A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham 9781684483549

Table of contents :
Contents
A Note on the Cover Image
Introduction
PART I Essays on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
Mirrored Minds: Johnson and Shakespeare
The General and the Particular: Paradox and the Play of Contraries in the Criticism of Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds
“The Caliban of Literature”: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Johnson’s Intertextual Scholarship
In Silence and Darkness: Johnson’s Verdicts on Artistic Failure
Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land
The Social Life of Thomas Cumming, or “Clubbing” with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker
Not “Just a Macheath”: Young Boswell and Old Cibber in Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763
PART II Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
English Historiography, the Development of Secular Autobiography, and the Memoir
What Else Did Pope Borrow from Dryden?
Poetic Performances: Pope’s An Essay on Man and Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”
Swift Shrinks the Duke of Marlborough: Public Delegitimation through Scale
Western Gardens, Eastern Views: Asian Travelers on Greenscapes of the British Isles
Publishers Can Cause Earthquakes: Explanations and Enigmas of the Seismic Enlightenment
PART III Personal Reminiscences
Greg Clingham as Teacher and Mentor
Greg Clingham and Bucknell University Press
Commemoratory Poems
Coda
Greg Clingham’s Publications
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A Clubbable Man •

Frontispiece. ​Greg Clingham, pictured h ­ ere at Dr. Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Square, London, where the writer and wit lived and worked in the mid-­eighteenth ­century. Johnson compiled his ­great Dictionary of the En­glish Language in the ­house’s garret. Photo by Jaia Clingham-­David.

A Clubbable Man • Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

E d i t e d b y A n t h o n y   W. L e e

lewisburg, pen nsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, Anthony W., editor. | Clingham, Greg, honouree. Title: A clubbable man : essays on eighteenth-century literature in honor of Greg Clingham / edited by Anthony W. Lee. Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015630 | ISBN 9781684483501 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684483518 (hardback) | ISBN 9781684483525 (epub) | ISBN 9781684483532 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684483549 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR442 .C67 2022 | DDC 820.9/005—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015630 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2022 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.b ­ ucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

Contents

A Note on the Cover Image    ix

Introduction ​ ​ ​1 Anthony W. Lee PA R T I

Essays on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell Mirrored Minds: Johnson and Shakespeare ​ ​ ​5 Philip Smallwood The General and the Par­tic­u­lar: Paradox and the Play of Contraries in the Criticism of Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds ​ ​ ​22 David Hopkins “The Caliban of Lit­er­a­ture”: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Johnson’s Intertextual Scholarship ​ ​ ​39 Anthony W. Lee In Silence and Darkness: Johnson’s Verdicts on Artistic Failure ​ ​ ​54 Adam Rounce Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land ​ ​ ​71 Aaron R. Hanlon The Social Life of Thomas Cumming, or “Clubbing” with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker ​ ​ ​90 Robert G. Walker Not “Just a Macheath”: Young Boswell and Old Cibber in Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763 ​ ​ 103 Gordon Turnbull v

vi C o n t e n t s PA R T I I

Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture En­glish Historiography, the Development of Secular Autobiography, and the Memoir ​ ​ ​121 Martine Brownley What Else Did Pope Borrow from Dryden? ​ ​ ​140 Cedric D. Reverand II

Poetic Per­for­mances: Pope’s An Essay on Man and Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” ​ ​ ​153 John Richetti

Swift Shrinks the Duke of Marlborough: Public Delegitimation through Scale ​ ​ ​169 Clement Hawes Western Gardens, Eastern Views: Asian Travelers on Greenscapes of the British Isles ​ ​ ​185 Bärbel Czennia Publishers Can Cause Earthquakes: Explanations and Enigmas of the Seismic Enlightenment ​ ​ ​207 Kevin L. Cope PA R T I I I

Personal Reminiscences Greg Clingham as Teacher and Mentor ​ ​  229 Dominic Jermey Elaine Wood Caroline Fassett Joseph McNicholas Margaret Williams Erin Labbie Patrick Thomas Henry Adam Walker W. K. Tchou Greg Clingham and Bucknell University Press ​ ​  241 Gary Sojka Nina Forsberg Daniel ­Little James Rice John Rickard

Contents

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Commemoratory Poems ​ ​ 249 “It is rowing without a port.” Notes by Lady Anne Barnard while in South Africa Antjie Krog “Frances Towne” Kieron Winn “An Ode: Alexander Pope Reciprocally Writes an Encomium for Samuel Johnson” Emily Grosholz “­Mother Johnson” Harry Thomas Coda ​ ​ 257 Kate Parker Greg Clingham’s Publications ​ ​ 263 Acknowl­edgments ​ ​  269 Bibliography ​ ​ 271 Notes on Contributors ​ ​ 291 Index ​ ​ 299

A Note on the Cover Image

Sherlock Library, St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge Robert Wodelarke founded St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1473 with a library of 84 manuscripts and three printed books. T ­ oday, the collection is comprised of 65,000 volumes in three libraries, and includes early printed books and manuscripts, the library of John Addenbrooke (1680–1719), the Smith collection of Darwinalia, and early editions of the plays of James Shirley (1596–1666). The image featured on the cover of this book is a corner of the Sherlock Library (1756), established by Dr.  Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761), Master of the College (1714–1719), and ­later Bishop of Salisbury and Bishop of London. The Sherlock Library was reputedly the first library in the University of Cambridge to produce a printed cata­log, in 1771. During his undergraduate years at St. Catharine’s (1975–1978), Greg Clingham spent many an after­noon and long night (the library being open 24 hours per day during term), in this corner at this desk in the Sherlock Library, reading Chaucer, Malory, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Austen, Keats, Words­worth, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, and E. M. Forster, in preparation for his weekly supervisions with, at vari­ous times, J.M.Y. Andrew, Dr. Richard Luckett, Dr. Paul Hartle, Dr. Charles Moseley, Dr. Glen Cavaliero, and H.A. Mason, as well as for his informal, formative conversations with close friends, also Catz men, Dr. Simon Varey and Dr. C.P. Macgregor. Ad honorem.

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A Clubbable Man •

Introduction Anthony W. Lee

To quote from a private communication sent me by Kevin L. Cope, one of the contributors to this collection of thirteen essays and miscellaneous commemorations by vari­ous hands, “­There are few in academe, and even fewer in publishing, who have done so much to advance the fortunes of so many worthy scholars as Greg Clingham.” The chronological bibliography of his works appended to this volume attests that Greg’s own scholarly achievements are considerable. More impressively striking, however, is the realization that this publication rec­ord was attained amidst his busy duties as a teacher and as the director of a major university press—­many of which are detailed below, in some of the commendatory reflections by previous associates. His selfless generosity in facilitating and promoting the work of ­others in t­ hese latter roles absorbed many hours that might have been spent on his own research and writing proj­ects. This sacrifice, however, has benefited countless ­others in the academic field: it is no overstatement to say that many students and ju­nior scholars owe much of their eventual professional success to his patient guidance and unswerving support. Indeed, the fruits of ­these ­labors are apparent in the number of pieces collected in this volume that are penned by former students. During his more than two de­cades at the helm of Bucknell University Press, Greg energetically—­and almost single-­handedly—­navigated BUP from a relatively small regional ­house to one of the major forces in con­temporary academic publishing. As I have written elsewhere, “He has expanded coverage to include such areas as German lit­er­a­ture and culture, Latin American lit­er­a­ture and theory, Irish writers, Rus­sian and comparative humanities, as well as Africana studies. However, for many readers of Eighteenth-­Century Life, the most significant consequence of his stewardship must lie in his active promotion of and tenacious support for scholarship devoted to the long eigh­teenth ­century.”1 It is fitting then, as he steps away from his administrative duties, that Greg’s accomplishments be marked and celebrated by this Festschrift. And it is particularly appropriate that such a liber amicorum would focus upon Greg’s own field of specialization—­t he area he so actively 1

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promoted as BUP director—­t he lit­er­a­ture and culture of the eigh­teenth ­century. It is precisely this intention that the pre­sent book fulfills. A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham (the main title word, celebrating Greg’s extensive professional and social connections, comes from Frances Burney’s Diary and Letters, where Johnson dismisses the staid and aloof Sir John Hawkins as “a most unclubable [sic] man!”2) assem­bles some of the top scholars in the field to pay tribute to Greg’s many accomplishments. The initial chapters focus upon Johnson and his circle. This choice is appropriate, given that Johnson in many re­spects inhabits the heart of Greg’s scholarly life, a touchstone never far away from his critical awareness. The second section comprises essays focusing more generally upon the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, taking up such figures as Dryden, Swift, Pope, Reynolds and ­others, as well as addressing such diverse topics as eighteenth-­century intertextuality, life-­w riting, travel, eco-­ criticism, historical analy­sis, close rhetorical reading, and, perhaps most surprisingly, seismology. All the essays on impor­tant figures and topics are unified by a central concern—­like Greg’s life and ­career—­w ith relationships. For example, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersection of the general and par­tic­u­lar in three key eighteenth-­century figures: Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling (walking) and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Robert W. Walker’s “The Social Life of Thomas Cumming, or ‘Clubbing’ with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker,” extends the theme, like ­others in the collection honoring the title, to textual and social group formations. ­W hether by way of social and cultural exchanges or through textual reciprocities, each essay endeavors to use the trope of relationship to or­ga­nize and express its findings in ways that mirror Greg Clingham’s own extensive academic and, ultimately, humanistic networking. The third part divides into three subsections: remembrances by former students; remarks by administrative colleagues; and poems on eighteenth-­century topoi by creative writers associated with Greg. In this re­spect, the book may be said to be unique, combining as it does generic categories that are typically allowed to stand on their own, alone, cross-­fertilizing to produce a larger textual entity that illuminates and reflects the manifold achievements of Greg Clingham and his rich and multifaceted impact upon the world of letters.

notes 1. ​A nthony  W. Lee, “Bucknell University Press: Twenty Years of the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury,” Eigh­teenth ­Century Life 42, no. 3 (September 2018): 1. 2. ​Francis Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, vol. 3, part 1 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1994), 76.

