
90
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 231.
29
Pepys. In his letters to Mrs Montagu (1781) he wrote: ‘I met Johnson some time
ago at Streatham, and such a day did we pass in disputation upon the Life [the
biography of Lord Lyttleton by Johnson], as I trust it will never be my fate to pass
again. [Johnson] observed that it was the duty of a biographer to state not only the
success but also all the failings of a respectable character…’91At that time Johnson
had no idea that one day he himself was to become the main subject of a similar
biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which immortalized and preserved
him for the future generations.
5.1. James Boswell: I Am Fond of Tea
On the morning of 16th May, 1763, Johnson probably woke up, sipped his
tea and vaguely thought what to do that day. Somewhere else in London, a
twenty-two-years old Scot from Edinburgh similarly could not know how an
important day lay ahead. ‘Jamie’ Boswell (1740–1795) had come to London the
previous November. He hoped to make a career in the military but under the
pressure of his father, he had studied law. What interested Boswell most was
‘describing whatever happened to [him] with vivid and dramatic skill’.92 This
habit had already evolved into writing journals—his most famous was London
Journal 1762-1763. He particularly delighted in recording colorful phrases from
the conversations of various people he met. He had a habit of jotting down what
he intended to do that day. The entry for the 16th May read: ‘Breakfast neat today,
toast, rolls, and butter, easily and not too laughable. Keep plan in mind and be in
earnest […]’.93 There was no mention that he was going to have tea with Tom
Davies, a bookseller, in his shop in Covent Garden. Johnson often dropped into
this shop for a talk, as he did this day. Later on, Boswell described the meeting:94
I drank tea at Davies’s […], and about seven came in the great Mr
Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. […]. As I knew his
moral antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come
91
Hill, ed. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, 417.
92
Clifford, Dictionary Johnson 308.
93
Boswell, London Journals: 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004)
264.
94
Boswell, The Life 140.
30
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’. […]. I shall
mark what I remember of his conversation.
And surely he did. Increasingly, Boswell found his new relationship
entertaining and absorbing. He visited Johnson at home a few days later. They
talked freely. Boswell reported, ‘As I took my leave, he shook me warmly by the
hand’. In June, Johnson said, ‘I have taken a liking to you’. In July, ‘My dear
Boswell, I do love you very much’. By the end of the month they were ready to
travel together.
They both shared a fondness for travel. In fact, Johnson considered it a
man’s duty to share with others the discoveries that he had made while on the
road. He became very exasperated with anyone who came back from wandering
with his ‘empty basket empty’. Once, he got irritated by a man who had visited
Prague: ‘Surely, the man who has been in Prague might tell us something new and
something strange, and not sit silent!’95 In 1773 Johnson and Boswell set out
together for a journey to the Hebrides. They returned with their baskets full and
offered its contents to readers in the shape of two books: Johnson’s Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides (1785). In Boswell’s Journal is a record of a sunny period in both their
lives; there is also an account of a meeting with Flora Macdonald, the lady who in
the disguise of a pageboy had played a crucial part in the escape of Prince Charles
Edward (known as Bonnie Prince or the Young Pretender) after the defeat of
Culloden in 1745:96
(On Monday 13th September, 1773)
At supper appeared the lady of the house, the celebrated Miss Flora
Macdonald. She is a little woman, of a genteel appearance, and
uncommonly mild and well bred. To see Dr Samuel Johnson, the great
champion of the English Tories, salute [her] in the isle of Sky, was a
striking sight for […] it was very improbably they should meet here.
95
Wain, Samuel Johnson 318.
96
Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (London: Penguin, 1984) 246.
31
Before the trip, Boswell had already decided to write the book about
Johnson (with dedication to Joshua Reynolds) and thus the journey helped him to
spend extra time with him and gather invaluable information.
