Tutorials were normally run in pairs, but we had an odd number in our group, and, by remaining tactically silent during the selection process, I managed to become the only person who got solo tuition that term. And so, from January to March, over eight weeks, I was privileged to choose the authors I wanted to study and to get dedicated time to discussing them with an expert. What else had I gone to study an English degree for? And naturally, I opted to spend two of those weeks on Samuel Johnson. I had read some of his work and was already hooked.

Johnson is, after Shakespeare, the major figure of English literature. Oh Milton and Chaucer and Spenser and Dryden and Wordsworth and whoever else will be claimed,—but no. No. Johnson wrote the dictionary, literally, in seven years, with only a handful of helpers. He was the first editor to restore the text of Shakespeare to its origins. (So many editors had decided they knew better than Shakespeare, and substituted his words.) And, he mastered several mediums: poetry, essays, moral tales, biography, literary criticism. Johnson is canonised in all of these.

He also wrote sermons, legal opinions, journalism, a play, was a Latin scholar, and excelled in conversation—so much so that the famous quotes of his that you read online are just as likely to be from his conversation as from his writings. No other literary figure can claim so much scope, accomplishment, or influence.

Reading Johnson, therefore, is a mighty task. I failed. Sure, I read a good chunk of the poetry, some of the Lives of the Poets, the essays; and I made a running jump at Boswell; I was absorbed by Rasselas. But I was so preoccupied by his prose style, I had to read it all again and again and again. Johnsonian prose opens with sub-clauses, so that a series of elaborations or qualifications are proposed, before the sentence ends, in what is known as the periodic style, on the main idea.

Here, as an example, is the opening of Rasselas, a book that caught my imagination like a fairy-tale during those two marvellous weeks:

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

As well as putting the real information at the end of the sentence—attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia—Johnson uses parallelism: he balances fancy and hope, age and youth, the present and the morrow; he sets up three grand statements, in which the words run fleet like darting shadows in a wood—whispers, eagerness, phantoms, promises, deficiencies—and then he pulls up short, whack!, with some real talk. All that hope and optimism, he implies, is an illusion. Credulity was neatly planted at the start, meaning, as he defined it in the dictionary, easiness of belief. But there are no easy beliefs in Johnson. The final parallel in this sentence is between credulity and the closing clause, warning of disappointments to come.

This is all achieved through a sound knowledge of rhetoric, learned from the Latin he studied as a child. But he perfected it, he brought a whole style of writing to a peak. It acted on me like a vision of greatness. I was in awe.

This mastery of rhetoric—the ability to balance ideas and words so carefully, and thus to juxtapose ideas, leading to sharp conclusions—makes Johnson the great moralist of English literature. Every page contains some declamation, some timeless observation, some wisdom. Some readers find him windy and wordy, pompous and prolix. To me, he is the J.S. Bach of English prose: formal, precise, expansive, universal.

When I became a blogger, my obsession turned into a series of essays. Where was Samuel Johnson in 1745? Was he a sado-masochist? Why was he a late bloomer? What role does he play in Progress Studies? How can he help you make better New Year’s Resolutions? Why did he go and investigate a reported ghost?

What has affected me most though is the question of biography. Johnson is the man who reformed English biography, who made it into a high art. Without his Rambler essays explaining what biography ought to be, and his examples in the Lives of the Poets, we wouldn’t have all the shelves and shelves of wonderful biography that exist today. I subsequently studied for an MA in biography, and my forthcoming book about late bloomers is half a review of social science, half biographical profiles of notable late bloomers. And, of course, Johnson has a chapter all of his own.

But this fascination with biography isn’t, strictly, just a fascination with Johnson. I was mesmerised by the Life of Johnson, written by James Boswell. This is a gargantuan book, stuffed full of letters, conversations, discursions, discussions, anecdotes, snippets, pronouncements, gossip. It it a panorama and a mosaic, a portrait and a curated pile of fragments. It does what biography ought to do, and which no biography has quite done since: it shows you the person, up close, personal, in immense detail.

For many years, I carried round my copy of Boswell. And over time I have come to see Boswell as something of an equal to Johnson, at least as a biographer. Boswell knew what topics to start talking about to get the best from Johnson. He, too, was a vast and vivid individual, just as worthy of his place in the greatest biography ever written. Johnson devised the theory of what biography ought to be—Boswell accomplished it.

Not all of this was discussed in those tutorials, of course. We talked about Johnson’s disregard of Milton and Donne, about the fact that he isn’t a truly great poet, about what I then saw as the boastfulness of Boswell. At the time, I was most interested in poetry, most interested in Johnson as a critic. The more I have read Johnson since, the more I have heard the poetry in his own tones, and seen that what he identified as the core aspect of poetry, “the art of uniting pleasure with truth”, was the centre of all his own work, too.

I have subsequently found that Johnson was the most perspicacious of the literary writers: he knew economics before Adam Smith, could talk with accustomed knowledge about manufacturing, and wrote perceptively about feminism nearly a century before J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, saying:

Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Beyond all this, Johnson was a living sermon of determination: plagued by illness mental and physical; tormented by the idea of hell and the possibility of madness; agitated by his constant struggle for accomplishment and his incapacity for meeting the dreams of his youth; Johnson spent his life resisting depression, living with compulsions and twitches, and searching for money. Living in this way is what made him a great critic. Who else could write this, as a footnote:

When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languour of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.

His work is a consolation and an encomium, an acceptance and a prayer, encouraging us not to get lost to the dreams after dinner or the designs of the evening, but to fill the business of the present time.

This essay is supposed to be about one book that made me, but there is no one book with Johnson. He is so uniquely ever-present in his work, that where Boswell ends, Johnson’s writing begins. No-one else talks as they write, and writes as they talk, as much as he. With all his rolling pronouncement and proclamations, it is impossible to separate the man from the work. Whether you read Boswell or Johnson, you are in the presence of the great man.

I have become so dogmatically biographical that I see no gap between the book and the man: Johnson is the book.

My thanks to all of you who are reading Second Act and telling me how much you are enjoying it. It makes a good Father’s Day present… Amazon US. | Amazon UK.

It seems like an odd thing to say, but the two heroes I have written most about on this blog—Samuel Johnson and John Stuart Mill—are increasingly interconnected in my mind. How can this be? Johnson was a conservative, a literary critic, a church man, while Mill was a radical, a philosopher, and a secularist. These surface differences, which makes it easy to imagine them disagreeing vehemently if they ever met, are merely that: surface. Instead, as Mill said of Bentham and Coleridge, “they are connected by two of the closest bonds of association—resemblance, and contrast.”

First, they can meet on the safe ground of essay writing. Both men were inveterate essay writers, a habit and occupation that unites them by temperament more deeply than the easy agreement of principles or beliefs. Mill was an exceptional literary critic, and it is to be regretted that he didn’t give more time to this sort of work. As well as his famous essay on poetry, he was the first person to see Tennyson’s genius. And Johnson was a good economist. In the Adventurer No. 67, written twenty-three years before The Wealth of Nations, Johnson exposited many ideas of market economics: division of labour, market satisfaction of human desires, the moral improvement available under commercialism. Johnson enjoyed “the bustle of prosperous trade.” His Journey to the Western Islands has many economic observations.

There is also the question of prose. “The same person may be poet and logician, but he cannot be both in the same composition,” Mill wrote to Carlyle. And then,

prose is after all the language of business, & therefore is the language to do good by in an age when men’s minds are forcibly drawn to external effort . . . in bringing order out of disorder.

This is so Johnsonian. Boswell talks about Johnson loving business. Johnson refers frequently to his love of reason and order. And Johnsons’s periodic prose style was his method for achieving that. Eugene August says Mill takes a middle ground between poetry and logic, writing as a “logician-artist” whose ‘Bentham’ was deeply inspired by Carlyle’s essay about Johnson and Boswell.

In a letter to John Sterling in 1829, Mill said that friendship depended on idem velle, idem nolle—to want, and reject, the same ideas. This quote he seems to have taken from Boswell. Three years later he read Carlyle’s essay on Johnson and Boswell so often he practically memorised it. He copy was worn thin.

Reviewing a book about political philosophy, Mill quoted Johnson:

…when Dr. Johnson says that a man has not a moral right to think as he pleases, “because he ought to inform himself, and think justly,” Mr. Lewis says he must mean legal right; and adds other observations, proving that he has not even caught a glimpse of Johnson’s drift.

Over thirty years later, in On Liberty, Mill quoted the same section of Boswell, but starting a little later, where Johnson talks about martyrdom being necessary to establish religious truth. Of course, Mill and Johnson don’t agree about free speech, but Mill respected Johnson and had absorbed him deeply. In his review of Comte’s positivism, Mill wrote:

We think with Dr. Johnson, that he who has never denied himself anything which is not wrong, cannot be fully trusted for denying himself everything which is so.

Perhaps where they converge most significantly, at the core of both of their ideas, is the notion that human happiness is the result of effort, but is not entirely within our control. Mill never stops asserting that we have responsibility to improve ourselves, to improve each other. He was constantly in the vision of greatness of Ancient Greece, a culture he had been immersed in from, quite literally, his earliest memories. In his fifth review of Grote’s History of Greece he wrote about Plato:

He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind.

Mill took Plato as a model for his own ideas of reform—the renovation of the mind being essential to the reconstruction of society. But, more important, is his reliance on the ancient past. Johnson was a Latin scholar from a young age, constantly relied on Latin authors in his own work, and said in the Rambler No. 2,

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased: and he that finds his way to reputation through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.

Here is the spirit of ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’, two of Mill’s most important essays. Note, too, the interplay of nature and nurture, a subject that preoccupied Mill from at least his mental crisis onwards, and reshaped the way he thought about almost everything.

They share a temperament of “superior elevation”. Mill said he would rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Johnson that a philosopher and a peasant may be equally satisfied but not equally happy.

Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for equal happiness with a philosopher.

I can think of no two people in English literature who offer, from their superior elevation, such multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. We may be peasants in comparison, but we can still find some happiness in their presence.

Unlike a lot of self-made people, Samuel Johnson was lazy. He got up late and often stayed in bed until the afternoon. He never held down a real job. He thought the two best pleasures were ‘fucking and drinking’, which left him confused as to why more people weren’t drunk more often because they certainly weren’t fucking enough. He had a terrible caffeine addiction and often drank tea late into the night, getting through pints of it every day.