PA RT I

•

Essays on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

Mirrored Minds johnson and shakespeare Philip Smallwood Within the limits of plausible argument, the most instructive comparisons (­whether of difference or similarity) are ­those that surprise. —Benedict Anderson

Beyond Comparison Anyone raising the topic of Johnson and Shakespeare, alongside the well-­worked subject of Johnson on Shakespeare, ­w ill encounter skepticism from a number of quarters. For ­t hose whose instinctive enthusiasm must always be Shakespeare (1564–1616), over and above the genius of Johnson (1709–1784), the proposal falls at the first fence. The two authors ­w ill seem strictly beyond comparison. My attempt to pre­sent them in parallel may therefore appear fatally prone to the logical fallacy satirized by Shakespeare in the fanciful notion of Fluellen in Henry V on the similarities between two military chiefs, where he likens Alexander the ­Great to King Henry of Monmouth based on where they chanced to be born: I tell you, captain, if you look at the maps of the world, I warrant you s­ hall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. ­There is a river in Macedon, and ­t here is also moreover a river at Monmouth . . . ​and ­t here is salmons in both.1

It is not principally that dif­fer­ent genres channeled the essential genius of each author (though they did). The objection is rather that t­ here is a fundamental difference in symbolic value between the two writers and that comparison must appear to ignore this. Shakespeare and Johnson inhabit two starkly contrasting contexts (opposite sides of a scientific and philosophical watershed defined by Newton and Locke) and a conventionally contrasting set of social and cultural determinants: in the one case an enlarging, socially diverse public of theater-­goers that has not gone away; in the other a reading public and a growing market for literary, scholarly, and critical wares that has continued to expand. Attitudes to both are 5

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colored by caricatures—­not in themselves wholly untrue but not the w ­ hole truth ­either. ­There is the “Shakespearean”: think variety of characters, immortal expressions that are the product of linguistic, poetic, and imaginative power, what the critic F. R. Leavis, who drew a sharp distinction between Shakespeare and Johnson at Johnson’s expense, called the “exploratory creative” use of language.2 Then t­ here is the “Johnsonian”: think a singular rhetorical and didactic manner that left its mark on an age, a sense of lit­er­a­ture’s relation to life, a wisdom, a pithy insight or sounding circumlocution, satire, conversational flair and extempore wit, the gravity of “statement.” Such attributes collect conflicting systems of cultural import. Overlaps w ­ ill instantly come to mind, and I’ll draw attention to them in this essay—­ but the bottom line is that the writers are differently esteemed ­because dif­fer­ent in kind. This perception is in some ways a relic of eighteenth-­century critical history itself, a legacy of the attempt by Johnson’s con­temporary Joseph Warton to define a ­grand authorial rank order. In the dedication to his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Warton had drawn a line between witty and satirical poetry (such as Pope’s) and the “True” or “Pure” or “Sublime and Pathetic” poetry of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.3 Such habits of critical categorization die hard. They are pre­sent again in the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold and his strange insistence that while Dryden and Pope “may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification,” they w ­ ere not poets in the sense he most valued (his standard is Words­ worth) but “classics of our prose.” 4 The caricatures we have of Shakespeare and Johnson, identified by the adjectives made up from their names, permit, then, a generalizing grasp of the perceived fundamentals of each author. Literary history cannot do without such caricatures; but their necessity is at the cost of exclusions and a degree of distortion that limits the truth of such history; the terms are weighted assessments conditioned by the indispensability of generalization to critical-­and literary-­historical formation. Alexander Pope teaches the value of “Due Distance” in such assessments—­t he need to take in the ­whole picture in our estimate and, while not ignoring the detail, to avoid premature distractions.5 Literary history has its own dramas of major form: its pro­gress and structure are defined by individuals standing as proxies for the ages in which they wrote; they in turn are defined by our conceptions of ­t hose ages; the pro­gress, diversions, developments, and revolutions charted by history seem impossible without such a perspective.6 But also, perhaps, when we stand back to a sufficient degree, and when in Pope’s phrase from the Essay on Criticism, we “Survey the Whole” (l.235; Twickenham Pope, 1:266), the exercise of comparing Shakespeare with Johnson appears not so doomed ­after all; it need suggest no blatant disregard of what is obvious to consensual valuation. The trou­ble is that the comparison between Shakespeare and almost anyone ­else can easily tend to go all one way. Shakespeare, ­after all, is a ­great theatrical genius, the greatest that ever was, a match for Homer, Mozart, Descartes, Rubens, Michelangelo, or Wagner in their respective departments. The predisposition to think of Johnson as necessarily of a lower order, before detailed questions of artistic quality are raised, may ultimately be borne out; but t­ here is a danger of

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overstatement, of assumptions unexamined that underplay the mirrored minds of a Shakespeare in Johnson and a Johnson in Shakespeare. Johnson is doubtless accomplished in vari­ous secondary or experimental tasks proper to the literary sage—­lexicographer, periodical journalist, and author of a stand-­a lone play and a solitary “novel” (the term “novel” to describe Johnson’s Rasselas fits only partly). And as his respected poetical oeuvre is small, he is celebrated as biographer and critic more than as poet, one who defined the art of judgment for posterity. Therefore, however accomplished his comments upon the creative productions of other writers, or however tireless in undertaking vast scholarly and editorial ­labors of an heroic order, and however seriously or unseriously we take his criticism ­today, including his criticism of Shakespeare, he ultimately falls foul of the prejudices conventionally reserved for the critic of art as against the primacy of the artist. With the flowering of satire, the g­ reat (critical) tradition of finding critics ridicu­ lous blossomed unpre­ce­dentedly in the eigh­teenth ­century, and his eminence ensured that Johnson was the victim of many assaults.7 The caricaturist James Gillray produced some gloriously savage satirical cartoons. The poet Tennyson in the nineteenth c­ entury would dismiss critics in general as parasites, “lice on the locks of lit­er­at­ ure,” 8 and even at its best, the critical role has often seemed a literary occupation of the second or third tier. In an essay on the Metaphysical poets published in the twentieth ­century T. S. Eliot influentially constructed literary history as a narrative of sensibility “dissociated,” a pro­cess allegedly starting within the literary modes of the late seventeenth c­ entury and afflicting the eigh­teenth ­century to impoverishing effect.9 On ­these terms, a fortiori, Johnson has often appeared a sterile “neoclassic.” He is rule and reason-­bound, deaf to m ­ usic, blind to art, insensitive to drama, hostile to the wild and the f­ ree nature of Shakespeare’s unfettered creativity and Dionysian energy. He even had the nerve to suggest that Shakespeare had faults. The judgmental playing field of comparison must therefore always seem far from level. The task must be to step over this a priori obstacle to a more even-­ handed approach by pretending it ­doesn’t exist and by appealing to a curiosity underpinning experiments in literary pairing. This is the spirit motivated by the promise of bringing two ­great En­glish writers together as complementary, mutually explanatory experiences and of seeing—­out of curiosity—­what they reveal of each other if we do. By analogy with Benedict Anderson’s practice of comparing po­liti­cal regimes in far distant nation states, the incentive arises from surprising likeness in radical difference. This is, in Johnson’s own formulation, the potential for “discovery of occult resemblances in ­t hings apparently unlike” conventionally enjoyed by readers of the seventeenth-­century Metaphysical poets.10

Lives L ­ ittle and Largely Known In the style of Fluellen t­ here is no shortage of mere circumstantial resemblance: ­t here are—­“ look you”—­“salmons in both.” How we weight the comparison is the prob­lem. Certainly, we seem to know very ­little about Shakespeare’s life (though many have fantasized about the detail), and most attempts at biography have much

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of the “must have done” or “prob­ably thought” or “most likely knew” or “almost certainly read” about them. The massive biography by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare as the “Soul of the Age” starts from historically documented ascertainables about the ravages of the plague, the general nature of Re­nais­sance Eu­rope, and the Elizabethan system of grammar school education that Shakespeare experienced. ­There is real history ­here; but the study is also packed with the kinds of speculative formulations I’ve mentioned whenever inferences are drawn—as they have to be in a “Life”—­about what Shakespeare did, where he was, who he knew, what he was reading at any one time and what he was making of it.11 It is a feature of history based on surviving documentary sources that we cannot judge the importance of the documents we have lost, or even know how much material has gone missing. But some ­t hings can be known for sure: we can be certain that Shakespeare was friends with Ben Jonson, that he read Holinshed, Plutarch, and at least some of Montaigne; we know Ovid mattered to him, and we know this without a shadow of doubt from surviving rec­ords, from the testimony of other writers, and from the plays themselves; but much cannot be derived, and plausibility, or probability, ­w ill often stand in for demonstrated certainty. Of Johnson’s life, courtesy James Boswell, Hester Thrale, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir John Hawkins, and o ­ thers who knew him personally, in addition to a cata­logue of modern biographers at all points on the scholarly-­popular spectrum, we seem by contrast to know every­t hing—­a ll we might ever want to know. And our confidence in what we feel we know is supported by a presumption of reliable testimony. Boswell was acquainted with Johnson first hand, corresponded with him regularly during periods of absence, and made careful rec­ords of their conversations over the latter half of Johnson’s life; they ate, talked, and travelled together over a period of many years.12 Granted, the Life of Johnson of 1791 is a biographical edifice of true fiction and succeeds through its many constructed situations for revealing interactions. It creates the myth of Samuel Johnson while evoking his singularity and immortalizing his flaws—­Boswell’s “presumptuous task” pre­sents Johnson in the monumental light he wishes Johnson to be remembered.13 “Sir, said Doctor Johnson. . . .” Such magisterial mannerisms as Boswell accorded to Johnson are audible: few BBC actors reading from Johnson’s works or Boswell’s rec­ord of Johnson’s conversation can apparently resist putting on the silly voice. The witness testimony of contemporaries is not entirely wanting in the case of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson writes from the heart in his famous poetical tribute “To the memory of my beloved, The AVTHOR Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: And what he hath left vs” (1623). Addressing the dead dramatist and poet, he observes how the work that Shakespeare has left ­behind him ­will survive the finite limits of the ­human span: “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.”14 And Ben has furnished us with an affectionate tribute to a friend and fellow playwright in his commonplace book, Timber or Discoveries (1640): “I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry),” he writes, “as much as any.” “Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and ­free nature: had an excellent Phantsie [fancy]; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that fa­cil­i­t y, that