Like Johnson, Boswell was a character of his own peculiarities and
eccentricities which might have helped the mutual attraction. He interviewed
dying people, asking how it felt to be dying. He often asked whether or not they
thought there is an afterlife. He attended public hangings in London, first
interviewing the condemned, then studying his corpse. He added death to his list
of obsessions, which also included lust (he seemed to contract venereal diseases as
if they were colds), drinking (he and his friends were able to consume two bottles
of port apiece in a single evening), and life as a wild emotional rollercoaster (‘I
was quite sunk. I had not even hope of happiness. I was in dreary hypochondria’).
Fanny Burney described Boswell this way:97
He spoke the Scotch accent strongly, though by no means so as to affect,
even slightly, his intelligibility to an English ear. He had an odd mock
solemnity of tone and manner that he had acquired imperceptibly from
constantly thinking of and imitating Dr Johnson. […]. There was, also,
something slouching in the gait and dress of Mr Boswell. […]. His clothes
were always too large for him, his hair, or wig, was constantly in a state
of negligence, and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a
chair.
Boswell was thirty years younger than Johnson. This gap could have been
merely generational but in their case, it also reflected ‘the seismic cracks in the
historical surface’. Wain points out that Boswell was a new man in Johnson’s
world. Where Johnson still belonged to the world of Aristotle and Augustus,
Boswell inhabited the ruins of that world. Their dialogues of mind and heart
recorded in The Life of Samuel Johnson are dialogues between two epochs—
‘Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered’.98 Boswell’s
account of how they parted for the last time in June 1784 is deeply moving:99
I accompanied him in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ coach […]. He asked me
whether I would not go to his house; I declined it from an apprehension
97
Whitney Balliet, ‘Getting on,’ The New Yorker 28 Dec 2001: 75.
98
Wain, Samuel Johnson 229.
99
Boswell, The Life 602.
32
that my spirits would sink. We bade adieu to each other affectionately in
the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement, he called
out, ‘Fare you well’; and without looking back, sprung away with a kind
of pathetick briskness…which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal
uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long
separation.
Everyone interested in Johnson is in debt to Boswell for his study of
Johnson and for the skill with which he grasped the quality of Johnson’s
personality and his effect on the people around him. That Johnson became a wellknown figure is due to Boswell.
Johnson created a moral and literary framework that in the beginning of
the nineteenth century influenced writers such as Jane Austen, whose social
comedies depended on Johnson’s principles. In the twentieth century Johnson still
remained the model of the archetypical thinker, as well as a man of letters. Samuel
Beckett was obsessed for years with Johnson’s pessimism.100 He even wrote a
play about him. Unfortunately, he finished only the first act—typical of Beckett—
which Johnson might have appreciated.
5.2. Jane Austen: Common Sense and Sensibility
When Johnson died in 1784, Jane Austen (1775–1817) was nine-years old.
They never met in person but they met in pages—Austen was influenced by him
in her writing style, often quoting him in her novels. She read and admired his
periodical essays in The Rambler, The Idler and The Adventurer, the philosophical
tale Rasselas, the prefaces for The Lives of the Poets, as well as the famous
biographies by Boswell and Mrs Thrale. Austen considered Johnson to be her
‘favourite author in prose’, and in her letters she referred to ‘my dear Dr Johnson’
or ‘my dear Mrs Piozzi [Mrs Thrale]’ to indicate more than just a preference.101
Her references suggested intimacy, respect and affection for Johnson. She agreed
100
Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (New York: Basic Books, 2008) 446.
101
Gloria Gross, ‘Mentoring Jane Austen: Reflections of “My Dear Johnson,”’ Persuasion: Jane
Austen Journal, 1989, 16 July 2013
<http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number11/gross.htm>.