And yet, he was prodigious. As well as the famous dictionary he wrote poetry, biography, innumerable essays and reviews, a philosophical novella, a travel book, he edited Shakespeare, and produced the monumental Lives of the Poets. He was no slouch when it came to research. He once told George III that in order to write one book you ‘have to turn over half a library.’

This dual personality is a mark of his depression. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was his favourite book, the only one that got him out of bed earlier than he wanted to get up. He loved his wife but suffered from sexual loneliness and dissatisfaction. He was a widower for a long time and was often moody, prejudiced, argumentative, and solitary.

But he was also warm hearted and generous. He found Oliver Goldsmith on the verge of being homeless and used his critical influence to sell The Vicar of Wakefield that afternoon to save Goldsmith from penury. He left money to his servant, Francis Barber, a freed slave whom he treated as an equal and wrote encouraging letters to help his education, telling him ‘you can never be wise unless you learn to love reading.’ He maintained a circle of close, committed friends.

He was deeply religious. He found spiritual things moving and important from a young age. The ghost in Hamlet scared him so much as a ten year old that he didn't read the play again for years and years. He was a stubborn High Church Tory in the age of Whiggery. He was also a borderline Jacobite.

Before he was famous, he was a failure. For his whole life, he resented the poverty he had lived in when he was young in London. He’d had to save his one clean shirt for the day in the week when he made house visits. He left Oxford because he couldn’t afford the fees. He founded and ran a failed school, losing most of his wife's money in the process. After that his play Irene, written to be the great tragedy of the age, was a flop. Aged 30, he wasn’t shaping up to much. It was about then that he took to hanging out with the reprobate Richard Savage, drinking and roaming the streets of London all night. At this time he was in his early thirties, living away from his wife.

His poetry was powerful: Harold Bloom thought he could have been Pope’s successor. When Irene failed he wrote London, which is still anthologised. But his real genius was not poetry, but judgement and compression. In his mid-thirties he wrote a biography of Savage which is a masterpiece.

The decade from the mid 1740s to the mid 1750s were when he produced the Dictionary, The Rambler, and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Three canonical works, each in a different mode: reference, journalism, poetry. At the end of that decade he was arrested for debt. He then worked on his edition of Shakespeare, The Idler, and Rasselas, which he wrote ‘in the nights of a week’ to pay for his mother’s funeral. It was an extraordinary fifteen years.

And all of this was done without a degree. He was a prodigious reader, alternating his bouts of depression with astonishing industry. Early in the 1760s he was given a government pension, but he still produced Lives of the Poets. It’s an astonishing record for a man who didn't even have a degree.

His sharp lapidary judgements would have thrived on Twitter and his essays would have been ideal blogs. He finds Milton’s early poetry dissatisfactory, and Paradise Lost is described as a great poem that ‘no one ever wished longer’. He was a non elitist, praising the common reader above the professional academic, perhaps unsurprising after Oxford’s snobbish credentialism. He thought interest was the main criteria for assessing a book and gladly threw books aside that lost their appeal.

He is mostly remembered because of Boswell’s biography, which details all sorts of weird and wonderful things about him, like the fact that he always kept his orange peel to put in his shoes, or his strange behaviour, twitching and rolling around and muttering, like he had tourettes. People who met him found his intelligence literally unbelievable after they had observed his ‘strange antic gestures’. He also had terrible eyesight and read with the book very close to his face, so close to the candle he scorched his wig. His friend Thrale worried he would set himself on fire.

But he ought to be remembered for his writing and his strong minded independence. He was an autodidact, and a powerful example of the Fitzgerald Rule. Who would have seen the potential in that strange man wandering the streets with Richard Savage, a well known liar and fraud? Only the people who could recognise that he was an opsimath: a lifelong learner and a late bloomer.

He is the source of this blog’s title:

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

You can really see where Harold Bloom got it from.

Where else can you find sentences like this in footnotes to Shakespeare?

When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languour of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.

If you haven’t read him, try Johnson on Shakespeare (bookfinder link), one of my favourite books, or dip in and out of his Rambler and Idler Selected Essays (US link). They’re better than almost all modern journalism, and are full of great lines like, ‘The essence of poetry is invention’ and ‘Probably no-one will ever know whether it is better to wear a nightcap or not’.

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It’s been a long time since I wrote about Samuel Johnson. New readers can find previous essays about Johnson—as a late bloomer, a potential revolutionary, a mystery masochist, and more—in the archive.

A scandal in Cock Lane

Samuel Johnson is often characterised as a dogmatic thinker. He was a firm Anglican who disapproved of religious dissent. His deeply-held, old-fashioned Toryism made him hate all Whigs. Admiration for his criticism is often qualified by nervousness about his right-wing politics and his prejudices. But there are many instances where Johnson’s judgement put aside his beliefs, such as when he included the hymns of Issac Watts in the Lives of the Poets series, even though Watts was a dissenter, not an Anglican.

The story of the Cock Lane ghost shows this side of Johnson at its best. He kept a rational head when all about him were losing theirs.

The episode began after two advertisements appeared in the Public Ledger. The first told of a young lady who was lured to London, imprisoned, and then poisoned. The second told of her ghost, which was haunting a house in Cock Lane. The ghost was Fanny Lynes and the man supposed to have poisoned her was William Kent. It wasn’t just a ghost story but a good old fashioned tabloid scandal. The whole town was divided.

What makes this story so interesting today is that we still disagree about these topics—not just ghosts, but UFOs. We still see people make wild judgements about scandalous stories based on their prior beliefs. So much about the ghost of Cock Lane seems very typical of the eighteenth century. But so much of it feels so familiar. Whatever our prior moral beliefs were about the people involved in a story tend to determine our opinion. Not Johnson, though.

And yes, before you ask, Cock Lane is named, quite literally, after the sort of business conducted there in mediaeval times as many London streets were. This system meant you knew where to go to get what you wanted. Just as Bread Street had housed bakers, and Milk Lane had dairies, Cock Lane once hosted brothels.

We are more interested in the ghost that may or may not have lived there once in 1762. Let’s begin with the backstory.

William and Fanny

William Kent had previously been married to Fanny’s sister, Elizabeth, who died in childbirth. Fanny was living with them, and stayed to take care of the baby. At this time, they lived in Norfolk. Soon, William and Fanny wanted to get married. He went to London for legal advice. Because Elizabeth had given birth to a living child, the marriage would be considered incestuous. So William moved to London permanently, leaving Fanny in Norfolk.

But she wrote to him, told him she wanted to spend their lives together, and soon joined him in Greenwich, where they lived as if they were married and made wills in each other’s favour. Fanny’s family disapproved. Word spread. They moved. Their new landlord refused to repay William a £20 loan, probably because he found out they were unmarried. William had him arrested for debt. But they had to move again.

At a church service in St-Sepulchre-without-Newgate, they met Richard Parsons, who offered to let them rent a room from him in Cock Lane. William also leant money to Parsons.

Now the tapping began. Fanny heard the noises in bed. The landlady told her it was a neighbouring cobbler. Then she heard the tapping on a Sunday, when the cobbler wasn’t there. The local pub landlord claimed to see a ghost on the stairs, as did Parsons. Kent was away for all of this. Fanny was with Parsons’ daughter Elizabeth when she heard the sounds.

William and Fanny tried to find somewhere suitable to live, but she got smallpox and died before she gave birth. That was 1760. The following year, Kent sued Parsons for three guineas that Parsons owed him.

Then in January 1762 the knocking started again. And the public scandal began.

Seancés and suspicion

Parsons and a man called John Moore, a rector at another church, asked the ghost questions—one tap for yes, two for no. They learned that the ghost was Fanny, come back to accuse William Kent of poisoning her with arsenic. The first ghost, they surmised, must have been Kent’s first wife, warning Fanny she was about to die. Now Fanny had come back to seek justice.

Suspicion lighted on Kent partly because he had screwed down the lid of Fanny’s coffin, which meant her sister had not been able to see the body. Her family was upset that she had left William Kent all her money, a further sign of suspicion, even though it was a small amount and Kent was well-off. And of course he and Fanny were unmarried. The ghost was a reminder of his sin.

A series of seancés had been held in early January 1762 as Kent tried to clear his name. The doctors who saw Fanny before she died were taken there, and her former maid. When Parsons’ daughter Elizabeth went to stay in another house for a day or two, the ghost followed her. Interest started to build in the girl. Elizabeth was moved again and a seancé held, this time much less conclusive. The girl showed signs of nervousness and claimed to have seen the ghost.

This was mid-January 1762. The news was spreading through London. Nobility took an interest. Cock Lane is a small street near the City border, behind St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate. At this stage, the street was often impassable because of the crowds gathering to look at the house where the ghost was heard. Parsons took advantage and sold tickets.

Obviously, the whole thing was a hoax, done to damage Kent’s reputation, perpetrated by Richard Parsons, who was cross about the debt. But this is only obvious to us. It took the visitation of a committee to Cock Lane to discover the fraud. Among that group was Samuel Johnson.

The mystery revealed

His first biographer John Hawkins thought it abased Johnson’s character to be so interested in this story. Others had mocked Johnson’s suspicious credulity. In his biography, Boswell swiped back. Johnson had been “ignorantly misrepresented as weakly credulous” on the subject of ghosts. Instead, Johnson had “a rational respect for testimony”. He was willing to submit to something “authentically proved”, even if he couldn’t understand it. It will surprise readers, Boswell says, to learn that Johnson was one of the people who detected the imposture and undeceived the world. Others assumed they knew the answer: Johnson went to see for himself.

After the committee visited Cock Lane, Johnson wrote an article about their findings:

…they were summoned into the girl’s chamber by some ladies who were near her bed, and who had heard knocks and scratches. When the gentlemen entered, the girl declared that she felt the spirit like a mouse upon her back, and was required to hold her hands out of bed. From that time, though the spirit was very solemnly required to manifest its existence by appearance, by impression on the hand or body of any present, by scratches, knocks, or any other agency, no evidence of any preter-natural power was exhibited.