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sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d” (583–584). This, too, is intimately and pleasingly personal; Ben knew William as Boswell knew Sam, and Ben offers a tantalizingly brief glimpse of a congenial and vastly inventive personality; but in the ­matter of Shakespeare, we see nothing of the wide landscape of the life made known to us by Boswell of Johnson and brought vividly alive through conversations caught in numerous types of com­pany and social situation. The researches may be scrupulous and the inferences plausible, but the life of Shakespeare remains largely an enigma by comparison. Even the best biographies have an air of desperation about them. But who would be without a “life of Shakespeare,” large though the role for imagination must be? For our purpose, however lightweight the evidence on the Shakespearean side of the scales, some life parallels can be drawn. The fact that both ­were the most famous sons of small but impor­tant towns in the En­glish Midlands may appear biographically and contextually trite; so too the observation that both experienced the social ­middle ground of the trading classes and ­were the offspring of local businessmen of some standing who came to know hard times financially; both tried their hand at school teaching but neither stayed the course; both married older ­women; for both the law and the ­legal profession ­were sources of well-­documented interest (Johnson had early ambitions as a l­ awyer and ­later in life could offer Boswell, who practiced law, impor­tant advice). Shakespeare, for his part, encountered the machinery of law through litigation over property rights: to this experience, as suggested by Bate (whose insight deserves credit ­here), are owed such dramatic inventions as the portrait of Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2 and in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Soul of the Age, 316–317). Johnson attended Pembroke College Oxford for one year, though for neither man was university the significant experience of youth that some literary contemporaries in respective generations enjoyed. But ­these broadly common origins, tendencies, and limitations have the potential to mean more than one might think in the mea­sure­ment of temperamental inclination or the identification of cultural anchorage points, professional incentives, escape trajectories, and confident rootedness. Both departed their native county to make a glorious success of literary life in London, the center of popu­lar theatrical culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as it was the focus of the literary and critical culture of an eighteenth-­century world. Among the ties that bind them is the fact that Johnson’s friend and former pupil from his Lichfield days was the ­great Shakespearean actor and adaptor of plays, theater man­ ag­er, and dramatist, David Garrick. This is a world in which Johnson thrived and which established the canonicity of Shakespeare as it celebrated Johnson at its critical center. Shakespeare’s Stratford property portfolio doubtless helped; the award of a pension to Johnson from the king helped likewise smooth the bumps of his own uneven, sometimes precarious financial fortunes. But both made their living essentially by writing and by the ungainsayable appeal of their works’ h ­ uman interest to a public at large. Of this circumstance Johnson was extraordinarily proud. Both wrote poetry. Such primacy of poetical ambition is never completely absent from

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the divergent genres in which they achieved their greatest success. Both embed what are—in effect—­“poems” in kinds of writing not conventionally regarded as poetry: hence Johnson’s moving prose description of Pope’s crippled frame in his “Life of Pope”—­and the eccentric nocturnal personal habits that derived from the condition of being at perpetual war with one’s body (Lives, 4:54–55). The passage is re­created as an ­actual modern poem of ­great poignancy by the living American poet David Ferry. Many such prose paragraphs in the literary criticism and biography of Johnson have the control and verbal organ­i zation of poetry. The term “prose poems” seems apposite, and I w ­ ill examine a further example l­ater on in this essay.

A Sense of Life Shakespeare’s poeticizing needs no par­tic­u ­lar illustration since it is everywhere. Johnson, whose idea of dramatic and theatrical production comprehends what ­today would go by other names, called him “the poet of nature.”15 By working creatively as poets in our modern meaning of the term, both gesture to classical pre­ ce­dents. Yet for neither writer was poetry the practice that in the main assured their lasting celebrity. If both had hopes of poetical c­ areers, what connects most crucially the two writers does not depend on casual contingencies or accidents of background, genre, and context. It is a value vested in their respectively intense ways of seeing the world and of expressing their comprehensive vision. ­Here they have something more than merely circumstantial in common, something more than “salmons.” They are both writers of exceptional scope and range, of “extensive view,” to adopt as a shared attribute Johnson’s phrase from the opening lines of his second Juvenalian imitation The Vanity of ­Human Wishes of 1749 (l.1). Granted, experience of this quality is very dif­fer­ent when u ­ nder the spell of each author in­de­ pen­dently, but the quality itself is not dif­fer­ent and comes down to a fascination with that part of the ­human that does not change. The encounter with life as the key to understanding such attributes provides evidence of humanity’s essential nature: the contrast is with the epic poet John Milton in whom, according to Johnson, “the want of ­human interest is always felt” (Lives, 1:290). And what they share with each other they are active in sharing with us. The fact that Johnson is arguably (it has been argued) our culture’s most articulate witness to the presiding ­human interest of Shakespeare is a complication that should not detract from the fact that knowledge of the ­human is an artistic ambition manifest in his own poetry and prose. As Johnson’s critical test of literary value, it is his motivation for writing on Shakespeare. Observation, then, attentiveness to life, is a concept enabling Shakespeare and Johnson to exist in the same cultural department ­after all. An expert eye for the constancy of the ­human resists the divisions that spring up in the mind of the literary historian, who like F.  R. Leavis, thinks in terms of the Elizabethan, the Re­nais­sance, the Augustans, or the Neoclassic and uses t­ hese classifications of period or historical concept as points of reference to construct Shakespearean and

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Johnsonian caricatures. But crucial to the comparability I advocate h ­ ere—as an affront to the real­ity of ­these concepts—is the explanatory power of a radically antitheoretical mode of comprehending the ­human world. “Life must be seen before it can be known,” writes Johnson in his devastating review of Soame Jenyns’s ­Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.16 The conclusions that might be drawn from rational deduction, or rule, or princi­ple, are constantly tested against the conclusions that direct experience pre­sents. ­These cannot be final. Nor, since they never harden into theory, can they be fi­nally overturned. A skepticism about intellectual systems runs through the thought, or rather the literary effect of the thought, of both writers (even when Shakespeare seems hardly to be thinking at all). So it does through the writings of Shakespeare’s near con­temporary in France, Michel de Montaigne.

Against Theory The common ground between Johnson, Shakespeare, and Montaigne enables comparison to suggest a philosophically anti-­philosophical fraternity enjoyed by all three writers.17 Explicit or implicit in their work is a critique of philosophical tradition evidenced in thought about the role of thinking in h ­ uman life. The fact that Montaigne could have a pervasive influence within the literary life of Johnson’s eighteenth-­century milieu assists their cultural convergence. So too does Shakespeare’s and Johnson’s habitual satire of the philosophical mode and their shared skepticism about the claims of rational consolation. The creative form of an Eastern Tale, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia of 1759, is the conduit for Johnson’s sympathetic despair of established philosophical doctrines—­such as stoicism. H ­ ere the phi­los­o­pher of Nature whose philosophy proves no protection against grief at the loss of his only ­daughter resonates with the loss of Cordelia, “limp in his arms,” by her own ­father at the close of King Lear (Yale Johnson, 16:75). An aversion to encompassing theories also appears in a readiness to criticize, more abrasively sometimes, in such locations as Johnson’s scathing review of Jenyns and his source in the versified philosophy of Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734). The poem presumes to reason the benevolence of divinity and to assert that “What­ever is, is RIGHT” (l.145; “Epistle 4,” Twickenham Pope, 3.1. 141). Johnson is famous for refuting Berkeley by kicking the stone.18 But ­there is also his more mea­sured hostility to his atheist con­temporary David Hume (who had ­little time for Shakespeare), his dismissals of Voltaire’s criticisms of Shakespearean savagery and indecorum (Yale Johnson, 7:65, 84) and his reservations about the very many eighteenth-­century dramas (mainly tragedies) that substitute ponderous moralizing for dramatic energy. The contrast, again, is with his eloquent appreciation of Shakespeare on the grounds of what makes drama “dramatic”: “the pro­gress of his fable and the tenour of his dialogue.” While “­others please us by par­tic­u­lar speeches . . . ​[Shakespeare] always makes us anxious for the event” (Yale Johnson, 7:62, 83). Johnson thought that Shakespeare enjoyed an advantage that ­later writers did not. He composed his plays at a time before the Eu­ro­pean philosophical tradition had ­really developed:

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P h i l i p S m a l lw o o d The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had not yet commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal princi­ples of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action. All ­those enquiries, which from that time that h ­ uman nature became the fash­ion­able study, have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty, w ­ ere yet unattempted. (Yale Johnson, 7:88)

In that phrase “became the fash­ion­able study,” ­there is the implicit charge of moral superficiality. Subtle enquiries into ­human nature can equally be “idle.” Shakespeare, while not a phi­los­o­pher, can nevertheless be a “thinker,” through the sentiments he gives to his in­ven­ted characters or t­ hose derived from historical originals and again in the moral design of entire plays. In the case of the former, think of the confessional soliloquies of Hamlet, à la Montaigne, or the ­g reat political-­ philosophical oration on degree by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. In the case of the latter, ­there are the terrible abysses of unnatural horror and desolation (“chasm[s] infinitely deep”)19 that open up in all of his g­ reat tragedies and what we are left with—to ponder philosophically—by them. What is and i­sn’t a part of Nature when we stare with unshaded eyes into the unspeakable interior of our own humanity? As a critic, Johnson especially appreciates the many explicit wisdoms to be found everywhere in the plays, as well as the many arguments or trains of reason that characters explore, as for example the famous lamentation on “Tomorrow” re­created in Johnsonian terms in his notes to Macbeth (Yale Johnson, 8:793). But as impor­tant are the many moral-­philosophical issues that arise and are handled dramatically: conscience, causation, the nature of guilt, racial prejudice, unreason, the morality of armed combat, crime and punishment, governance, patriotism and po­liti­cal thought, sexual psy­chol­ogy, f­amily values, ageing and death. Characters in the plays sometimes raise such topics. They may be debated; but they are best realized through that combination of character, situation, and plot that is the special province of dramatic per­for­mance and that places the emphasis on ways of saying, on the associated action, and on the ­human and narrative contexts in which ­t hings are said. In the devotion to abstraction, which can be the death of drama as Johnson well understood, philosophy must of necessity turn ­t hese contexts aside.