33
with his ideas about the ‘relationship of manners and morals, and assumptions
about the nature of love and the qualities which make for a happy marriage’.102
The rivalry, divisions, and estrangement that Johnson describes in
domestic life are echoed in Austen’s novels whose heroines pursue satisfaction
and individuality within marriage and society. They often are caught in helpless
positions and in the dynamics of family life. Their fathers are either physically
absent or absent-minded, or they unintentionally drop deprecating remarks to their
daughters (as in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth is asked to see her father
who wants to share the ‘joke’ of Darcy’s alleged attraction to her:103 ‘Let me
congratulate you, on a very important conquest. […]. Mr Darcy, who never looks
at any woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his
life! It is admirable!’). The heroines’ mothers are slightly hysterical or childish.104
The heroines themselves are vulnerable, isolated (with strong bonds to at least one
of their sisters), in need of money, and with many hopes and ideals for their
future—in the end everything is a bit different than they thought. This reflects
Johnson’s message in the poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’.
In Mansfield Park (1814) Johnson is both a moral touchstone and a source
of wit. Edmund Bertram, the serious clergyman who is endowed with Johnson’s
common sense and moral concerns, offers his cousin Fanny Price, the solemn
heroine, copies of ‘Crabbe’s Tales, and The Idler’.105 Later in the novel, when
Fanny returns after many years of living with her cousins in Mansfield to her
home in Portsmouth, where she was born, she describes the conditions in both
houses. Mansfield as an oasis of calm and respect as opposed to Portsmouth:106
At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt burst,
no tread of violence, was ever heard; […]; everybody had their due
importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted. […]. At [Portsmouth]
everybody was noisy, every voice was loud, […]. Nobody could command
attention when they speak. In a review of the two houses, as they
102
Meyers, The Struggle 447.
103
Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ The Complete Novels, ed. Claire Booss (New York: Dorset
Press, 1994) 358.
104
Gross, ‘Mentoring Jane Austen,’ Persuasion: Jane Austen Journal. Web.
105
Meyers, The Struggle 448.
106
Austen, ‘Mansfield Park,’ The Complete Novels 544.
34
appeared to her before the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to
them Johnson’s celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and
say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth
could have no pleasures.
In Northanger Abbey (1818) Austen gently satirizes the way people
deferred to Johnson’s judgments. Eleanor Tilney, advising Catherine Morland
about how to please her brother, warns her that he will invoke Johnson’s
Dictionary as the absolute authority on usage:107
[D]o not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?’ asked Miss
Morland.
‘The nicest; by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend
upon the binding,’ said Henry.
‘[…]. Miss Morland,’ said Miss Tilney, ‘he is treating you exactly as he
does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me for some incorrectness
of language, […]. The word “nicest”, as you used it, did not suit him; and
you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered
by Johnson and Blair [eighteenth century professor of rhetoric at
Edinburgh University] all the rest of the way’.
In Pride and Prejudice (1813) Austen also imitates Johnson. In The
Rambler No. 115 Johnson’s young narrator says, ‘I was known to possess a
fortune, and to want a wife’. Austen’s most celebrated sentence in the beginning
of the novel is an adaptation of this line: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,
that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’.108
In The Rambler No. 34, Johnson said that he was censured for having
dedicated so few of his speculations to the ladies and he acknowledged a fault:
‘…[M]asculine duties afford more room for counsels and observations, as they are
less uniform, […]; we therefore find that in philosophical discourses […], or
historical narratives […], the peculiar virtues or faults of women fill but a small
part.’ As Tave observes in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations,109 ‘There
would seem to be an opportunity here for the novelist, but there is still the
107
Austen, ‘Northanger Abbey,’ The Complete Novels 862.
108
Meyers, The Struggle 448.
109
Stuart M. Tave, ‘Anne Elliot, Whose Word Had No Weight,’ Bloom’s Modern Critical
Interpretations: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 2004) 30.
35
problem of the lesser room afforded by feminine duties in a duller and unvaried
life. ‘We live at home, quiet, confined,’ Anne Elliot says to Captain Harville in
Persuasion (1818). ‘You are forced on exertion’.110
Austen paid tribute to Johnson in her poem ‘To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy
Who Died on Dec:r 16—My Birthday’:111
[…]
At Johnson’s death by Hamilton t’was said,
‘Seek we a substitute’—Ah! Vain the plan,
No second best remains to Johnson dead–
None can remind us even of the Man.