Obviously, the girl, Elizabeth Parsons, was making the noises. Two more tests were set up, away from Parsons’ house. Every time Elizabeth was told to put her hands out of bed, the noises stopped. A maid saw the girl conceal pieces of wood in her sleeves. She was making the noises under duress from her father. He was soon sent to prison.

People believe what they want to believe

With hindsight, the whole affair seems so silly. A small girl was clacking bits of wood together. On 9th July, the Derby Mercury reported Parson’s trial: “Many ridiculous circumstances which occurred in the several conferences with the pretended Ghost, as related by the Evidences, afforded much Merriment to the very numerous Audience.”

It was easy to laugh six months after the event. At the time, it wasn’t so obvious. The hoax worked, to begin with, because everyone involved had some prior beliefs that shaped their opinion. Many people were prone to believe in spirits. It was common to see the ghost warning about the sinfulness of two people living together unmarried.

In his account of the affair The Mystery Revealed, Oliver Goldsmith wrote, “It is somewhat remarkable, that the Reformation, which in other countries banished superstition, in England seemed to encrease the credulity of the vulgar.” Many Anglicans took this view, that belief in ghosts was Catholic superstition. The new Methodists were more inclined to believe in ghosts. Thus opinion divided.

Johnson was a good Anglican. And he wouldn’t have approved of living in sin. But attached though he was to the doctrines of the Anglican church, he knew the ghost needed investigating.

He told Boswell that if he heard a voice tell him he was wicked and ought to repent, “my own unworthiness is so deeply impressed upon my mind, that… therefore I should not believe.” He knew he was more likely to deceive himself though “the mere strength of his imagination” on subjects he had prior beliefs about. He would believe in ghosts if one told him something factual that he had no means of knowing and could then corroborate.

He wanted the afterlife to be real, but he wasn’t going to let that determine his beliefs. As Johnson said

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

He was one of the few rational people involved in the ghost of Cock Lane.

Here, for example, is one way you could begin the story of Johnson’s life, beginning in media res and using, as writers today tend to, the trick of enriching the effect with telling details and vivid images to create atmosphere, full of the little niceties that make up sophisticated prose. For good measure, there is some light prolepsis and analepsis, to excite suspense and highlight comparison.

On a bright London morning in 1751, when window shutters were being opened and maids were tipping the contents of chamber pots into the street, Samuel Johnson has to provoke his broad, shambling body to get up out of bed and take a breakfast of large, soft rolls and strong coffee. Johnson begins the day slowly but not as slowly as he would like: he does not yet have the ease of leisure that will come to him later on, such as in 1779 when Boswell called to see him before he was awake and Johnson “called briskly, ‘Frank, go and get coffee, and let us breakfast IN SPLENDOUR.’” For now, life is drudge rather than splendour, as Johnson is labouring over hundreds upon hundreds of definitions for his Dictionary, work which he will use to illustrate the word dull—“Not exhilarating; not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work.”

Johnson is not lazy, as such; but he has a predilection for staying up late. He described men who go to bed before midnight as scoundrels, though he advised others to rise early if they want to be productive. Another definition he gives for dull is “drowsy; sleepy”. His late nights and perpetual melancholy make him a slow riser. Rather than lie in bed with a book, this morning he must climb to the attic of his townhouse where a small team of amanuenses are copying and pasting the quotations he has marked in some of the thousands of books and pamphlets which are the source material for his Dictionary. Johnson has a profound and fearful religious temperament that keeps him at work—carved on the back of his watch is a verse from the Gospel of John, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” He later had the words removed, telling Boswell that the quotation, “might do very well upon a clock which a man keeps in his closet; but to have it upon his watch which he carries about with him, and which is often looked at by others, might be censored as ostentatious.”

And so in his shabby wig and tousled, greasy coat, he heaves himself to work.

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There is nothing wrong with this piece of writing, as such—though I don’t claim it to be excellent—but, until it is made part of an argument, it is a plethora of techniques, a string of effects, like a freight train sounding its horn while carrying no cargo.

Creative non-fiction writers think they have learned these techniques from novelists. Louis Menand has objected to this in the New Yorker saying that: “the techniques of fiction are the techniques of writing.” That, however, is precisely the mistake creative non-fiction writers make—to make it all about technique, rather than technique with a moral purpose. The effect of these “novelistic” techniques is often limp and rather pointless—what exactly the telling detail is supposed to tell is often unexpressed—compared to the way novelists use these techniques for the purposes of irony, satire, moralising, explicating character, pattern making in the service of the larger argument, and so forth. This is why, despite decades of creative non-fiction, close-reading of journalism is often uninteresting.

What argument could the Johnson passage above be used to make? Many central themes of Johnson’s life are established, most importantly the fact that Johnson’s wisdom was learned from his own failures, close observation of his own psychology, and the ability to write truthfully about his faults. Johnson failed and struggled in the ways everyone does—but he was honest about it. One argument, then, that seems interesting today is about the nature of self-help, which is often the form wisdom literature now takes, a metamorphosis akin to a god becoming a beast.

There is a trap here. When non-fiction writers make clear statements of their thesis up-front, they can become basic—few of the books that sell the most copies today will be read by the next generation. Johnson is still read (albeit by too few people) because he doesn’t just make bare thesis statements—he imbues them with an unmistakeable moral value. He does what so many writers are afraid to do: he admonishes and disapproves, without flinching. In the Idler No. 43, Monitions on the flight of time, he wrote: “Every man has something to do which he neglects; every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.”

This is not self-help as encouragement. In the Dictionary, neglect is defined with the words: inattention, careless, negligence. Modern writers would be more gentle, perhaps make a self-depreciating joke, offer an understanding excuse. In this way, the wisdom that ought to provoke action becomes a comforting conspiracy of continuity. Look at Johnson’s words “conquer” and “combat”: so often we talk about conquering our fears, but we do not balance that, as Johnson did, with the imperative to fight. Every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes, he said in his essay on Pope—the fight is endless. Inattention must always be resisted.

Johnson’s moral tone begins in the title with monition. Johnson defined monition as instruction, and instruction as teaching or “Precepts conveying knowledge.” For that definition he quotes the poet Young:

On ev’ry thorn delightful wisdom grows,
In ev’ry stream a sweet instruction flows;
But some untaught o’erhear the whisper’ring rill,
In spite of sacred leisure, blockheads still.

This theme is picked up directly in Idler No. 43 where Johnson says that nature constantly reminds us our time is running out.

Whatever we see on every side reminds us of the lapse of time and the flux of life. The day and night succeed each other, the rotation of seasons diversifies the year, the sun rises, attains the meridian, declines, and sets; and the moon every night changes its form.

Most people gawp romantically at nature, blockheads still, without learning from it that one day soon they are going to die, that it is time, as Johnson said elsewhere, to be in earnest.

Johnson’s essay ends like this:

From this inattention, so general and so mischievous, let it be every man’s study to exempt himself. Let him that desires to see others happy make haste to give, while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction. And let him, who purposes his own happiness, reflect, that while he forms his purpose the day rolls on, and the night cometh when no man can work.

“So general and so mischievous” sounds tame to us—getting up to mischief is a playful phrase. Not for Johnson, who defined it in unforgiving terms: “Harmful; hurtful; destructive; noxious; pernicious; injurious; wicked.”

Modern non-fiction writing is often shy of moral precepts. But you only get to say one thing and if you wrap your instruction in an excuse, you teach the excuse. Biographers who are so thorough they turn every archival page and report it, leave us with little more than the sense that they were completionist. When marks off Boswell, Froude, and others like them is their clear moral mission—and their subject’s. It is not technique alone (whether of fiction or otherwise) that makes writing great, nor unarguable thoroughness, but a distinct moral tone, unhesitatingly expressed. Do not, in other words, read the egregious and soppy Oliver Burkeman (or any of his ilk) and believe you ought to get therapy to cope with being a useless speck of dust in a vast universe, but study Johnson and prick your conscience into doing something useful today, now.

As Johnson wrote in his diary in 1775:

when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.

The next book club is 14th May 19.00 UK time where we will be discussing David Copperfield and thinking about the intersection of fiction and autobiography. Subscribe now if you want to join us. You’ll also get access to the notes and video afterwards.

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I have spent dozens and dozens of hours in Johnson’s London, was kindly and informatively hosted at his Gough Square house—where I held his copy of Herrick! and saw a book with a coffee ring on the cover—finally got inside the always-bloody-closed St Clement Dane church where he worshipped, and have walked the streets he walked, seen the places where he drank and worked and read. But in Lichfield there are things unavailable in London. It was in his father’s bookshop that Johnson likely heard gossip about the seventeenth century poets which was later inspiration and information for his late blooming masterpiece The Lives of the Poets. I have been in the attic where the Dictionary was made, now I will stand in the room where he learnt so many of the words he defined.

As I travel I am reading Johnson’s only travel book, The Journey to the Hebrides. What a model of non-fiction writing. Johnson often writes in the ornate, periodic style making no allowances for his readers—but he also makes sly jokes and swiped asides, such this little joke against Boswell:

We were now to examine our lodging…circumstances of no elegant recital concurred to disgust us.  We had been frighted by a lady at Edinburgh, with discouraging representations of Highland lodgings.  Sleep, however, was necessary.  Our Highlanders had at last found some hay, with which the inn could not supply them.  I directed them to bring a bundle into the room, and slept upon it in my riding coat.  Mr. Boswell being more delicate, laid himself sheets with hay over and under him, and lay in linen like a gentleman.

Advocates of either plain or ornate (sometimes called rhetorical) English often cite Johnson for or against, but like all good writers Johnson used both styles to equal effect depending on what he was trying to achieve. Most of this passage is in the plain style with no metaphor or rhetoric: that is how he makes the joke work. Look at this rather withering remark about the island of Col:

For natural curiosities, I was shown only two great masses of stone, which lie loose upon the ground; one on the top of a hill, and the other at a small distance from the bottom.  They certainly were never put into their present places by human strength or skill; and though an earthquake might have broken off the lower stone, and rolled it into the valley, no account can be given of the other, which lies on the hill, unless, which I forgot to examine, there be still near it some higher rock, from which it might be torn.  All nations have a tradition, that their earliest ancestors were giants, and these stones are said to have been thrown up and down by a giant and his mistress.  There are so many more important things, of which human knowledge can give no account, that it may be forgiven us, if we speculate no longer on two stones in Col.