A Sense of the Dramatic Johnson’s writings do not lack appreciation of the dramatic mode or, in his own terms, a personal talent for dramatization, albeit that his attempt at actually writing a play notoriously fails in dramatic effect. Once he witnessed it staged, courtesy of Garrick, it was an experiment he never repeated. As Johnson freely conceded, the tragedy of Irene, learnedly based on a history of the Turks, was a disappointment and was itself the victim of a con­temporary fashion for the declamatory voice. This voice Johnson could share with Shakespeare as he recognized the inconsis-

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tent nature of Shakespearean genius. Alongside some of the notes to the plays it is a fault that he critically elaborates in the Preface to Shakespeare, observing that “[Shakespeare’s] declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak” so that he “seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader” (Yale Johnson, 7:73). In their relative success as dramatists the divide between Johnson and Shakespeare could hardly be greater; but Johnson understands the prob­lem from the inside, as only a fellow practitioner might comprehend it. That phrase “like other tragick writers” turns the reference back to the self and to how far Johnson’s own “stores of knowledge” served ultimately to deaden the solitary drama he had nurtured. Johnson’s grasp of how drama works comes out forcefully, however, in his Shakespearean criticism, as in his famous comments on the attention-­ manacling power of King Lear: “The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. Th ­ ere is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity” (Yale Johnson, 8:702). A sense of “dramatic” (as opposed to theatrical) form is a prominent attribute of Johnson’s critical accountings; enactment shapes a variety of Johnson’s work. This flair for dramatization appears in a lighter mode within the social vignettes and satirical narratives of the Rambler or the Idler, but moves to the threshold of tragedy in his descriptions of the individuals whose varied histories Johnson organizes in his Lives of the En­glish Poets. The dramatic pathos of Jonathan Swift’s terminal decline in the “Life of Swift” combines an almost medically detached inquisitiveness with Johnson’s own psychic and physical fears; it is a particularly power­f ul piece of eighteenth-­century tragic writing. The closing paragraphs ally the tragedy of Swift to the disintegration of Shakespeare’s King Lear: The tumour [in his eye] at last subsided; and a short interval of reason ensuing, in which he knew his physician and his f­ amily, gave hopes of his recovery; but in a few days he sunk into lethargick stupidity, motionless, heedless, and speechless. But it is said, that, ­a fter a year of total silence, when his ­house­keeper, on the 30th of November, told that the usual bonfires and illuminations w ­ ere preparing to celebrate his birth-­day, he answered. It is all folly; they had better let it alone. It is remembered that he afterwards spoke now and then, or gave some inti­ ntil mation of meaning; but at last sunk into perfect silence, which continued u about the end of October 1744, when, in his seventy-­eighth year, he expired without a strug­gle. (Lives, 3:207–208)

­ ere is resignation in the close of this passage, but the foregoing phrasing capTh tures the uneven agony of Swift’s erratic demise as a proxy for his wayward life. The conjunction of m ­ ental and physical distress is acute in Johnson’s mea­sured pauses. Johnson’s unsentimental sympathy rec­ords the lucid glimmers that punctuate Swift’s slide into extinction; the coolly bureaucratic atmosphere created by the cited dates gives inevitability to the markers of time that terminate where time itself is eclipsed. In his biographical treatment of the death of Swift Johnson shows

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that stage per­for­mance is not, in the event, the indispensable condition for tragedy of Shakespearean force.

A Shakespearean Standard Johnson’s Lives shares with Shakespeare and Montaigne a common inspiration in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—­and this series of classical pairings helps model the exactitude and equipoise of his critical comparisons between Dryden and Pope or (in the Preface to Shakespeare) the contrast between the dramatic energy of a single Shakespeare play and the formality of Joseph Addison’s popu­lar tragedy of the noble Roman Cato. H ­ ere, famously, “Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men” (Yale Johnson, 7:84). The reservations Johnson expresses on the stilted theatricality of Samson Agonistes (Lives, 1:292–93) and on the studied ornamental poeticality of the masque of Comus in the “Life of Milton” (Lives, 1:280–82) imply similarly a Shakespearean test of dramatic merit, as do his reservations about narrative poems such as Butler’s Hudibras (Lives, 2:6).20 In the major form of the Lives Johnson’s sense of the contrasts and continuities of the ­human enacts a comprehensive fraternity with Shakespearean nature. This is the quality once recognized in the paragraph from the Essay on Dramatic Poetry quoted by Johnson in his Preface. “Shakespeare was the man,” wrote Dryden in 1667, “who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature w ­ ere still pre­sent to him” (Yale Johnson, 7:112). Johnson’s primary praise for Shakespeare rests on “general nature.” This is the critical concept that he had been the first to elaborate in a classic passage on nature’s combination of depth and durability: Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of par­t ic­u ­lar places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world ­w ill always supply, and observation ­w ill always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of t­ hose general passions and princi­ples by which all minds are agitated, and the ­whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in ­t hose of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. (Yale Johnson, 7:61–62)

Johnson is held to account for t­ hese values as a critic. But Johnson’s sense of “what observation w ­ ill always find” can also be applied to his own creative writings. “Let Observation with extensive view . . .” begins his greatest poem (Yale Johnson, 6: 91) and the satirical, or rather, tragic portraits of the Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes instantiate types inspired by individuals: Cardinal Wolsey, his fall recalling Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Xerxes, Swedish Charles, and so on work as case histories to illuminate a pervasive existential condition and appeal to the consolations of Chris-

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tian salvation in the face of h ­ uman insufficiency. ­Here too, in anticipation of the theatrical quality of the death scenario I have quoted from the “Life,” “Swift expires a driv’ler and a show” (l.318; Yale Johnson, 6:106). In Rasselas ­t here is no such reassurance from religion; but the form of the Eastern Tale enables Johnson to withdraw from the particularities of a recognizable everyday life, naturalistically displayed, to capture the large moral and philosophical issues that arise from all times and places and in his own style to dramatize them. Rasselas, reputedly written in the eve­nings of one week while Johnson worked full-­tilt on his 1765 edition of the plays, offers a Shakespearean moment in its focus on variety, the quality that Johnson was to accord to Hamlet in his endnote to that play: “If the dramas of Shakespeare ­were to be characterised, each by the par­tic­u­lar excellence which distinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety.” “ ‘Variety,’ said Rasselas, “ ‘is so necessary to content, that even the Happy Valley disgusted me by the recurrence of its luxuries’ ” (16:164; Yale Johnson, 8:1010–1011). The narrative of Rasselas shows how the experience of “general nature” is no more synonymous with uniformity than the spirit of Shakespeare’s play. Through its appeal to “general nature,” Johnson’s “Life of Savage” once more particularizes the variety of humanity’s incarnations. Richard Savage, a convicted murderer and a drunk, was the poet of The Bastard and the maverick companion of Johnson in his wild early days in London, long before Boswell made Johnson’s acquaintance. But the effect of Johnson’s biography of Savage and his analy­sis of a gifted but delusive and self-­destructive rogue, traces the arc of ­human aspiration, folly, and ultimate failure. The “Life” offers a forgiving, compassionate, but clear-­ sighted judgment on the simultaneous error and attractions of general humankind. This combination Johnson also explored in the mingle of warmth and undeluded moral directness (spoken, as it w ­ ere, to the man’s face) that marks his portrait of Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2: “Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how ­shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice” (Yale Johnson, 7:523). Like the real-­life Savage, Falstaff is a one-­off instance of exceptional humanity through which the variety of “general nature” can be known and, if not approved, at least enjoyed. When Johnson is touring the Western Isles of Scotland with Boswell, his eye falls on t­ hose everyday details that bespeak a complete and coherent culture, albeit one that is in the pro­cess of ­dying out. The perspective is uncondescendingly anthropological and unfailingly curious; Johnson perhaps views the life of the Highlands and islands with the eye of the journalist he once was. But t­ here is again a characteristic movement (in both directions) between the par­tic­u­lar and the general, a sense of how environmental change relates to changes in the ­human condition, and to the nature of change itself and of how understanding ­t hese ­factors explains what is before one’s eyes. The Ovidian, Lucretian, Pythagorean values of a common classical heritage animate the writings of both Johnson and Shakespeare. With this background in mind, the spirit of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)21 can associate naturally with the literary genesis of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The suspension of both tragic and comic