[…]
Both Johnson and Austen were acutely aware of the corrosiveness of
hopes and disappointments, and the dangers of and anxieties about the ‘vacuities
of recluse and domestick leisure’ (The Rambler No. 85). Thus, they can be
recognized as writers who were pointing out women’s problems and confinement
in their changeless neighborhoods, and who were encouraging them to rely on
their feelings and reason to develop their strength.
5.3. Samuel Beckett: I Regret Everything
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), like Boswell, also spent lots of time by bed
of the dying whom he interviewed. It is a peculiar thing to do and surely an
evidence of an intriguing and fascinating behavior—some people may say absurd.
In any rate, it seems he would have fit well into Johnson’s circle.
Beckett strongly identified with the figure of Samuel Johnson, his
namesake, and even made a pilgrimage to Lichfield. But Beckett used ’Johnson’s
religious doubt, his melancholy and fits of insanity to emphasize his own sense of
futility’.112 Like Johnson, Beckett often sank into stupor and spent half the day in
bed. Like Johnson, Beckett was a late bloomer. They shared the same pessimistic
110
Austen, ‘Persuasion,’ The Complete Novels 902.
111
Jane Austen, ‘To the memory of Mrs Lefroy who died on Dec:r 16—My Birthday,’ Jane
Austen Society of North America. 16 July 2013
<http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/tothememory/austenpoem.htm>.
112
Meyers, The Struggle 454.
36
worldview. In Rasselas is a reflection on human life saying that there is ‘much to
be endured, and little to be enjoyed’, which is very close to Beckett’s bleak
outlook. The last chapter of Rasselas, ‘The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is
Concluded’, appealed to Beckett’s nihilism. He called Rasselas ‘a grand book’.113
But they also shared an incredible erudition.
In 1937 Beckett planned to write a play about Johnson and read many
books by and about him in Trinity College, Dublin. His three manuscript
notebooks emphasize Johnson’s dark side. His principal source was Johnson’s
Prayers and Meditation (1785), which revealed his morbid ‘obsession with mental
and physical deterioration’, ‘with melancholy, madness and death’.114 According
to Bair, Beckett’s biographer, Beckett said, ‘It’s Johnson, always Johnson, who is
with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his’. Bair added that ‘Beckett’s
original idea was to write the play in four acts and call it Human Wishes, after
Johnson’s poem. He intended to explain Johnson’s esteem for the “imbecile Mr.
Thrale” by concentrating on Mrs Thrale’s relationship to the mature Johnson, and
his obsessive, unspoken love for her’.115 Beckett’s drama is famous for its
elliptical style and usage of many polysyllabic words but it also shows certain
fondness of ‘Latinate roots and philosophic diction’.116 Beckett, like Jane Austen,
was fascinated by Johnson’s Dictionary.
He was quite frank about his interest in Johnson with Mary Manning (a
playwright herself) and they frequently saw each other. He discussed the theme of
his planed play with her without any reservation and she was afterwards
associated with Mrs Thrale in his mind, ‘to such an extent that he sometimes
referred to her as “the Swan of Streatham”’.117
The only surviving part of the play is the beginning. Beckett was still a
long way from his mature dramatic period, but in its spareness and economy, its
use of pauses, silences and repetitions, the fragment that remains is still
recognizably by the author of Waiting for Godot (1953).
113
Meyers, The Struggle 461.
114
ibid, 455.
115
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1990) 396.
116
Meyers, The Struggle 460.
117
Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997) 255.
37
The scene is a room in Bolt Court where Mrs Desmoulins, Mrs Williams
and Miss Carmichael are sitting. Mrs Desmoulins is knitting, Poll Carmichael
reading and Mrs Williams meditating. The stage direction says that Johnson’s cat
Hodge, being on stage, is sleeping (if possible). Johnson himself does not
appear:118
Mrs D.