Good plain English and well done at that. The idea that this is not plain style merely because it has some subordinate clauses is a basic error I can trust none of you to be deceived into believing. It is easy to imagine this passage in a magazine like the New Yorker with only a few edits.

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Supposedly the plain style is the mark of honesty. Believing things like this is how smart people become gullible. As Hugh Kenner said, “What the masters of the plain style demonstrate is how futile is anyone’s hope of subduing humanity to an austere ideal.”

Visiting an old dignitary on Col, Johnson expressed some admiration for a religiously unorthodox writer:

Mr. Maclean has the reputation of great learning: he is seventy-seven years old, but not infirm, with a look of venerable dignity, excelling what I remember in any other man.

His conversation was not unsuitable to his appearance.  I lost some of his good-will, by treating a heretical writer with more regard than, in his opinion, a heretick could deserve.  I honoured his orthodoxy, and did not much censure his asperity.  A man who has settled his opinions, does not love to have the tranquillity of his conviction disturbed; and at seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

Johnson means that with death so close one must be wary of one’s religious observations. We live in an age where such beliefs are rare and often inconceivable and our discussions of prose style are influenced by this. The plain style was associated with political writing in the time of Orwell and Swift; now it is seen as a mere technique for being comprehensible online.

But you will note that as Johnson moralises, his style becomes more ornate, more rhetorical. Shortly before the Maclean episode, Johnson wrote this injunction—“To be ignorant is painful; but it is dangerous to quiet our uneasiness by the delusive opiate of hasty persuasion.” Whoof!—the ornate style and no doubt. All such maxims and mottos today would be in the plain style and would lack the nuance and subtlety Johnson provides. What better way to describe the use of the plain style in so much online writing today than the delusive opiate of hasty persuasion. Plain today, gone tomorrow.

The rhetorical style has another function. It doesn’t just describe in condensed form the psychology behind the moral—the “delusive opiate” being what we would call the “dopamine hit”—it provides a slowness, a burden, so that you must actually think about the different meanings provided. The plain style says one thing but the ornate style says many things. That’s not quite true; as I said above and as Kenner discusses, the plain style can be ambiguous too: but it’s true that moral lessons in the plain style often lack context and offer no insight into how the morals interact with psychology and other considerations. You must infer that a dopamine hit is delusive; Johnson is able to tell you this. And so the ornate style becomes, obliquely, more direct. There is no quick path to the truth.

To end, here is one of Johnson’s more subtle homilies:

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.

See how Johnson imputes the knowingness rather than plainly states it, thus emphasising the cunning involved in such oblique praise, to the extent that it may be unconscious. But see too how this flips from ornate to plain style in the second sentence. How well this brings out the fundamental superiority of the humble brag, the subtle alpha. When we admonish people for the humble brag, we get close to this, but our plain style is too blunt and starts useless disagreements. Johnson’s balance of plain and ornate creates something more enduring and something that is closer to wisdom.

Substack won’t let me add hyperlinks on my phone so here is the Hugh Kenner article, recommended: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/15/books/the-politics-of-the-plain.html

Frank Barber, as Johnson called him, was born a slave in Jamaica in the 1740s. There was about one slave per acre in Jamaica at that time. A combination of low birth rates and high infant mortality meant the only way to maintain labour supply was to import slaves. Between 1607 and 1857, Britain brought 1,020,000 African slaves to Jamaica. In 1730 there were about 75,000 enslaved people on the island.

We don’t know much about Frank’s owner, but another man on the island punished slaves who ate the sugar canes by having other slaves piss and shit in their mouths. Slaves were routinely whipped. Salt and lime juice was rubbed into their wounds. The women were regularly raped. Young Frank was born into a miserable, hopeless world. At this time, his name was Quashy.

The usual life stages for a slave child were to start helping pick up trash aged 3, to go out weeding aged 5 or 6, to heap manure into cane holes aged 12, and by 18 to be a labourer planting and harvesting, twelve hours a day, six days a week, in the dreadful heat. On the seventh day, you worked your own plot of land. But Quashy did not work outside. He was a house slave, a lucky position in relative terms.

It seems possible that the master, Colonel Bathurst, was Quashy’s father, which is why, in 1750, when he was about seven, Quashy sailed to England. Bathurst had Quashy Christened and later freed him in his will, leaving him twelve pounds. In London, Quashy would have been part of the growing population of black people. (About 1% of London was black at this time.) When he was sent to school in Yorkshire for two years, however, he was likely the only black person.

Frank came back to London and lived with the Colonel’s son, a good friend of Samuel Johnson, which is how he ended up being apprenticed to the great man. This was a piece of luck. Johnson seems to have shared some of the racial prejudice of his time, as Burdock relates, but was a vastly more kind and tolerant person than many others, with deeply held convictions against slavery. Their relationship was a little rocky to start with, but Johnson ended up making Frank the main beneficiary of his will.

We don’t know when Johnson started paying Frank, but it was at least from the age of twenty-four. And Johnson housed, fed, and clothed him also. Because of a lack of records, and the inherent uncertainty of the legal position, we don’t know when Barber stopped being a slave. But he definitely wasn’t treated as a slave by Johnson. There was a fashion for black slaves in London as they were a status symbol. Johnson was more concerned with the tending of Frank’s soul, something he would talk to him about for the next thirty years. On slavery, the important question is how Frank viewed himself. When he was freed in Bathurst’s will, he left Johnson’s house, with his twelve pounds, and went to work for an apothecary.

During that time he visited Johnson and they seemed to get on well. Gough Square was full of middle-aged people who were sullen, silent, grumpy, and often not well disposed towards each other, or to Frank. But he and Johnson maintained a relationship. After two years, Frank agreed to go back to Sam. Then he changed his mind and joined the Navy. This would have paid well and been more equal, at least among the lower ranks — and somewhat more representative: the population of the navy was between 6-8% black at this time — but it came with a huge risk of dying from disease.

Johnson worried about Frank, who was often in poor health, and used his connections to have him taken out of the navy. We don’t know how Frank reacted to this interference, but Burdock does a good job of contextualising Johnson as a paterfamilias, whose influence over Barber would continue for many years. Indeed, there are excellent summaries of all sorts of aspects of life, such as newspaper adverts for runaway slaves (Johnson’s is a model of humanism, seeking to maintain a friendship rather than recall a slave), the definition of slavery, life in the Navy, and the role of apothecaries.

It wasn’t all Johnson telling Frank what to do. After a trip to Lincolnshire once, Johnson reported: ‘when we returned home together, I found that a female haymaker had followed him to London for love.’ Unlike many servants, Frank was allowed to entertain friends in Johnson’s home. There was inevitably a lot of interest about legal cases and the definition of slavery among the black community in London, with an event in a pub on Fleet Street reported in the London Chronicle where, ‘no Whites were allowed.’ Frank may have gone to such gatherings, but we do not know. Although the grounds of the Somerset judgement were narrow, it was a starting point for the idea that there could be no slavery in England. A generation later, the abolition movement would flourish. Bundock quotes Simon Schama saying Frank had a party to celebrate Somerset, but no evidence exists for such an event.

Further good treatment came from Johnson — who never allowed his servant to buckle his shoes or buy food for Hodges, his beloved cat — when he sent Frank to Bishop Stortford Grammar School. Frank was in his twenties at this time and it was now that Johnson wrote to him, like a good paterfamilias, ‘you can never be wise unless you love reading.’

In 1773, thirty-one year old Barber married a seventeen-year-old white woman called Elizabeth Ball. They would eventually have four surviving children, and a son who died. Their first child, who died, was called Samuel, as was their surviving son, a tribute to Frank’s boss. Many people were hateful about mixed race marriages and especially nasty about the resulting children. William Cobbet said such families were ‘foul, unnatural, and detestable’. Hester Thrale, Johnson’s close friend, called Elizabeth Frank’s ‘Desdemona’, with her usual haughty insensitivity. Johnson remained concerned for Frank’s well-being in the face of hostile reactions. The Barber family lived with Johnson at this time.

When Johnson died, Barber was bereft. But here he makes his silent contribution to history. The final pages of Boswell’s Life are among the best, including the account of Johnson’s death. Boswell got this passage from his brother, who had interviewed Barber and transcribed what he said. Barber and his wife were with Johnson when he died and nursed him in his final illness. It is the only eyewitness account of Johnson’s death, and Frank wrote it. There are other sections closely based on what Frank told Bozzy. So Frank Barber is, in his own small way, a biographer.

The rest of Frank’s life is a sorry tale. He inherited a £70 annuity, a very generous sum (more than double Frank and Elizabeth’s joint wages), as well as £1,500 on trust. It seems patronising to have the money held on trust, but Frank was impecunious and eventually ran out of money, despite being relatively well-off. Johnson had urged him to move to Lichfield, where he had connections, and could live more cheaply than in London, which Frank did. To start with he was a local celebrity. But he was eventually called before the magistrate to be examined under the Poor Law. It seems a combination of poor health and bad money management made life difficult. He even sold Johnson’s bible and watch to raise funds. When he was only fifty he was described in decrepit terms in the Gentleman’s Magazine:

Francis is ... low of stature, marked with the small-pox; has lost his teeth; appears aged and infirm, clean and neat, but his cloaths the worse for wear; a green coat, his late Master’s cloaths, all worn out.

Like Johnson, he set up a school to try and earn money — he may have been England’s first black school master. Like Johnson, his school failed. The schools were in neighbouring villages, although many decades apart. Frank was frequently ill and shortly after his examination for the Poor Law, he died after a painful operation, aged fifty-seven or fifty-eight, in January 1801. His descendants live near Lichfield still.

The Fortunes of Francis Barber, by Michael Bundock

Other Common Reader articles about Johnson

Charles Nicoll’s review in the LRB which has some corrective material about Jamaica at the end. ‘Bundock is splendidly informative on Barber’s life with Johnson, but tells us little about his first life in the rugged uplands south of Port Maria, on a dogleg bend of the river, a world away from those London literary gatherings which would become his habitat.’ He also disputes that Bathurst was Quashy’s father.

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When they got back, he and Boswell took one seat each on either side of the garden door in Johnson’s apartments, and they talked ‘in the open air and in a placid frame of mind.’ It is one of my favourite conversations in the Life of Johnson because it shows the range, flexibility, and acuity of Johnson’s mind, even though he was seventy-three and would die nineteen months later. An opsimath indeed.