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modes in Rasselas offers likewise an interpretive context for understanding the character transformations of Hamlet and the “mingled drama” of all the plays (Yale Johnson, 7:66). Johnson joins com­pany with Shakespeare as an “exact surveyor of the inanimate world” ­adept in “contemplating ­things as they ­really exist”; he “looked upon mankind with perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive” (Yale Johnson, 7:89; 88). It should then be no surprise to find Johnson drawing on Hamlet for his image of Shakespeare holding up a mirror to ­every mind; and no surprise to recall that Shakespeare and Johnson alike inhabit the broad culture of Re­nais­sance humanism—­t he fruits of the Latin language, the wisdom of Erasmus, the Essayes of Montaigne (translated in 1603 by John Florio), and the unbroken life of the skeptical tradition. His contemporaries ­were likely to exalt Milton as the literary hero of the last age worthy of the most extended critical appraisal, an emphasis shared by Johnson in his early ­career;22 but it is an extraordinary fact that Johnson’s first comprehensive evaluation of any En­glish literary genius whatsoever is a criticism of Shakespeare. The Elizabethan dramatist took possession of his critical mind in the years up to 1765 and burst unpre­ce­dentedly upon his attention. How the world thought about Shakespeare was never the same thereafter, and the influence of Johnson’s criticism came to be felt throughout Eu­rope. This was not always in the terms that Johnson would have approved. I have in mind the Shakespeare who is the epitome of romanticism, as god, bard, perfect and superior being, as much a stimulus to German and Eu­ro­pean Romanticism as British nationalism. “With us islanders,” wrote Arthur Murphy in reply to Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare in 1753, “Shakespeare is a kind of established religion in poetry.”23 Johnson’s Shakespeare implies no such blasphemous appeal. Johnson is sometimes thought to disrespect actors, and from the beginning of his theatrical ­career Shakespeare was, of course, a professional actor-­playwright. Johnson’s satire of actors can be hilariously pointed, as when he narrates a visit (real or i­ magined) to his “old acquaintance,” one Prospero (note the Shakespearean pseudonymous type). This is the host who hides his best china from his now less eminent, less fastidious guest and who prob­ably embodies the increasingly self-­ important personage of David Garrick, whose fame and wealth had now outstripped that of his former schoolmaster. The essay appears in Rambler 200 (1752), and the unflattering portrait prompts the laughter we might reserve for some modern incarnations of acting celebrity, the inflated grandeur of thespian knights and dames and their role as unimpeachable Shakespearean authorities. Johnson is in critical dialogue with the Shakespearean fashions of our times when he stresses the text, “a play read,” the “poet of nature” (my emphases; Yale Johnson, 7:79, 62), literary value, his re­sis­tance to and irreverence ­toward Shakespeare as shown in the clear-­sighted recognition of faults and his cele­bration of comic playability as against tragedy’s strutting on stilts. He opens the way to a more grounded and disinterested look at Avon’s “Sweet Swan.” At times Johnson disdains the pretensions of actors and seems maladapted to theatrical culture: he writes concerning Savage’s friend, the actor Wilks, of a profession “which makes almost e­ very other man, for what­ever reason, contemptu-

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ous, insolent, petulant, selfish, and brutal” (Lives, 3:127). But ­t here is also much to suggest his admiration for the singular merits of stage performers. In the course of his editorial notes to Shakespeare, Johnson defends the “players” against the disdain of Bishop William Warburton (Shakespeare’s antecedent editor of 1747) on the grounds that they introduced inferior ­matter into the plays. He successfully avoids agreeing with Warburton that the textual lapses of Shakespeare are to be blamed on the players. Add to this that Johnson offers some penetrating thoughts on the art of acting in the course of his Lives of the Poets. At the commencement of his “Life of Otway” he reflects on why it is that a good playwright does not always or often make a good actor. Otway, according to Johnson, shared with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, “as he shared likewise of their excellences,” a certain kind of inability. Johnson expatiates thus: It seems reasonable to expect that a ­great dramatick poet should without difficulty become a ­great actor; that he who can feel, could express; that he who can excite passion, should exhibit with ­great readiness its external modes: but since experience has fully proved that of t­ hese powers, what­ever be their affinity, one may be possessed in a g­ reat degree by him who has very l­ ittle of the other; it must be allowed that they depend upon dif­fer­ent faculties, or on dif­fer­ent use of the same faculty; that the actor must have a pliancy of mien, a flexibility of countenance, and a variety of tones, which the poet may be easily supposed to want; or that the attention of the poet and the player have been differently employed; the one has been considering thought, and the other action; one has watched the heart, and the other contemplated the face. (Lives, 2:24)

Claude Rawson has written that “Johnson . . . ​disliked the theatre and was impervious on princi­ple to the force of dramatic illusion.”24 The distinctions in the passage I have just quoted could not be made by someone who fits this description.

A Dialogue of the Dead I’ve spoken slightingly of the fantasies indulged by modern biographers of Shakespeare and have compared the speculation of Shakespearean biography with the more solid knowledge of Johnson’s life acquired from Boswell and other intimates. Let me now indulge a fantasy of my own. Let’s assume that Johnson and Shakespeare had met in Hades, Heaven, or on Mount Parnassus in a dialogue of the dead. What turns would their talk have taken? We know enough to be sure that both enjoyed the pleasures of sociability and lively conversation. They would without doubt detect this appetite in each other and would warm to it; and they had enough in common temperamentally to ensure any arguments that erupted would be real. Their differences are real enough—­Johnson is forthright and, for some who suffered in his com­pany, brusque and downright rude; Shakespeare, if amiable and garrulous, is elusive and perhaps impossible to pin down—or to “stop.” Johnson, though confident in his public persona, is prone to guilt and depression as a private man; as for Shakespeare, though some of his comedies may be dark, and the

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tragedies terrible, all the emotions are likewise his; all the characters are of his making, so we know both every­t hing and nothing of Shakespeare’s psychic interior. Johnson was irritated by unhinged fabulation, mythological imagery, and the trappings of pastoral affectation, and praised Shakespeare ­because he “approximates the remote” (Yale Johnson 7:65). But Shakespeare can be fanciful and super­ natural at the slightest provocation, and he seems at home in the realms of faery as Johnson was not; he loves trickery and revels in gender disguises and identity swaps. Of this trait Johnson could hardly disapprove: Shakespeare, a­ fter all, “familiarizes the wonderful” (Yale Johnson, 7:65); but as a man Johnson hates deceit and duplicity, and as a critic he instinctively refers fancy to truth. This is an emotional ­matter for him: the “heart,” he says of Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard, “naturally loves truth” (Lives, 4:72). The role of deliberation in artistic composition marks their contrasting demeanor as writers. Shakespeare’s most dramatic scenes do not have to be conscious acts of creation (any more than his plays are consistently thought-­out structures). A given utterance might therefore be hard to explain, and his impetuosity may produce the confusions of which Johnson complains; but it is also to the credit of Shakespeare when he summons passionate, thoughtless speech in o ­ thers. The effect seems ­free of contrivance when he depicts individuals possessed by passions exploding ­under pressure. In his notes, Johnson commented on an outburst in Act 4, scene 2 of King John to the effect that t­ hese reproaches vented against Hubert are not the words of art or policy, but the eruptions of a mind swelling with consciousness of a crime, and desirous of discharging its misery on ­others. (Yale Johnson, 7:425)

I exempt some of the prayers and annals of Johnson from this diagnosis of difference: many are outcries or poignant overflowings of private grief at the loss of friends and wife, or they may be pleas for heavenly mercy and forgiveness. Something similar could be said of moments in the letters, which contain utterances of extraordinary emotional power, intimacy, or naked distress.25 But Johnson’s work, on the ­whole, is deliberative to a very high degree, not least in his defence of Shakespeare’s neglect of the unities of time and place: “What I have h ­ ere not dogmatically but deliberatively written,” he asserts in conclusion (Yale Johnson, 7:80). The passage in question is a forensic masterpiece of logical and satirical analy­sis on the subtle relationship between make-­believe on the stage and how good drama constructs real­ity. Key misconceptions are addressed directly. “If ­there be any fallacy,” Johnson concludes, “it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a ­mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from her” (Yale Johnson, 7:78). In our imaginary scenario of two souls communing, Shakespeare’s feelings about his critical interlocutor can only be guessed, and they might well have been mixed—­t hat while praised as the poet of nature, he stands accused of neglecting justice, of overdoing it, of bad grammar, contorted expressions, and carelessly hasty

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endings: “He shortened the ­labour, to snatch the profit” (Yale Johnson, 7:72). Shakespeare might have conceded ­t hese observations; but ­t here ­were times, in mitigation, when the show had to go on, and Johnson—­a fellow professional—­would surely understand this. And despite the criticisms laid at his door, Shakespeare might in any event have preferred the honest Johnsonian appraisal to all the l­ater German adulation about his untrammeled empyrean genius striding divine and godlike above the puny realms of terrestrial nature. Johnson’s successor Stendhal cribbed big chunks from the Preface and called him the “­father of romanticism” for defending Shakespeare.26 But Shakespeare might complain that he simply got on and wrote plays—it was the t­ hing to do at the time; p ­ eople liked them a lot; they w ­ ere moving, disturbing, or funny; and they earned him a living at a time when financial pressures impinged and a living had to be made. He cannot be blamed for what the Romantics made of him, and even when Ben Jonson called him the “Swan of Avon” in his moving tribute, that might already have seemed over the top. Shakespeare’s dramatic characters likewise shine a light on Johnson’s personality. Few would think of Johnson as much like Hamlet, but his ruminative, questioning, tormented introspection reveals a side of the real man, knowable through his private confessionals, reminiscent of the fictional Dane’s.27 Johnson’s intellectual stature and his nature’s tragic turn (as David Ferry intimates of the “Life of Savage”) is justly termed “Tolstoyan,” while his capacity for suffering and sympathy make him Shakespearean in a larger-­t han-­life sense that Shakespeare could not overlook in the greatest eighteenth-­century critic of his plays.28 Johnson for his part expresses l­ ittle interest in the personal life of Shakespeare: the “standard” eighteenth-­century account was that of Nicholas Rowe in his edition of 1709 and was reprinted with successive editions of the Works. Johnson, however, draws inferences of all kinds about the Shakespearean temper, the ­human strengths and weaknesses; so that out of the shadow of the works emerges the person that Shakespeare is: that he had, in common with Johnson, an absorbing fascination with humanity in all its modes (a product, perhaps, of their Janus-­like ­middle station in life); that he offered “a faithful mirrour of manners and of life” (Yale Johnson, 7:62); that he displayed a disposition to comedy making his tragic drama, like life itself, “mingled” (Yale Johnson, 7:69); that he sometimes tries too hard and is too self-­conscious, whereupon he ends up laboring emotions in tragic scenes; that he sometimes ties himself in linguistic knots, and (as Christopher Ricks, quoting Johnson, says of Dylan’s poetry) “It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment that he cannot well express and w ­ ill not reject” (Yale Johnson 7:73);29 that he can be casual where he needs to be careful and shows a flagrant disregard for the difference between right and wrong. He can make the demented credible and, by giving centrality to the mad, cast aside the remedial, sense-­making resource of tragic art. So unbottled was his taste for jokes, and so pressing the imperative to tickle a popu­lar audience for his wares, that the time was right at any time and in any play to work the pit for a laugh. For the sake of the ubiquitous “quibble,” his “fatal Cleopatra,” “he lost the world, and was content