He is late.
Silence
Mrs D.
God grant all is well.
Silence
Mrs D.
Puss puss puss puss puss.
Mrs W.
What are you reading, young woman?
Miss C.
A book, Madam.
Mrs W.
Ha!
Silence
The absurdity of the snippet comes out when the facts are taken into
account. The chemistry among Mrs Desmoulins, Mrs Williams and Miss
Carmichael was explosive. They quarreled almost constantly. As Johnson wrote to
Mrs Thrale, ‘Williams hates everybody. Levet hates Desmoulins and does not
love Williams. Poll loves none of them’. ‘Often he was afraid of going home’,
said Mrs Thrale, ‘because he was sure to be met at the door with numberless
complaints…every favour he bestowed on one was wormwood to the rest’.119
Beckett was dissatisfied with the fragment because he was ‘incapable of
putting it into the Irish accent as well as the proper language, after the manner of
Boswell, while all the other characters speak only the impossible jargon I put into
their mouths’.120 But there was probably another reason for giving it up.
According to Meyers, another critic noted that ‘the more of Johnson he recorded
in his notebooks, the more preposterous was the amatory scenario that initially
impelled his interest’.121 Beckett did not mention Human Wishes to his official
bibliographer, grew impatient when Bair tried to discuss it with him, refused to let
118
Cronin, The Last Modernist 256.
119
Bate, Samuel Johnson 503.
120
Cronin, The Last Modernist 260.
121
Meyers, The Struggle 454.
38
his American director read it and finally gave the manuscript to a scholar, saying
‘he was glad to be rid of it’.122
Samuel Beckett, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, read
all of Johnson works and he continued to be faithful to him throughout his life.
6.
His Presence in the Present
In our times, unfortunately, Johnson’s name is not a household name.
There are many biographies about Johnson (the most notorious one by Boswell)
and even more reviews of the biographies in various magazines and newspapers.
There are many articles about Johnson’s works. Several societies are dedicated to
him (such as the Johnson Society of London). There are also novels based on him
(for example, in 2001 Beryl Bainbridge published a novel called According to
Queeney, a fiction about Mrs Thrale’s daughter and her views on Johnson while
he was living under her family’s roof). At best, readers rather read about him than
read him. Today, Johnson’s poetry and essays are almost exclusively the domain
of the specialist. There is no denying that some of his sentences are wordy and
ponderous; his syntax is quite dense for today’s readers. He also repeats himself
quite often (as in The Rambler). On the other hand, everyone can recognize the
great strength and dignity of his writing style. Here I would like to present several
possible reasons why Samuel Johnson has faded into obscurity for the general
public, and some possible ways to bring him back to the light he deserves.
Johnson, more than any other major figure of English literature, is better
known as a ‘personality’ than as the great writer he was, due to the difficulty of
access to the large collection of his writings.123 This is now slowly corrected by
several publications of his works (one is e.g. Samuel Johnson’s Major Works
edited by Donald Greene). But the editions are not complete and in any case they
are likely to be used by the scholars and students of English literature.
Literary historians and critics found Johnson’s essays different in tone, and
much weightier in thought than those in Addison’s Spectator, and they assumed
Johnson had ‘failed’ while trying to imitate Addison and other of his famous
122
Meyers, The Struggle 456.
123
Donald Greene, ed. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works 30.
39
contemporaries (like Jonathan Swift). That assumption could be still found in
school and college textbooks, and is repeated even by admirers of Johnson who
tend to think of him as ‘a sort of Dickensian character in the pages of Boswell’.124
Nevertheless, Bate argues that Johnson did something quite different in his
essays—he lifted the form into permanent universality in the tradition of wisdom
literature from the Greek aphorists to the Renaissance humanists. The view on
Johnson has shifted from a complex narrator to an aphorist known for his direct
short observations. This aphoristic power makes him still very quotable.