They start by discussing whether, if they were country gentlemen, they would be hospitable to many people or not. Boswell recounts the number of people Sir Alexander Dick told him came to his house every year. Johnson immediately calculates how many that is per day. ‘How your statement lessens the idea,’ says Boswell. They talk about how counting things brings them into proportion (counting, says Johnson, ‘brings everything to certainty’) and removes the grandness of general statements. Boswell slightly regrets this loss of grandeur. ‘Sir,’ Johnson replies, ‘you should not let yourself be delighted with error.’

Anyone who wants to be an educated person, to be rational or sensible, to be able to think critically, to be able to read the news without being duped, to learn to stop taking the world at face value should take that to heart.

Write it down and put in on the wall. You should not let yourself be delighted with error.

Once they were done shooting the breeze about hosting responsibilities, the two old friends moved on to poor people who collect bones. Boswell had noticed this happening and wondered why. They boil them, Johnson said, to make grease used on wheels. The best pieces of bone make mock ivory for knife handles. The ‘coarser pieces’ are burned and ground and the ashes are sold to chemists to be made into a paste to line the chemist’s pots. The paste of burnt bones will not melt under the intense heat required to melt iron.

Boswell switches to oranges. He has seen Johnson ‘scraping and drying the peel of oranges’ and notes now that this is done on a larger scale by manufacturers. Johnson tells him they use it to make a fragrant oil.

And there’s more! Boswell wants a walled garden; Johnson thinks it wouldn’t be worth the expense. He knows about the fixed and variable cost of building walls; he knows the price of land; he knows that for the amount of land Boswell can afford, and the cost of the wall, his fruit yields, considering the climate, will be insufficient. ‘Such contention with nature is not worth while.’ He knows that there are hardly any orchards in Lincolnshire.

Boswell records all this in such minute detail ‘to shew clearly how this great man, whose mind could grasp such large and extensive subjects, as he has shewn in his literary labours, was yet well-informed in the common affairs of life, and loved to illustrate them.’

The book rolls on and Johnson talks about whether priests should admit to their training in oratory and the process by which language first occurred.

This is the sort of passage that makes some people (maybe most people) believe that Boswell cannot have been telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Not because Johnson wasn’t capable of this sort of intellectual fluency — of course he was, the man’s mind was a river of knowledge, ideas, and invention — but because Boswell cannot possible have remembered so much and in so much detail.

Maybe. Maybe. There are times when he confesses his gaps. Of Sunday 17th May 1775 he says, ‘of which I find all my memorial is, “much laughing”.’ He compensates with a short description of Johnson when he was laughing. One friend said, ‘he laughs like a rhinoceros.’

But Boswell had a remarkable memory. He invented his own system of shorthand (which he learned as a lawyer) and made compressed notes of his conversations with Johnson. He filled out the notes later on. Where comparisons are available with other sources, Boswell comes off fairly accurate, in content if not down to final wording.

But what about Johnson’s stern warning: You should not let yourself be delighted with error. Isn’t Boswell’s book technically full of errors, however small? Doesn’t that mean that there’s an accumulated distortion? What about all the times we are not able to compare Boswell to someone else? How sure are we that his accuracy record would hold up over a larger sampling? Let us compare Boswell to another famous biographer, one with a real disregard for the truth.

Lytton Strachey, one of the most celebrated English biographers, did let himself be delighted with error. He invented, distorted, manipulated, and merged his facts to suit his argument, which was with society at large, not his subjects. I wrote a long, detailed rant Against Lytton Strachey once before, so we won’t rehearse all of that here. Here’s a good example: Strachey wasn’t above editing General Gordon’s diaries to make him look like a villain. Yes, you read that right, editing the diaries.

Strachey said in his preface, ‘Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes.’ And yet, Holroyd tells us, the errors, dissimulations, amends, omissions, and distortions Strachey introduces into the material are because

Strachey was not simply interested in his subject as an individual person, but in the interaction between her and the abhorrent age in which she lived.

Which is it? Does Strachey see them as valuable for who they are or for what they represent about the age? Holroyd is counsel for the defence and has to ignore one of Strachey’s main ideas in order to defend his work. Strachey is not really a biographer but a frustrated polemicist. That is why, for me, Strachey is emphatically not a new departure for biography. He takes the old hagiography and merely inverts it. He is tabloid.

It is not just that Strachey makes errors but that he delights in them. He knowingly changes the facts however and whenever he wants to for moral not just literary effect. If you are a modern, literary, liberal person, uncomfortable with empire, disdainful of establishment, revolted by patriarchy, this is easy to overlook. After all, it wasn’t a harmless set of lies, but a noble one. And it is such good writing! It made Bertrand Russell laugh! Oh spare me.

This is not what Boswell was doing. He concealed some important facts about Johnson’s sexual life, but he was trying to present Johnson as he was. This is a massive detailed portrait of a person. Of course some of it will be borderline fictional. Anyone who knows anything about memory, witness testimony, the inability of a group of people to accurately recall the lunch they had together yesterday, knows that.

The case against Boswell cannot be made on the basis that he is not always accurate. He went to great lengths to collect and print Johnson’s letters. He spent hours and hours and hours of his life noting down Johnson’s speech. He spoke to dozens of Johnson’s friends. For God’s sake, he sought Johnson out and followed him round, travelled with him, talked to him about every conceivable subject. Boswell knew Johnson. He might not have got all the details right, he might have invented some of them, but that is not the same as Strachey’s egregious dissimulations. Boswell was always trying to give an overall picture of fidelity.

Here’s Johnson to explain.

‘Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion. If I come to an orchard, and say there’s no fruit here, and then comes a poring man1, who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me, “Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears,” I should laugh at him: what would that be to the purpose?’

The important thing is that where Boswell is not accurate it is in the service of presenting Johnson’s character, not for a political purpose. He does not delight in error. This is not a great man biography (nor tabloid denunciation). He is constantly interrupting the narrative to tell us what Johnson has got wrong, thinks his hero has narrow beliefs about politics and religion, and was happy to show him being ridiculous, as in this description: ‘when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon.’

So that brings us one final question. Who was smarter, Johnson or Boswell? Johnson said most of this stuff, but Boswell recorded it, organised it, and compiled it into a narrative, over a period of decades. Johnson was a big enough man to justify being a subject of the most original biography ever written — but Boswell produced it, showing perhaps more enterprise and industry than his mentor ever did. And as I said, Boswell had phenomenal powers of memory. If anyone took Johnson’s teachings to heart, it was Boswell. How else could he have written this book?

Think about that Good Friday conversation, where Johnson said so much about so many topics. As Boswell said, ‘His moral precepts are practical; for they are drawn from an intimate acquaintance with human nature.’ Boswell also had such an acquaintance. He knew what topics to start talking about. He had observed the bone collectors and orange peel manufacturers. He, too, was a vast and vivid individual, more troubled than Johnson, less outwardly impressive, but perhaps just as worthy of his place in the greatest biography ever written.

This is the topic of my next salon, on Tuesday 31st May at 19:00 UK time. Is what makes the Life of Johnson great the subject Samuel Johnson, pioneering lexicographer, poet, essayist, pillar of morality, and Latin scholar—or the author James Boswell, failed lawyer, frequenter of prostitutes, sycophant, and a drunk?

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Throughout his time at the Charterhouse, Williams continued his experiments, never giving up on his ideas. There was a £20,000 reward for whoever came up with a method of determining longitude at sea, and Williams needed the money. He was neglected at the Charterhouse, where his daughter moved in with him — a clear contravention of the rules. Eventually he was evicted and some of his instruments were smashed. At this point, having heard of the great man’s generosity towards the destitute, Williams wrote to Samuel Johnson.

Johnson should hardly have been looking for anything else to do. He was working on the Dictionary and producing the Rambler twice a week. (One or two references in the Rambler are clearly about Williams.) But he took up the cause nonetheless. Williams and his daughter went to Gough Square to visit Johnson and his wife. Johnson wrote letters in his support, to Lords of the Admiralty and the Earl of Halifax. In 1755, Johnson wrote an account of William’s theories to promote them.

This story is interesting, not just because of Johnson’s fascination with almost everything, but because, as W.P. Courtney says, “Williams’s life provides an unusually rich story representing the countless seekers after longitude money that have slipped into oblivion.” If we want to make great breakthroughs, some people will have to fail. And people with scientific ideas need to collaborate with great communicators. Johnson could write almost anything — adverts, sermons, journalism, moral novellas, dictionaries, poems, Latin poems, political pamphlets — including scientific pamphlets.

The closest modern analogy I can think of to Johnson helping Williams is Cormac McCarthy editing scientific journal articles. The difference, of course, is that Johnson did not edit William’s work. He took the time to understand the theory and then wrote the pamphlet himself. Johnson was inexhaustibly interested in everything. That and his willingness to help, as much as his ability as a writer, was his qualification for the job.

This may not be the best solution for all modern scientist-writer combinations, but a key part of Progress Studies has to be the way ideas are circulated, communicated, and understood. Writing matters. It makes key ideas easier to understand and discover. Well written papers are more likely to be circulated. How many great writers are toiling away on their novel when they might be better employed writing scientific pamphlets? How many good journalists are turning out generic click-bait when they might be writing science blogs or collaborating with academics producing brilliant ideas in terribly written papers?

Johnson was an early proponent of Progress Studies; as he said in Chapter Thirty of Rasselas:

There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates to the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance (which are the light and darkness of thinking beings), the extinction and resuscitation of arts, and the revolutions of the intellectual world. 

It may well be that the best people for the job are not currently working as writers. Who knows where the people are who have made these studies, what disciplines they are lurking in, or on what blogs they might appear. This could be a task for generalists, for people who have a broad understanding, or who can acquire one. Johnson followed Seneca in putting practice before principle:

Example is always more efficacious than precept.  A soldier is formed in war, and a painter must copy pictures. In this, contemplative life has the advantage. Great actions are seldom seen, but the labours of art are always at hand for those who desire to know what art has been able to perform.