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to lose it” (Yale Johnson, 7:74). We can daydream about their imaginary meeting; but we can also be reasonably sure that when each is viewed through the other’s eyes, as far as this perspective is pos­si­ble, Shakespeare and Johnson appear stranger characters, and strangely more alike in crucial ways, than ­those we think we know when we know them apart. The dialogue imaginable between them opens up our dialogue with them, between the living and the dead. Together, and at such times, they show how literary history, like Shakespearean biography, relies on the occasional fantasy for its truths.

notes 1. ​Shakespeare, Henry V, The Riverside Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1007, 4.7. 22–30. 2. ​See F. R. Leavis, “Doctor Johnson,” Kenyon Review 8 (1946): 637–657. Leavis was reviewing J. W. Krutch’s Samuel Johnson (1944; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963) in which Krutch had written that “aesthetic criticism that was once good is never completely outmoded” and continued with praise of Johnson’s Shakespearean criticism (290). 3. ​Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (1756 and 1782), 1:ix: “Our En­glish poets may, I think, be disposed in four dif­fer­ent classes and degrees.” 4. ​Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” (1880), Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1898), 41–42. 5. ​Pastoral Poetry and “An Essay on Criticism,” vol. 1 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1961), 260, l. 174. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 6. ​See David Perkins, Is Literary History Pos­si­ble? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 4, “Literary Classifications: How Have They Been Made?.” See also my Critical Occasions: Dryden, Pope, Johnson and the History of Criticism (New York: AMS Press, 2012), esp. chap. 1, “Impossible Perspectives? Narratives of Eighteenth-­Century Literary Criticism.” 7. ​For illustrations see Philip Smallwood and Min Wild, eds., Ridicu­lous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014). 8. ​Tennyson’s remark in an anecdote by Gosse recorded in Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (London: Heinemann, 1931), 196–197. 9. ​T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 288. 10. ​Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 1:200. Subsequent references to this edition of the Lives of the Poets appear parenthetically in the text. 11. ​Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2009). Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text. 12. ​See John B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 13. ​James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., with a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 1: 25. 14. ​Ben Jonson, The Poems; the Prose Works, vol. 8 of The Oxford Edition of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 391, l. 22. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 15. ​ ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 62; hereafter cited as Yale Johnson. 16. ​“Review of a F ­ ree Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil” (1757), in Johnson: Poetry and Prose, selected by Mona Wilson (London: Hart Davis, 1968), 357. 17. ​The following section of my discussion parallels arguments I outline in my essay “Shakespeare, Montaigne and Philosophical Anti-­Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to

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Shakespeare and Philosophy, ed. Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne (London: Routledge, 2018), 1–11. 18. ​Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1:471. 19. ​“Review of a ­Free Enquiry,” 355. 20. ​Johnson had criticized the dialogue of Hudibras on the grounds that “some power of engaging the attention might have been added to it, by quicker reciprocation, by seasonable interruptions, by sudden questions, and by a nearer approach to dramatick spriteliness; without which, fictitious speeches ­w ill always tire, however sparkling with sentences, and however variegated with allusions.” The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, 2: 6. 21. ​A pertinent example of a Johnsonian observation in this spirit is recorded in the visit to Bamff, where Johnson examines the detailed construction of the win­dows and their frames in the local h ­ ouses. He then pans out to reflect on the larger considerations that can be deduced from architectural detail and its relation to how we live. See Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, vol. 9 of Yale Johnson, ed. Mary Lascelles, 22–23. 22. ​See, for example, Johnson’s early critical discussions of Milton in Ramblers 86, 88, and 94. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vol. 4 of Yale Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 87–93, 98–104, and 135–143. 23. ​Arthur Murphy, “Essays on Shakespeare 1753–54,” in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 4: 93. The remark originally appeared in the Gray’s Inn Journal for 1753–1754. 24. ​Claude Rawson, “Art and Money,” review of Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The Publication of Plays in London 1660–1800, Times Literary Supplement, March 4, 2016, 24. 25. ​Most famously Johnson’s letter to Mrs. Thrale of Friday, July 2, 1784, on learning that she was to marry Gabriel Piozzi. See The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 4: 1782–1784, ed. Bruce Redford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–1994), 338. 26. ​Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Racine et Shakespeare (1823/1825), Appendice III, “Du Romanticisme dans les Beaux-­Arts” (1819), text établi par Henri Martineau (Paris: Le Divan, 1928), 278. 27. ​Or perhaps the ghost of Hamlet’s ­father: see Anthony W. Lee, “ ‘Look, My Lord, It Comes’: Ghostly Silences in the Boswell/Johnson Archive,” Notes and Queries 64, no. 3 (September 2017): 493–497. 28. ​For Ferry’s sense of the “Tolstoyan severity and sympathy” of Johnson see his “What Johnson Means to Me,” Johnsonian News Letter 55, no. 2 (September 2004): 7–10; repr. in Johnson A ­ fter 300 Years, ed. Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 262–267. 29. ​Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London: Penguin, 2003), 61.

The General and the Par­tic­u­lar paradox and the play of contraries in the criticism of pope, johnson, and reynolds David Hopkins

Generality, Particularity, and Originality in Eighteenth-­Century Criticism Two charges are commonly levelled against eighteenth-­century criticism of lit­er­ a­ture and art in histories and handbooks addressed to the general reader. First, it is said, this criticism is derivative, its judgements resting on externally imposed “rules,” often derived from the distant past, rather than on a spontaneous response to the works of art to which it refers. Second, it is claimed that eighteenth-­century critics privileged depictions of “the general” over displays of the “concrete particularity” that for some ­later critics has constituted a sine qua non of artistic excellence.1 In his study of Sir Joshua Reynolds as a portraitist, Mark Hallett, commenting on the three letters which Reynolds published in Nos. 76, 79, and 82 of The Idler, offers a summary account of Reynolds’s artistic convictions at this stage in his ­career. Hallett reports that, ­after criticizing a con­temporary connoisseur’s censure of Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I for its lack of the “spirit and contrast” and the “flowing line” “that his convention-­bound perspective saw as essential to pictorial grace,” Reynolds goes on to discuss an issue that powerfully ­shaped his own practice, and that was ­later to become central to his Discourses: the need for a “­grand style of painting” that would avoid the kinds of minuteness, naturalism and particularity he associated with Dutch painting and with a lower, artisanal mode of practice. Having in his third article suggested that the painter in search of the beautiful must attend, like the g­ reat Italian masters did, to the most general forms of nature, rather than pursue the slavishly mechanical imitation of nature he sees

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as characteristic of Netherlandish art, he ends by declaring, “if it has been proved that the painter, by attending to the invariable and general ideas of Nature, produces beauty, he must, by regarding minute particularities and accidental discriminations, deviate from the universal rule and pollute his canvas with deformity.”2

Elsewhere, Hallett has described the way in which Reynolds’s l­ater writing in the Discourses encouraged the [Royal] Acad­emy’s artists and students to concentrate on ­grand, universal ideas, and to focus on the central, ideal forms that underpinned the variety and particularity vis­i­ble in the natu­ral world. If “the art which we profess has beauty for its object,” Reynolds declares, “the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist.”3

The sentiments expressed in the two passages from Reynolds quoted by Hallett have often been taken to typify eighteenth-­century attitudes to both painting and poetry and have provoked adverse reactions from both art historians and literary critics. In his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-­Century Verse, Roger Lonsdale has reported the ways in which even supposedly sympathetic commentators on eighteenth-­century verse have felt the need to warn readers not to expect from such writing any “dwelling on the local and the temporary surface of life” or on “the homely, the crude, the capricious, and the abnormal,” but to find “a “polite” style” designed to “muffle” “the ‘low’ and potentially disturbing immediacy of the real world.” The eigh­teenth ­century’s “theoretical preoccupation with general and universal experience,” according to its ­later critics, has, Lonsdale says, “made particularity of description and idiosyncratic subjectivity undesirable and irrelevant.” 4 Such a view was central to the argument of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), a work that, though published over half a c­ entury ago, is still widely recommended and widely influential ­today. In that book, Watt campaigned with undisguised bias for the early En­glish novelists’ emphasis on “truth to individual experience,” in the face of the supposedly elite, classicizing emphasis of eighteenth-­ century poets and their critical epigones on “general ­human types” and “general truths.”5 Hostility to eighteenth-­century praise of “generality” and its supposed connection with the conventional, rule-­bound nature of eighteenth-­century aesthetics found a well-­k nown early expression in the furious marginalia that William Blake wrote, around 1808, in his copy of Edmond Malone’s edition of Reynolds’s Works. Beside Edmund Burke’s approving description of Reynolds as a “­great generalizer,” quoted in Malone’s preliminaries,6 Blake scribbled famously: To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are t­ hose Knowledges that ­Idiots possess.7