Even if Johnson’s name is recognizable in some households, they are
mainly the Anglo-American households—outside this culture he is generally
known only within the academic institutions focusing on the Anglo-American
studies. One of the reasons could be the lack of translations of his works.
Specifically, in the Czech Republic, there are no translations of Johnson, except
for the already mentioned aphoristic punch lines being translated here and there
throughout the internet or in magazines. I found one translation of a work that
distantly alludes to Johnson. It is a fantasy-detective series for children—The
Gates (2009), Hell’s Bells (2011) and The Creeps (2013)—written by John
Connolly and translated into Czech (except for the last title) by Jaroslava
Kočová,125 in which the child protagonist is named Samuel Johnson and his best
friend, a dachshund, is called Boswell. Aside from the names, there is no other
connection with Johnson.
Another reason why Johnson is not a ‘mainstream’ name could be his life
was not a very eventful one to make him a focus of romantic attention. In contrast,
Percy Bysshe Shelley still fascinates wide public by his incredibly dramatic life
and self-fulfilling prophecy of drowning, as does Oscar Wilde, celebrated not only
for his conversational and aphoristic skills but also for his dandyism,
homosexuality, imprisonment and eventually death in poverty and isolation.
What might bring Johnson back into spotlight for our society triggered
mainly by visual stimuli is a successful movie about him. There have been some
attempts made by BBC: one is Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary Man (2006), a
124
Bate, Samuel Johnson 294.
125
John Connolly, Brána do pekla (2011) a Pekelné zvony (2013), trans. by Jaroslava Kočová
(Praha: BB/art).
40
‘mock-documentary’, and the other is Boswell and Johnson’s Tour of the Western
Islands (1993), a TV film that does not follow the facts and subtly ironic
descriptions made by Boswell himself but—what a pity— invents its own rather
vulgar episodes. Both films are quite mundane. Given the immense popularity of
costume dramas and witty conversation romances in the style of Jane Austen’s
film adaptations or Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), it seems that the
potential audience for a film about Johnson is large. Surely, the main challenge
would be the precise casting for the role of Johnson who would carry the film
(how about somebody like Albert Finney?). Johnson is waiting for his rebirth, for
a person who realizes the potential and re-establishes him back in international
public mind. The rich garden of London where the notes are sent back and forth
and kept for one’s lifetime could be once again enlivened by Johnson in Love.
41
7.
Conclusion
The aim of the thesis was to present Samuel Johnson (1707–1784) as a
professional acclaimed writer of the eighteenth century in England and provide an
account of his works that are extremely rich in feelings, thoughts and opinions.
Though deeply serious, he brought a sense of humor and sharp wit to illuminate
his great subjects: the powerful claims of the individual conscience, the moral
struggle inherent in life, the misery in human existence, the sense of his own
imperfections, and the pains of religious belief.
Between 1748 and 1760 Johnson published his most important works. The
poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ recognizes the weight of human life that is
burdened with sufferings, passing time and unavoidable iniquities which might be
lightened with joy and hope. But finally all struggles are vain. In his periodical
essays published in The Rambler (and later in The Idler and The Adventurer) he
gives his thoughts about stoicism, sorrow, marriage, capital punishment, parental
tyranny, criticism along with the rules of writing and the limitations of human
achievement. The highly successful philosophical tale History of Rasselas, Prince
of Abyssinia presents the conviction that happiness cannot be reached (if at all) by
direct approach but rather by realizing what is one’s purpose in life and acting
upon this realization. Johnson’s fame and reputation were sealed by the
publication of his Dictionary of the English Language which was a fresh way to
collect the English lexicon and is still beneficial and enjoyable to read. Also this
work granted him degrees from College Trinity, Dublin, and from Oxford
University. One hundred and fifty years later, the dictionary became the
touchstone for creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Lives of the Poets,
the prefaces he wrote when he was in his seventies, are entertaining portraits of
his famous contemporaries Alexander Pope, Johns Milton, Thomas Gray and
others. He intended these accounts not only for poets and scholar but also for
common readers.