We need more Samuel Johnsons. Now is the time, as he said, to “compare our own with former times, and either rejoice at our improvements, or, what is the first motion towards good, discover our defects.” Plenty of good examples exist. We might be entering a Silver Age of Blogging. Works in Progress is promising. And The FitzWilliam (although their style guide is contentious). This will likely become one of the areas of blogging that provides the best content in the near future.

Many of the most productive people writing online, by the way, are mostly unknown, Wikipedia editors and Amazon reviewers and the like. You become one of the most useful writers online by combining broad ranging interests with deep curiosity, just like Samuel Johnson did. Nor does credentialism help you spot this talent. One of Wikipedia’s most prolific editors is a sometime pizza delivery man. He does a lot of typographical edits, but he also wrote the George Orwell bibliography. You will remember that Johnson never got his degree and was not always expected to be a success. Progress studies will rely on many people who share many of Johnson’s qualities, not just his great ones.

Let there be more biographies of failures

Don’t forget!
On 5th April, I’m holding a discussion salon about Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko, a heartbreaking novel by a young Belarussian writer, that explores the bridge between the past and the present and the way history is lived out through individual lives. I do hope you can join me.

That’s why I’m very pleased to be hosting a salon about Johnson’s wisdom literature, on 1st March. We’ll be primarily discussing Rasselas, my favourite of his writings, and the Rambler essays. Anyone who attends is encouraged to bring all and any knowledge of Johnson to the discussion. But if you find unforgettable, as I do, Johnson’s exhortations like “you can never be wise until you learn to love reading” or “the only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it” this is the salon for you.

Salon Tickets

People admire Johnson for many reasons, many of them more pompous than profound. He gets wheeled out by people who just want a high-falutin quote, the way they bring out the dessert trolley at old-fashioned restaurants which would be better off operating as museums. He becomes, through this process of sacerdotal incarceration, a caricature of respectability.

The truth is that he often lived a rather shabby life. He was often poor. His twitches and scars meant he was often regarded — and treated — as a freak. He worked in obscurity for many years. He was married, but not always happily. He had what we would call mental health problems. And, alongside his amusingly entrenched and old-fashioned toryism, he was potentially a political radical. “If England were fairly polled,” he told an alarmed friend in 1777, a time of stability under George III, “the present King would be sent away to-night, and his adherents hanged tomorrow.” This put him in an unfashionable minority.

He wouldn’t let a provocation go past unattended. To go drinking or dining with Johnson, you had to be prepared for serious conversation and serious rebuttal. I find it impossible not to feel compelled by his frankness, the extraordinary range of his knowledge, and the fact that, as Walter Raleigh said, “You can never quite predict what Johnson will say when his opinion is challenged.”

He was socially desirable because he was, in many ways, socially unacceptable. What you notice when you read Boswell is that Johnson changes and challenges conventions not because he’s belligerent, but because he is inexhaustibly interesting. He is frank, but not to be controversial; he is pointed, but not to get attention; he is honest.

We need more Johnsons — more pessimists, more disagreeable personalities; but we need these people to exist in a productive tension with society. Too many disagreeable voices today stand in cartoonish opposition to common sense. This was not Johnson’s style. He was often out of step with his times; but he didn’t want to posture against them.

He was, in his ethical arguments, a pragmatist. He wasn’t a myopic writer, a literary type, an insufferable self-regarding flaneur. Johnson had lived: poverty threw him upon experience, and he turned this experience into the material of his genius. “Books without knowledge of life,” he said, “are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?”

He offered genuine debate.

To read Johnson is to be challenged to think. The Rambler was written with the premise that “men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” He wasn’t trying to catch attention. His work makes you think for yourself. There are no shortcuts. “By indulging early the raptures of success,” Johnson warns us, characteristically, “we forget the measures necessary to secure it.”

So, if you too want to be wise one day, join us on 1st March. Now is the time. Wisdom is acquired slowly, and against the clock. As Johnson warned us, “He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.”

Salon Tickets

This might be why he accepted the commission from three publishers to write his Lives of the Poets when he was sixty-eight. He was already accomplished. He had produced the Rambler, the Dictionary, Rasselas, and his edition of Shakespeare. This hadn’t brought him quite the fame he had hoped for. Although he was famous enough to make the booksellers want his brand on their project, he seems to have underrated himself. He asked for two hundred guineas, got three hundred, but it was thought he could have got fifteen hundred. He always needed more money, but he had a government pension and enjoyed his leisure. His time was well spent reading, talking, going to supper clubs. Indeed, it was at a monthly dinner that he accepted the commission.

In 1772, five years before he accepted the job to write Lives of the Poets, he wrote a poem about a lexicographer (clearly himself) that included the lines:

He curs'd the industry, inertly strong,
In creeping toil that could persist so long.

So he vacillated between enjoying the release from hard work and feeling the unbearable lightness of being. He also knew he was incredibly talented. Paul Graham wrote about the interaction of talent and work when you are trying to achieve great things: “you need great natural ability and to have practised a lot and to be trying very hard.” Johnson knew he was talented (he says in the poem: “To you were giv’n the large expanded mind, The flame of genius, and the taste refin'd.”) and he had a massive accumulation of experience behind him. But retirement threatened a lack of hard work. One more push might get him closer to his desired reputation.

Graham says hard work often begins in early adolescence, as it did with Johnson. He was an astonishing Latin scholar by the time he went to Oxford. But knowing what you want to work on isn’t always enough. Hard work is a “complicated, dynamic system”; Johnson seems to have understood that. He knew, as Graham says, that hard work relies on you being honest with yourself. Johnson was exhausted from a life of toil, but also diminished from leisure. The impetus that made him write the Lives was psychological, moral, and practical

A mind like Scaliger's, superior still,
No grief could conquer, no misfortune chill.
Though for the maze of words his native skies
He seem’d to quit, ‘twas but again to rise;

Johnson’s 1772 poem is remarkably similar to Graham’s essay. Johnson was an infovore. He was interested in everything. Boswell reports his indefatigable interest in conversation about all subjects, including things like manufacturing processes. In this sense, he wasn’t a literary person, most concerned with writing, style, craft. He was a scholar, an information-hungry nerd.

The 1772 poem is a bit self-involved, but it is self-analytical. And not in that unbearable “let me tell you the story of my early life” way. He was trying to see himself objectively and in the effort wrote an essay about work and psychology. He knew the effects of weak wills on strong minds. And he knew the benefit of hard work.

The listless will succeeds, that worst disease,
The rack of indolence, the sluggish ease.

Johnson’s other worry, alongside his eternal life, was that he was going mad. The year he started Lives he resolved for “more efficacy of resolution” after his “barren waste of time” in the last year. In the poem, idleness leads to “phantoms of the brain” and “vain opinions.” Work would keep him sane.

The poem anticipates Graham: “Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.” And so Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets.

He was also a firm believer that getting older didn’t mean getting less intelligent. He understood that some people are opsimaths. His retirement project would show the world that he was still the great Doctor. Writing Lives of the Poets was a way to demonstrate that his powers were not in decline. This was an explicit topic in the Life of Waller: we might read this passage as autobiography, as much as biography.

That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling to allow much excellence in another, always produces a disposition to believe that the mind grows old with the body; and that he, whom we are now forced to confess superior, is hastening daily to a level with ourselves. By delighting to think this of the living, we learn to think it of the dead; and Fenton, with all his kindness for Waller, has the luck to mark the exact time when his genius passed the zenith, which he places at his fifty-fifth year. This is to allot the mind but a small portion. Intellectual decay is doubtless not uncommon; but it seems not to be universal. Newton was in his eighty-fifth year improving his chronology, a few days before his death; and Waller appears not, in my opinion, to have lost at eighty-two any part of his poetical power.

(Waller is also worth reading for the humour: “Waller was not one of those idolaters of praise who cultivate their minds at the expense of their fortunes.” And it contains one of Johnson’s most underrated lines: “Many qualities contribute to domestic happiness, upon which poetry has no colours to bestow… There are charms made only for distant admiration.  No spectacle is nobler than a blaze.”)

Throughout the Lives, Johnson’s judgements are stinging. Gray is denigrated for almost all of his work, other than the Elegy, of which he says, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader”.1 (Milton doesn’t get off lightly, either.) The Lives are a lesson in how to give your opinion without being opinionated. But this is not an essay about the Lives as writing — we are interested in Johnson and his laziness, in how he overcame it; in how the Lives affected his life. The new year approaches, and we are in the season of resolutions. Johnson was, unsurprisingly for a neurotic moralist, a great writer of resolutions.

A typical diary entry from 1738 reads, “Oh Lord, enable me to redeem the time which I have spent in sloth.” So this was a lifelong preoccupation. His resolutions, which you can find in Prayers and Meditations, were not like ours. His resolutions were moral, and theological; they were about his character.2 For the new year in 1777, he wrote:

Grant, O Lord, that as my days are multiplied, my good resolutions may be strengthened, my power of resisting temptations increased, and my struggles with snares and obstructions invigorated… Grant me true repentance of my past life; and as I draw nearer and nearer to the grave, strengthen my faith, enliven my hope, extend my charity, and purify my desires.

For Easter in 1777, just about the time he accepted the commission for the Lives, he wrote:

I was for some time distressed, but at last obtained, I hope from the god of peace, more quiet than I have enjoyed for a long time. I had made no resolution, but as my heart grew lighter, my hopes revived, and my courage increased; and I wrote with my pencil in my common prayer book:

Via ordinanda
Biblia Leganda
Theologiae opera danda
Serviendum et laetandum

That is: to order my life, to read the bible, to study theology, to serve god with gladness.3 His resolutions were often so similar because a good resolution will help us make progress but never be complete. Wisdom is the work of a lifetime. And work, as we see here, was the mechanism that helped him to live up to his resolutions. It was his view that no really good literary life had been written. This was his chance to change that. It was a big project: big enough to be a contribution to his resolutions.

As we approach the new year we can take Johnson’s example — to resolve, again, to improve at what matters, and has mattered, and will matter, most to us; to hold ourselves to as high a standard as possible, so that we will improve through our partial failures; and to be ready, waiting, and asking, for opportunity, so that through our work we can find ways of testing, and proving, our resolution. To help maintain your resolve this year, keep this quote from the Life of Pope somewhere where you will be forced to read it every now and then.

The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

Every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes — our lives, if they are well lived, are long works. Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail, and resolve again.