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And a few pages e­ arlier, commenting on Malone’s report that the Discourses had been thought by some to have been written by Burke or Samuel Johnson, Blake wrote: The Contradictions in Reynolds’s Discourses are Strong Presumptions that they are the Work of Several Hands, But this is no Proof that Reynolds did not Write them. The Man, ­Either Painter or Phi­los­o­pher, who Learns or Acquires all he knows from ­Others, Must be full of Contradictions. (Blake, Complete Writings, 449)

­ arlier still, Blake annotated a passage in which Reynolds disapproves of the E painterly practice of “general copying” of the work of ­others “as a delusive kind of industry,” exclaiming “­Here he Condemns Generalizing, which he almost always Approves & Recommends” (Blake, Complete Writings, 448). Blake’s hostility to Reynolds’s penchant for generalizing is thus combined with a condemnation of his derivativeness and of the inconsistency that inevitably—in Blake’s view—­ accompanied it. Blake’s generalizations about Reynolds, of course, refute—­ apparently unwittingly—­the princi­ple that they enunciate. But in the very excess of his indignation, Blake has stumbled upon a truth about Reynolds’s Discourses that can be thought of more positively. For, in accusing Reynolds both of unacceptable generalizing and of a self-­contradiction resulting from a lack of originality, Blake alerts us to two impor­tant features of eighteenth-­century criticism. Let us consider first the question of originality. The eigh­teenth c­ entury, to be sure—­like ­every c­ entury—­has its fair share of clichéd, rule-­bound, and conventional criticism. But the best eighteenth-­century critics repeatedly insist that t­ here is a world of difference—in both art and the criticism of art—­between, on the one hand, the inert relaying of received ideas and the dogmatic following of rules and, on the other, the creative absorption and reapplication of the wisdom of one’s pre­ de­ces­sors. A failure to appreciate this fact has sometimes led to serious misunderstandings and misinterpretations of some impor­tant passages in the writings of eighteenth-­century poets and critics. In the first edition of his Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope phrased one of his most famous couplets as follows: True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest; What oft was Thought but ne’er before Exprest,8

When he came to revise the lines a few years ­later, they appeared thus: True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest; What oft was Thought but ne’er so well Exprest,9

The revised couplet, viewed in isolation, has often been taken to imply that, for Pope, the art of writing well consisted merely of the neat expression of commonplace wisdom. But Pope’s couplet, in its original form, suggests something very dif­ fer­ent. The couplet, moreover, in both its forms, cannot be regarded as an isolated

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aphorism, since it ends with a comma, rather than a full stop, and is immediately followed by another two lines: Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind. (ll. 299–300)

Pope’s alteration of his first couplet was perhaps prompted by the realization that to express a sentiment or idea that had never been previously voiced by any ­human being in any form whatsoever might be considered a definition not of “originality” but of hubris, or even madness. In both their forms, the four lines, when taken together, suggest the way in which telling poetic or critical sentiments, what­ever pre­ce­dents may lie ­behind them, must both strike us as if they ­were “original” and must produce a spark of recognition on the reader’s part. In the latter re­spect, Pope anticipates Keats’s belief that “Poetry . . . ​should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.”10 What the poet says comes as a surprise, but also seems strangely familiar. In his “Life of Cowley,” Samuel Johnson suggested that Pope’s definition of wit was “undoubtedly erroneous,” in that it “reduces [wit] from strength of thought to happiness of language.”11 But Pope’s lines—­even more clearly, perhaps, in their original version—­show that Pope was as aware as Johnson of the im­mense difference between fresh and telling expression and mere cliché or platitude. Pope therefore seems closer than Johnson realized to Johnson’s own belief that true art should strike us as “both natu­ral and new”—or, as a ­later critic put it—­should have an “inevitable” rightness about it.12 Blake, as we have seen, thought that the derivativeness of Reynolds’s Discourses was the source of their contradictoriness. But what Blake saw as mere contradiction might be more usefully considered as an acknowledgement by Reynolds and his contemporaries of the inevitably ambiguous potential of most critical terms and statements. To call a work of art “­simple” or “sophisticated” or “­g rand” or “witty” or “sentimental” or “grandiloquent”—or, indeed, to attribute to it “generality” or “particularity”—­might equally imply praise or blame, depending on the context. The best eighteenth-­century literary and artistic criticism shows itself to be fully aware of the equivocal and multifaceted potential of such terms. The aesthetic vocabulary that it employs is thus not rigid and fixed, but acknowledges that critical success is usually the result of a series of equal, though often opposed, tendencies, ­either of which may be in play at any moment and which are often held by the poet or critic in constant tension or equipoise. The critical terms of eighteenth-­ century critics thus seem closer to the “princi­ples” described by Christopher Ricks. Such “princi­ples,” Ricks argues “admit contradictions, and leave us to think . . . ​about applicability,” unlike “theory,” which, in Ricks’s view, “seeks exactly to generalize and not be circumscribed by ‘any given situation.’ ”13 In this re­spect, eighteenth-­century criticism of lit­er­a­ture and art may—­somewhat ironically in the pre­sent context—be seen to confirm two of Blake’s other celebrated aphorisms: “Without contraries is no progression” and “Opposition is true friendship” (Blake, Complete Writings, 149, 157). Eighteenth-­century critics’ praise of “the general” can

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be seen not as offering an unproblematic and straightforward alternative to “the par­tic­u­lar,” but as part of an attempt to define the distinctive tension between generality and particularity that must be held in balance if a successful work of art—­ and a truthful judgement on such a work—is to come into being. Commentators have sometimes suggested that the modern antipathy to eighteenth-­century praise of “the general” is best combatted by an historical re­orientation, in which our modern preferences are overridden or corrected by an attempt at “imaginative sympathy” with and “understanding” of ideals of the past that are very dif­fer­ent from any we might entertain ourselves.14 But another, arguably more satisfactory, approach was offered by William Youngren in two impor­ tant but apparently little-­known essays from the 1960s.15 In t­ hese essays, Youngren argues that a crucial “first step in getting to a clearer notion of generality and particularity is to stop seeing them as necessarily opposed and mutually exclusive attributes like straightness and curvature” (“Generality in Augustan Satire,” 212). “It is wrong,” Youngren maintains, “to suppose—as most critics from Blake and Hazlitt down to our own age have done—­that neoclassic demands for generality, as we find them in critics of major caliber, ­were aimed at producing cloudy abstractions or lukewarm restatements of what every­one already knew.” For the best writers and artists of the period, “meaningful generality still had to be firmly grounded in par­ tic­u­lar experience” (“Generality in Augustan Satire,” 232). In this way, Youngren argues, “generality and particularity,” rather than being opposites or alternatives, “could actually be conducive to each other” (“Generality in Augustan Satire,” 212). ­Later in this chapter, I s­ hall attempt to demonstrate how Youngren’s formulations might be applied to Reynolds’s espousal (in practice) and his advocacy (in theory) of a “­g rand” style of painting that pre­sents “the most general forms of nature,” in contradistinction to the minute detail of the depictions of nature to be found in the work of the Dutch school. And I ­shall address this subject with par­ tic­u­lar reference to the intellectual relationship between Reynolds and his greatest En­glish literary con­temporary, Samuel Johnson, and to the common ground that can be seen between the two friends’ treatment of “generality” and “particularity.” The last part of my investigation ­will consider the application of Reynolds’s ideas about generality and particularity to a painter-­contemporary: Thomas Gainsborough. But before turning to Reynolds and Johnson, it w ­ ill perhaps be useful to return to the treatment of critical terms in the e­ arlier work that we have already encountered and that was greatly admired by both Johnson and Reynolds: Pope’s Essay on Criticism. For Pope’s Essay displays pervasively its author’s sense of the paradoxical, multivalent potential of critical language and of the need for both artist and critic to maintain a poised and subtle control of their imagery and to display a self-­conscious awareness of its implications.

Critical Terms in Pope’s Essay on Criticism A reader glancing superficially at Pope’s Essay in the fully annotated texts that appear in the Twickenham or Longman editions16 might be forgiven for thinking

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that the parade of parallels and analogues presented at the foot of the page provides an eloquent testimony to the derivativeness and unoriginality that, as we have seen, are often taken to be the marks of eighteenth-­century critical thought. The density of Pope’s “sources” from Aristotle to Boileau, that is, might seem to confirm Thomas De Quincey’s description of the Essay as “a metrical multiplication-­ table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-­traps,”17 and thus to confirm the still common view of the poem as a clever but superficial digest of “neo-­classical” commonplaces. And Pope’s genius for memorable aphoristic utterances—­t he Essay generates over a full column in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations—­might seem also to support De Quincey’s view that the poem is merely “a collection of in­de­pen­dent maxims . . . ​having no natu­ral order or logical de­pen­den­cy.”18 We have already, however, witnessed one example of the dangers of excerpting individual couplets in the Essay from their immediate context. Pope recorded his conviction that, far from offering a rehash of “what every­one believed” at the time, his Essay would actually offer a substantial challenge to his readers’ habitual assumptions. In a letter to his friend John Caryll of 19 July 1711, he expressed the view that the Essay was a poem “which not one gentleman in three score even of a liberal education can understand.”19 And early responses to Pope’s poem suggest that, pace William Empson’s suggestion in a famous essay that it was addressed to a “smart milieu” on whose emotional and intellectual acquiescence Pope could confidently rely,20 the Essay was, in fact, judged to be “a difficult, unfashionable poem, and needed the support of the judicious before it could sell; a poem that appealed to sense as much as to sensibility.”21 But if both internal and external evidence may cause us to hesitate before writing off the Essay on Criticism as a string of self-­contained epigrams or a repository of neoclassical commonplaces, we should also perhaps resist the temptation to regard it as a systematic treatise, of the kind suggested by the ­table of contents that Pope himself included in his own ­later editions—­a tendency further developed in the edition of the Essay published ­after the poet’s death by his friend William Warburton.22 For the coherence of the Essay, as one of the most perceptive of its e­ arlier critics registered, is the coherence of a poem rather than that of a prose aes­t he­ti­ cian. Pope’s “Observations follow one another,” wrote Joseph Addison in his Spectator review of the Essay, “like ­those in Horace’s Art of Poetry, without that Methodical Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author.” Where Pope’s thought does resemble that of one or other of his pre­de­ces­sors, Addison noted, ­t hose pre­de­ces­sors’ ideas are “placed in so beautiful a Light, and illustrated with such apt Allusions, that they have in them all the Graces of Novelty, and make the Reader, who was before acquainted with them, still more convinced of their Truth and Solidity.” Pope has, moreover, like the ancient critic Longinus whom he so admired, “exemplified,” said Addison, “several of his Precepts in the very Precepts themselves.”23 The Essay is thus, as Johnson remarked of the criticism of Dryden, “the criticism of a poet . . . ​where delight is mingled with instruction, and where the author proves his right of judgement, by his power of per­for­mance.”24