An eloquent debater, he surrounded himself in The Club with the most
distinguished men of London to dine, drink and have stimulating conversations on
a variety of topics on which he held strong views that he often presented in
humorous ways. He considered himself deeply religious and loyal to the Church
42
of England but he was also very respectful towards other religions and their
practices. Nevertheless, he was aware of the thin line between evil and good (that
evil could be disguised in goodness), and he experienced an inner division
between praying in solitude and in his own mind, which he preferred, and
attending public sermons. This tendency shows his interiority and individualism;
the transition to inwardness that was to be fully embraced by the next generations.
Johnson was a presence of compelling dimensions. He was deeply curious
about the world and its inhabitants, intensely concerned for the human condition
which he was able to dissect with his penetrating insight. The sheer number of
people he helped and the variety of ways in which he helped them easily entitle
him to be called one of the most benevolent men who ever lived, or at least, a
great humanist of his times. Though he opposed the Whigs, it would be false to
call him a pure conservative; he also opposed colonialism and every form of
exploitation: He detested the slave trade and proclaimed that any civilization is
tested in its treatment of the poor. He himself rooted his life among the poor and
outcast.
His table talks were recorded in intimate details in letters, journals, and
memoirs, and especially in the great James Boswell’s biography The Life of
Samuel Johnson. Boswell was able to capture Johnson in his everydayness due to
Boswell’s own intriguing character, memory and skills for capturing the quality of
his companion. They spent a good deal of time together in The Club, on travels
and at their homes. Johnson also influenced many future writers, such was Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Samuel Beckett; they all often
quoted him in their own works.
Yet, Johnson has never come into his rightful reputation. One reason could
be his syntactic density which for today’s readers is very hard to digest. Another
reason might be the limited access to his work, as much of it has only recently
started to be edited into collections. Moreover, outside the English-speaking world
he is virtually unknown. This is certainly due to the lack of translation of his
canon into other languages. Johnson’s reputation outside the academic world
could benefit from a modern and attractive presentation (e.g. a film adaptation)
which would re-introduce him to the wider public consciousness. This revival he
surely deserves for his thoughts and opinions are ageless.
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8.
Resumé
Cílem mé práce je představit Samuela Johnsona (1709–1784) jakožto jednoho
z prvních profesionálních spisovatelů 18. století, jenž dosáhl v Anglii ve své době
značného renomé. Johnson psal eseje, kritiky, životopisy, poezii, prózu a cestopisy.
Uvádím zde jeho nejznámější díla, v nichž se odráží bohatství jeho myšlenek, pocitů a
názorů. Určitá témata se u něj často opakovala, ať již se jednalo o sílu mravního
přesvědčení jedince, morální zápas neoddělitelně spjatý s rozhodováním, utrpení
v lidském životě, vědomí vlastní nedokonalosti či trýzeň v otázkách víry. Přesto
dokázal tato témata humorně odlehčit.
Vrcholem Johnsonovy tvorby bylo období mezi lety 1748 až 1760, kdy
vznikla jeho mistrovská díla: báseň „Marnost lidských přání“; cykly esejí na témata
zármutku, manželství či trestu smrti; filozofující příběh Princ Rasselas o hledání
lidského štěstí; Slovník jazyka anglického, jenž se stal prvním výkladovým anglickým
slovníkem, navíc s názornými příklady použití termínů v podobě citátů Shakespeara,
Miltona, Drydena a jiných; a Život básníků s kritickými předmluvami zaměřenými na
básníky Josepha Addisona, Alexandra Popa, Thomase Graye a další.