Other Common Reader essays about Johnson

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Perhaps the most speculated-upon mystery is what he meant by writing a letter in French to Hester Thrale in which his use of words like ‘slave’ and ‘mistress’ have a distinct sub-text. Just like we will never know where Samuel Johnson was in 1745, we will also never get a satisfactory answer about this letter — in which he asked Hester to “keep me in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful.”

Johnson met the Thrales at a dinner party in 1765 and ended up half living with them in Streatham. He wrote much of Lives of the Poets there. Henry Thrale was a rich brewer and an unfaithful husband. Despite his philandering, Hester gave birth eight times in slightly more than eight years, and was left with four children. Johnson was joining a fractured household, where an older husband was neglecting a young, intelligent, lonely wife.

It would be speculative to draw the inevitable conclusions about the letters, although gossip was widespread at the time. Newspapers ran mocking stories that Henry Thrale’s son looked like Johnson. Friends of the trio assumed Hester would write Johnson’s biography, and that Hester and Johnson would marry when Henry died. Add to this that the letter in question was written in French, that Johnson recorded masturbation in his diary the day after he met Hester, and that among her possessions when she died, Hester Thrale left a padlock belonging to Samuel Johnson, and you have the grounding for a thoroughgoing “Samuel Johnson was a Masochist” thesis. This review of a clutch of Johnson and Thrale biographies by Adam Gopnik is an excellent appraisal of the whole situation.

The padlock, before we go any further, was most likely not sexual. Outwardly, Johnson was merely asking her to lock him in his room: “spare me the need to constrain myself, by taking away the power to leave the room when you want me to stay.” Johnson was most likely obsessive compulsive, severely depressive, and literally afraid of going mad. Sometimes he wanted to be restrained until his mood passed.

We shouldn’t read too much into the padlock, then, with our inevitably Freudian assumptions. But in Hester’s reply, she asks him not to be cross that she doesn’t use her rod firmly enough. And Adam Gopnik quotes this apposite section of Hester Thrales’ memoirs, which keeps curiosity alert.

…she later wrote, in her “Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson,” “Says Johnson a Woman has such power between the Ages of twenty five and forty five, that She may tye a Man to a post and whip him if She will,” and appended to this an unequivocal footnote: “This he knew of him self was literally and strictly true.”

We might remember Johnson’s quip that “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman” and reflect that we take this for the joke that it is because it has no especially scandalous implication. Hester Thrale’s footnote is suggestive, but it isn’t enough. Alas, there are no more answers to be had.

From here, we must give up the biographical trail and go straight to fiction. Cue According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge, written twenty years ago and as fresh as anything else you can find on this topic. Samuel Johnson would almost certainly have disapproved of this book. He didn’t like fictionalised biographies. Quite right too. But fiction fills the gaps of history. In this strange and wonderful little novel, Beryl Bainbridge compiled a detailed series of facts and arranged them into a mosaic that shimmers like the truth even though it goes beyond it.

So much of what is said and reported in this book is true. And so much of it implies, endorses, and invents. It is an account of the sexual tension between Johnson and Thrale, the way it affected their relationship, and how the facts we have can be assembled to create credible stories. Perhaps the most we can know is they had the sort of textbook friendship in which sex is assumed to have been inevitable in other circumstances.

Respectability formed a crust around the facts of Johnson’s life, so that on questions of sex we often see him as if through thick distorting glass. Boswell concealed things that present him in a much more human, desperate, inappropriate light. He struggled with the balance of a large sexual appetite and a strong Christian belief. His friendship with the Thrales, especially Hester, is presented by Bainbridge as a dynamic of frustrated, mutual sexual attraction that, in all likelihood, had a debilitating effect on the people around them. The novel has a mordant air of erotic pressure.

Bainbridge realises that Johnson lived the life of the mind. We cannot know what happened, but we do know that whatever the facts, a great deal of the truth will have been conducted in Johnson and Thrale’s inner lives. From the perspective of understanding Johnson’s, his character, his psyche, it matters whether anything happened — but it is not the whole truth. He was a man of dreams and demons.

When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.

Were the letters just sexual badinage — a sort of coy expression of something they never enacted? Our inability to get at the truth, or for any biographer to get at the whole truth, is shown through Bainbridge’s device of putting a letter from Hester’s daughter, Queeney, at the end of each chapter showing her recalling — consciously or not — the details of events differently to how they have been narrated. Hester and Queeney’s relationship is tense, terse, and sometimes terrifying. Bainbridge also speculates about how Queeney’s lifelong dislike of her mother affects the presentation of the facts later on.

This is an exceptionally concise, dramatic book that immerses you right in the world of Samuel Johnson and his circle. Few writers have made Johnson and Thrale real like this. Because Bainbridge is so close to her sources, there’s an immensely tempting credibility to her speculations. It would be useless to keep reeling off details of Johnson’s life as so many of Bainbridge’s reviewers did. The book is worth reading for the economy of language, the vivid details, and the way it re-tells the story of Johnson and the Thrales to enact one of the great man’s great dictums:

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

Or, as Adam Gopnik put it, “We love Johnson for his humanity, and what makes us human is the contest between our desires and our doctrines.” Bainbridge brings that dynamic wonderfully to life. And by working as a novelist, not a biographer, she preserves her dignity in a field of competitive speculations and presumptions — remembering Johnson again, perhaps: “Every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the work of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic”. Bainbridge does what few biographers manage: she presents the action and preserves the mystery.

Not recommended for people who think it is aesthetically important for fiction to have a happy ending. I look forward to re-reading it.

According to Queeney, by Beryl Bainbridge (US link)

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It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great-Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate House, is well known; and some may fancifully imagine, that a sympathetick anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers: but I am inclined to think, that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.

Talk about avoiding the subject. Respectable scholars like David Noakes and Leo Damrosch are similarly firm in their view that there is no evidence Johnson was in any way involved with the civil war of 1745-46, when Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and raised a rebellion which was eventually put down at the battle of Culloden. This was the last huzzah of the House of Stuart, which had been replaced with the Hanoverian succession by act of Parliament. The question is how much Johnson, that irascible old Tory, was distracted by the attempted rebellion.

Supporting the Stuarts was a minority pursuit among civilised people. After the debacle of Charles I, and the invasion of William of Orange to displace James II, it was all but politically impossible to believe that the Catholic Stuarts, who believed in the divine right of kings, rather than the legislative right of Parliament, could be monarchs. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion was the last time the Jacobite cause was seriously pursued.

Johnson’s feelings on the matter remained intense. Over thirty years later, in 1777, Johnson was talking to Dr Taylor and they had a ‘violent argument’ about the feelings of the general population about the House of Stuart. Johnson argued vociferously:

If England were fairly polled, the present King would be sent away to-night, and his adherents hanged tomorrow.

Strong stuff. It hardly suggests that thirty years earlier, while a much less popular king than George III was on the throne, and while the Jacobite cause was in fact gaining ground in Scotland, that Johnson simply sat at home working on his dictionary and his Shakespeare, not leaving much of a paper trail.

If you think (quite reasonably) that I’m peddling conspiracy theories, look at some of the other comments Johnson made that day to Dr Taylor.

Sir, the state of the country is this: the people knowing it to be agreed on all hands that this King has not the hereditary right to the crown, and there being no hope that he who has it can be restored, have grown cold and indifferent upon the subject of loyalty, and have no warm attachment to any King.

There might not have been any hope of the Stuarts being restored in 1777, but that wasn’t the case in 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie marched towards Edinburgh. It’s common to make light of Johnson’s reported views on this topic. Boswell was a Jacobite and egged him on, or inflated his views, perhaps, or Johnson was goading people, or there’s no evidence of anything. So go the arguments. But when Boswell reports Johnson’s equally passionate views against slavery — such as his famous toast to ‘the next insurrection’ of slaves in the West Indies — no-one doubts the sincerity.

In 1775 Johnson was discussing morality and showing that a man could be genteel in appearance and manners but still a scoundrel. Tom Davies gave Charles II as an example. Big mistake. Johnson was roused.

‘Charles II knew his people, and rewarded merit. The church was at no time better filled than in his reign. He was the best king we have had from his time till the reign of present Majesty, except James the Second, who was a very good King… No; Charles the Second was not such a man as ——-, (naming another King). He did not destroy his father's will. He took money, indeed, from France: but he did not betray those over whom he ruled: he did not let the French fleet pass ours. George the First knew nothing, and desired to know nothing; did nothing, and desired to do nothing: and the only good thing that is told of him is, that he wished to restore the crown to its hereditary successor.' He roared with prodigious violence against George the Second.

Boswell might have been a Jacobite, but he was also an acolyte of Johnson, and suppressed plenty of material about the great man’s private life to preserve the image of his hero. It would presumably have been ridiculous to try and deny or leave out his political opinions. Even so, this is part of a clear and consistent image of a man who remained passionately biased towards a hopeless cause. Did the man who, thirty years later, ‘roared with prodigious violence against George the Second’, really sit at home for eighteen months planning a dictionary while the Jacobite rebellion gained ground in Scotland?

J.C.D. Clark wrote a revisionist, and controversial, history of Samuel Johnson, in which he discusses Johnson’s 1739 pamphlet Marmor Norfolciense, ‘a plain and open incitement to war against Spain… a conflict which Walpole had long sought to avert and which Jacobites had eagerly anticipated as a means of destabilising the Hanoverian regime.’ When Marmor Norfolciense was republished in 1775 by a satirist who was denouncing Johnson for taking a pension from the king, a reviewer called it, ‘a bloody Jacobitical pamphlet.’

The same year a play was published about a Danish usurper on the Swedish throne, who was challenged by a man with a better hereditary claim to the throne. Not exactly a subtle parallel. The play was banned, and Johnson took the author’s side. He then produced a second pamphlet. Rather than being merely an argument against the legislation that enabled plays to be banned it was, ‘a heightened denunciation… of a corrupt and illegitimate regime.’

There was more. In 1741 Johnson abridged a tract from 1660 to be published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. It was a tract calling for the restoration of Charles II. Johnson did not receive the patronage from James III (living under that slightly silly name abroad) that he might have expected, and was later disappointed when the Tories joined with the Whigs to vote Walpole out in 1742. It was a game of parties and pretend patriotism, he realised, rather than sincerity. He is not the first or last person whose idealism has been shattered by politics.