Johnson byl navíc také velice barvitou osobností, jež kolem sebe sdružovala
tehdejší nejvýznamější umělce, myslitele, politiky, šlechtice, ale také lidi v nouzi a
z nejnižších vrstev. Práce tedy rovněž popisuje nejen tyto vztahy, ale též vztahy
milostné, ať již naplněné či jen platonické.
Další důležitou částí této práce je pojednání o vlivu Johnsona na tvorbu autorů
v pozdějších staletích. Rozhodla jsem se analyzovat tři spisovatele – Jamese
Boswella, Jane Austenovou a Samuela Becketta – kteří, ač ve svých dílech a v
přístupu k životu rozdílní, mají společné jmenovatele právě Johnsona (u Becketta
doslovně) a smysl pro humor.
Zbývá zodpovědět otázku, proč tato fascinující mnohavrstevná osobnost,
přestože hojně citovaná, nefiguruje mnohem výrazněji v širším povědomí veřejnosti a
objevuje se spíše jen v úzce profilovaných anglistických vědeckých kruzích. Usuzuji,
že důvody jsou hutnost Johnsonovy větné skladby, jež je typická pro dobu osvícenství
(ale pro současné čtenáře hůře stravitelná); nedostatek překladů jeho děl (zajisté by to
byla výzva); jeho nedostatečně dramatické životní události, aby byly uchovány a
zlidověny (narozdíl od pozdějších romantiků). Přesto si Johnson zasluhuje větší
pozornost, jelikož jeho názory na mnohé palčivé i radostné lidské záležitosti a situace
jsou nadčasové.
44
9.
Annotation
Author:
Martina Tesařová
Faculty and department: Faculty of Arts, Department of English and American
Studies
Title:
The Times and Influence of Samuel Johnson
Thesis supervisor:
Mgr. Ema Jelínková, Ph.D.
The number of pages:
49
The number of characters: 86,195 (without spaces)
The number of annexes: 1CD
Key words:
Samuel Johnson, 18th Century, the Age of Reason in
England, James Boswell, Dictionary of English
Language, British Authors
Description:
This work presents Samuel Johnson as an influential eighteenth-century novelist,
poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, and lexicographer. Its focus is on
Johnson’s literary achievements. It analyzes his psychic and physical condition
that greatly affected his work and social relationships. The thesis also considers
the reasons why such a vivid, often quoted person (e.g. by Jane Austen and
Samuel Beckett), has been almost forgotten if not for the biography of his younger
contemporary James Boswell. The aim of this work, largely supported by the
above mentioned Boswell’s biographical masterpiece, is to justify Johnson’s
importance even for our present days.
45
10. Anotace
Autor:
Martina Tesařová
Název fakulty a katedry: Filozofická fakulta, Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Název práce:
Doba a vliv Samuela Johnsona
Vedoucí práce:
Mgr. Ema Jelínková, Ph.D.
Počet stran:
49
Počet znaků:
86,195 (bez mezer)
Počet příloh:
1 CD
Klíčová slova:
Samuel Johnson, 18. století, doba osvícenství v Anglii,
James Boswell, Slovník anglického jazyka, britští
autoři
Popis:
Tato práce představuje Samuela Johnsona jakožto vlivnou osobnost 18. století,
básníka, esejistu, literárního kritika, životopisce a lexikografa. Práce blíže zkoumá
jeho literární úspěchy, analyzuje jeho psychické a tělesné dispozice, jež značně
ovlivnily Johnsonovu tvorbu i sociální vztahy. Dále práce pátrá po důvodech, proč
tato barvitá a často citovaná osobnost (odkazují se na ni například spisovatelé Jane
Austenová a Samuel Beckett) upadla téměř v zapomnění, nebýt životopisu, který
o Johnsonovi napsal jeho blízký přítel James Boswell. Cílem této práce, jež se
opírá o zmiňovaný mistrovský životopis Boswella, je dokázat, že Johnsonovy
názory a myšlenky jsou aktuální i v dnešní době.
46
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