The invasion of 1745-46 was a reckless gamble. We don’t know what Johnson was doing at that time. There is a gap in his correspondence from January 1744 to to June 1746. It certainly makes sense that Johnson was lying low. It would have been very dangerous to be caught issuing seditious writing, let along mixing with Jacobites. And it is likely that during the battle of Culloden, Johnson was writing his proposal for a dictionary. He submitted it to the publishers not long afterwards.

Clark notes a few shady associations Johnson has, but the trail really does run cold. We have nothing to go on. Biographers will never know where Samuel Johnson was in 1745 or what he was doing. One thing we might want to dwell on, as we speculate about this period in Johnson’s life, is the friendship he had in the 1730s with Richard Savage. Savage was a poet, a liar, a cheat, and a criminal. His friendship with Johnson is bizarre, almost inexplicable.

As poor young authors, Johnson and Savage walked the streets of London at night, many times not returning home all night. They drank and talked in Westminster, St James Square, the heart of the Hanoverian establishment. As they walked, they sometimes talked about patriotism — which meant opposition to the King. It is interesting to note that Savage was arrested and questioned about a treasonable Jacobite publication and was the subject of Secret Service reports.

These walks often took place in the West End and they ‘inveighed against the minister’ and ‘resolved they would stand by their country.’ This means they were talking about their opposition to Walpole — and the Hanoverians — under the windows of the leading Whig politicians of the day. This is no more conclusive than anything else, but it does suggest that, like many prominent conservatives throughout history, Samuel Johnson started out as a romantic radical, and that he may well have got much closer to astonishing behaviour than we are able to prove or believe.

Dr Johnson and Mr Savage by Richard Holmes (US link) — the best Johnson book ever written?

Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism by J.C.D Clark(US link) — academic but engaging

Samuel Johnson, opsimath

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Boswell’s life without the writing requires a lot of sympathy. It’s easy to laugh or roll your eyes: he was never far away from the next drunken embarrassment, like falling off his horse and bruising his shoulder so badly he spends a week in bed, or hitting on his daughter’s school friend and then not remembering the next morning.

And his treatment of his wife isn’t exactly top drawer. For many years they lived in London which was terrible for her health and contributed to her early death. The ostensible reason was that only in London could Boswell work on The Life of Johnson, but it was also a result of his incredible desperation to be English, not Scottish.

The Act of Union wasn’t even a hundred years old, and there was a great deal of bad feeling about the number of Scotsmen who came to London. Scottish manners and language were thought to be uncouth and many lairds like Boswell wanted to be sophisticated and English. Going back to Scotland from London would have confirmed Boswell to himself as the vulgar Scottish mediocrity he was always trying to outpace.

He was also astonishingly unfaithful. The amount of time he spends attending to his syphilitic blisters would have been enough to learn a new language. They were often so uncomfortable it was difficult for him to walk. One weekend when he was travelling and couldn’t get to a doctor, he had to visit a surgeon barber to have a blister split open to provide enough relief for him to be able to move around. He had venereal disease at least seventeen times in his life.

But there’s something to be pitied about him, as well. His father made it obvious, right from a young age, that Boswell was a disappointment and a failure. He was, as a good old fashioned parochial Scot, especially disappointed in his frivolous son’s interest in being sophisticated and English.

Boswell’s career at the bar was mediocre — he was terrible at networking, with no real nous about how preferment worked. His obsequious flattery to noblemen was so embarrassing he even made a twit of himself in front of King George III on a number of occasions.

So desperate was he for preferment that he repeatedly supplicated himself to Lord Lonsdale, allowing that bullying moron to embarrass him and waste his time. Lonsdale had a constant entourage of people who wanted his preferment (he controlled a number of seats in Parliament and offices like the judgeship Boswell eventually got). These purgatorial souls were summoned to Lonsdale’s house for nine in the morning and left waiting in the hall until the evening before starting on a long journey.

Lonsdale didn’t serve his guests wine, gave them sub-standard lodgings, and insisted on everyone staying up until the small hours to listen to him ranting. He was a formidable lunatic and Boswell allowed himself to be pushed around like this despite being a grown man with an ill wife he ought to have been looking after because his legal career in Scotland was only ever half baked, and his attempt to start a practice in England was a crashing disaster.

He once stayed with Lonsdale and endured the humiliation of having his wig stolen from his room so that he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere in the house: it was unthinkable for a gentleman to appear without a wig. On another visit he got up early one morning, hopped on a passing cart which took him to a nearby crossroads. From there he walked to the local town. He ran into another one of Lonsdale’s cronies who warned him not to escape back to London like this: the consequences would be severe. And so Boswell returned to the house to endure more ranting and raving. He was, at least, given some decent coffee when he got there.

As you can see, he didn’t make it difficult for his Victorian detractors to run him down. For over a hundred years after he died, his family was so embarrassed by him that all of his papers were kept hidden. All that fawning and whoring was unseemly for a laird. And he was an embarrassment merely as a person. Like many badly treated, lonely and unhappy children, Boswell grew up unable to properly adjust himself to other people. He spent his whole life is search of a father. And it showed. He was constantly writing to eminent men sidling up to them like a child collecting autographs.

All of this, of course, makes him perfect to be a biographer. Johnson was the biggest man of his time, and Boswell was the right combination of persistent researcher and low-confidence failure to be dedicated enough to follow Johnson around and record his sayings. And here the paradox begins.

Perhaps the most important thing we know about Boswell is that Samuel Johnson respected him. If the facts given above were the whole picture, why would Johnson have sat outside with Boswell on Good Friday and passed the time speculating about growing fruit trees? Or gone on a tour of the Hebrides with him?

Johnson may well have been the only real friend Boswell ever had. His father ridiculed Boswell for scampering around after Johnson, but the great doctor was always kind about Boswell, cherished his company, and insisted that he be elected to join The Club, where members like Burke, Goldsmith, and Reynolds debated topics of the day. Burke was seriously opposed to Boswell joining, but Johnson prevailed.

The obvious question then: how on earth did this frivolous, drunken man produce that massive, impressive book? After Johnson died, the answer was: slowly. There were periods of depression, or impressive hangovers, that left him unable to work. It was a slow, persistent, job. But Boswell had been writing the book for years and years before that. He had been working on it ever since he met Johnson, twenty one years before the old lexicographer died.

The secret was his diary. Boswell had an astonishing memory, able to recreate accurately any events that he made basic notes about. He had his own perfunctory style of shorthand, noting down abbreviated words and phrases, which, to anyone else, would mean almost nothing. It was like a shopping list summary of what had happened. To Boswell, these notes were memory triggers, which he could use to write up full journal entries. We can take them as fairly accurate because whenever someone else records what Johnson said, Boswell is vindicated. No two accounts are ever word perfect, obviously, but they show us that Boswell was accurate.

It was Johnson who encouraged Boswell to keep a journal, where his father had been derisive of the idea. The journal is famous for its frankness — he once slept with an actress five times in a single night, and she called him, he notes with pride, a prodigy; there are plenty of other entries like this. You can see why the family wanted it hidden. Of course, when the London Journal was first published it sold and sold and sold and sold. Much against the spirit of the times, Boswell turned his extraordinary willingness to open himself up to scorn, embarrassment, and mockery into an art form.

It is this same frankness that makes The Life of Johnson the seminal work in English biography. Let’s not forgot, the debate isn’t how did Boswell write a good book — but how did he create a new genre. No-one had written a book like this before. Fourteen hundred pages of letters, anecdotes, and recorded speech, with a solid structure that followed the annual pattern of activity which defined the year in London. He recorded as much as he could about Johnson’s work, tracked down old acquaintances, verified information by visiting churches to review records, assessed evidence and discounted spurious claims.

But he also showed us all of Johnson. You can quibble about the details left out, especially when it comes to sex. There are some things that simply couldn’t be revealed in 1791. But Boswell reveals so much about Johnson: his moods, his habits, his oddities. This isn’t just curios like Johnson keeping his orange peel (we still don’t know why he did it, but there was a wonderful exchange of letters about it in the TLS a few years ago: it may have been to put in his shoes to keep them fresh).

We see Johnson in the 1780s, well into the reign of George III, fly off the handle and deliver a page long rant about the Hanoverian monarchy and how it would not win the support of the people in a referendum. We read his letters to Frank Barber, his servant who was a freed slave, telling him: ‘You can never be wise until you learn to love reading.’

We know about Johnson’s favourite books like Walton’s Lives, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, but also his love of romances; we know that if he had been as rich as David Garrick (celebrity rich) he would have hired two men to walk ahead of him in the street with sticks pushing people out of his way; and we know that as a young man Johnson lost religion and drank and swore enough to shock the doting Boswell.

This is not comparable to other Lives written before it. It’s a unique, weird, epic preservation of a man who would otherwise be the somewhat anonymous genius behind the first real Dictionary of English. Where else can you find something like this:

JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir; a man would never undertake great things, could he be amused with small. I once tried knotting. Dempster's sister undertook to teach me; but I could not learn it.' BOSWELL. 'So, Sir; it will be related in pompous narrative, "Once for his amusement he tried knotting; nor did this Hercules disdain the distaff."' JOHNSON. 'Knitting of stockings is a good amusement. As a freeman of Aberdeen I should be a knitter of stockings.' 

Far from a boozy stenographer, Boswell was, like many other writers of his time, a lost soul, who couldn’t properly fit into a professional or social structure, and whose work is so astonishing it is difficult for us to reconcile it with the leering kaleidoscopic mess of his life. After his wife died, he lived in a terrible bazar of dissipation: drink nearly stopped him writing the book at all, and he died early having written no other biographies. But what he did produce was astonishing.

He was louche, debauched, and pretentious, but he was also remarkable. He was a paradox: a wonderful failure.

Life of Johnson (US link) Boswell’s book — one of the best books ever written.

Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, Adam Sisman (US link) A lovely book about Boswell and how he wrote the Life of Johnson. Highly recommended.

Boswell's "Life of Johnson": A Collection of Critical Essays (US link) Excellent detailed essays about Boswell’s papers, his memory, how he edited the Life.

Samuel Johnson: Opsimath — my earlier post on Johnson

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