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Such ideas may be borne in mind when considering the key terms of the Essay, which, unlike the vocabulary of a scientific or philosophical treatise, accrue complex, shifting, and sometimes paradoxical resonances as the poem proceeds. The full significance of each of the words, phrases, and meta­phorical figures that Pope uses to characterize the nature of poetry and criticism—­for the two activities are, in his view, inseparably intertwined one with the other—­cannot be understood ­until the par­tic­u­lar meaning with which they are charged at one point in the poem comes, as the reader progresses through the poem, into connection with the shifting connotations they acquire as the poem progresses and with the other “key terms” that the poem contains. Take, for example, the word “wit.” William Empson suggested “that t­ here is not a single use of the word in the w ­ hole poem in which the idea of a joke is quite out of sight,” and asserted that “what is now the most common and prominent meaning of the term, something like “power to make ingenious (and critical) jokes,” “was . . . ​a lready the most prominent one in the smart milieu which Pope was addressing” (“Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” 87, 85). Empson’s second assertion is immediately called into question by the general uncertainty with which, we are assured by a con­temporary witness, the term was understood in Pope’s day. In The Laws of Poetry (1721), Charles Gildon noted that “wit” has never yet been so compleatly defin’d, as to give full satisfaction that the definition was perfectly just; for the general term wit stands for so many ­t hings so very dif­fer­ent in their nature, that they seem by no means capable of being reduc’d to one and the same individual definition.25

Empson’s assertion is rendered doubly dubious by the variety of connotations with which the term “wit” is invested during the course of the Essay. Near the beginning of the poem, Pope’s use of the term has clear pejorative overtones and suggests a certain knowing smartness, when we are told that Some are bewilder’d in the Maze of Schools, And some made Coxcombs Nature meant but Fools. In search of Wit t­ hese lose their common Sense, And then turn Criticks in their own Defence. (ll. 26–29)

But ­later, where we are invited to appreciate that “Art” is “vast” but “­Human Wit” is “narrow” (l.61), the word is being used to suggest the limitations of “­human intelligence” or “the capacity of the ­human mind,” rather than “smartness.” And when we are told that “Wit and Judgment often are at strife, / Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (ll. 82–83), “wit” now seems to suggest the capacity that in other periods has been called “creativity” or “inspiration.” Where Pope tells us that “Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence, / And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense” (ll. 209–210), he seems to be referring to the quality of reflective, self-­k nowledgeable intelligence that is so easily overwhelmed by h ­ uman beings’ self-­protective and self-­promoting tendencies.

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In the famous couplet discussed ­earlier, “wit” is, as we have seen, brought into direct juxtaposition with another of the poem’s key terms, “Nature.” Pope’s early critic, John Dennis, complained that Pope failed to define adequately “what he means by Nature, and what it is to write or to judge according to Nature,”26 and Pope’s modern defenders have sometimes responded by appealing to a body of e­ arlier and con­temporary philosophico-­theological discussion of “Nature” of which, it is suggested, Pope’s readers would all have been aware, and to which Pope was himself implicitly appealing.27 But such a defence fails to register the ways in which Pope deliberately avoids any attempt to “define” “Nature,” or to appeal to any kind of received definition of the term. “Nature,” in the poem, rather than being accorded a clear-­cut definition, is evoked by a series of suggestive poetic meta­phors. “Nature” is seen by Pope as the ultimate real­ity to which ­human beings are normally blind, but to the presence of which they can be alerted by g­ reat art. The experience is welcomed by the reader in a rush of unexpected assent. “Nature” is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (l.73): it is what gives rise to art in the first instance; it is what ­great art reveals to the reader or beholder; and it is the means by which g­ reat art is recognized. Though it is normally unseen, it is not (pace some commentators) an abstract quasi-­Platonic entity existing somewhere “above” or “­behind” the world of appearances, but rather a force or power that can be revealed to be immanent in that world. Its presence is likened by Pope to that of the soul in the body: In some fair Body thus th’informing Soul With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the ­whole, Each Motion guides, and ev’ry Nerve sustains; It self unseen, but in th’ Effects remains. (ll. 76–79)

­ ecause of its ­triple identity, as source, end, and test of poetry, Nature also inspires B the best criticism of poetry, since the princi­ples informing that criticism are not merely man-­made structures dogmatically imposed on the art they purport to explain, but have actually been derived from meditation on the nature of the very art to which they are subsequently applied: ­ ose RULES of old, discover’d not devis’d, Th Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d. (ll. 88–91)

When the poet attempts to reveal Nature, his “wit” must, in Pope’s view, “dress” her “to Advantage” (l. 299). Pope has been taken to task for his description of “expression” as “the Dress of Thought” (l. 318).28 Poetic expressions, wrote Words­ worth—in a passage specifically critical of Pope—­are not “what the garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul” and are “themselves a constituent part and power or function in the thought.”29 But Words­worth’s remarks fail to appreciate the playfully self-­conscious and shifting inflections of Pope’s use of the image. “True Expression,” Pope writes,

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like th’unchanging Sun, Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon, It gilds all Objects, but it alters none. (ll. 315–317)

Poets can easily spoil their attempts by “overdressing” Nature with “glitt’ring Thoughts” (l. 290) and unwanted “Ornaments” (l. 296), whereas their efforts should more properly be addressed to revealing Nature with no apparent “dress” at all: “The naked Nature and the living Grace” (l. 294). And Pope, as we have seen, anticipates Words­worth’s image of poetry as the “incarnation” of thought in his account of the manifestation of “Nature” in the movements and muscular activity of the vis­i­ble world. Pope’s tactics throughout the Essay, as the examples already given have suggested, are to define his terms not as separable entities but in relation to one another, employing the ever-­mobile meta­phorical suggestiveness of a poet rather than the clear-­cut definitiveness of a phi­los­o­pher or a theologian. His key terms are often used in subtly dif­fer­ent senses and are approached from dif­fer­ent ­angles as the poem progresses. Many of the t­ hings said about poets are equally applicable to critics. Full use is made of the necessarily paradoxical coexistence of contraries. Poetry, Pope suggests, must be the product both of passionate commitment and cool objectivity (ll. 84–87). The poet may be inspired (ll. 152–155), but should also learn from his best artistic pre­de­ces­sors, ancient and modern (ll. 118–129, 181– 200, 362–633, 394–407) and from the critics who have described the qualities to be found in ­t hose pre­de­ces­sors (ll. 163–164, 197–202)—as opposed to mere pedants (ll. 260–266, 267–272). The poet must have boldness and in­de­pen­dence (ll. 152–155), but also modesty and humility (ll. 213–214). He must observe decorum (ll. 318–334), but also avoid cliché and staleness (ll. 239–242, 344–355). The movement of a poet’s lines should echo their sense (ll. 358–383). He must avoid extremes (ll. 384–393), but also be ­free from boring insipidity (ll. 344–353). He must distinguish false eloquence (ll. 289–314, 320–334) from true (ll. 315–317). He must steer clear of both pedantry (ll. 612–617) and modishness (ll. 430–447). He must be self-­k nowledgeable (ll. 46–61) and wear his learning lightly. He must be tactful as well as candid (ll. 560–575). He must read books but also know life (l. 640). Pope’s poem is self-­ validating in that it can be seen to embody and enact its own princi­ples and to manifest both the creative power and the paradoxical oppositions that it commends. It is no accident, therefore, that Pope’s portrait of the ideal poet or critic is of a man who is able to avoid dogmatism of all kinds and who can reconcile the conflict between mighty opposites without any suspicion of mere compromise or fence-­sitting: But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow, Still pleas’d to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiass’d, or by Favour, or by Spite; Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right; Tho’ Learn’d, well-­bred; and tho’ well-­bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?

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Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show, And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe? Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d; A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind; Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride; And Love to Praise, with Reason on his side? (ll. 631–642)

Pope’s sense of the tensions that must be maintained in the successful production and criticism of works of art is mirrored in the treatment of the general and the par­tic­u­lar in the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson, to which we should now turn.

The General and the Par­tic­u­lar in Johnson and Reynolds Readers coming to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art from a background in academic En­glish lit­er­a­ture are likely to be immediately struck by the substantial similarities in thought and phrasing between the Discourses and the writings of Samuel Johnson. That is not surprising. The two men ­were intimately acquainted. Reynolds painted Johnson’s portrait no less than four times. Johnson once wrote to Reynolds: “If I should lose you, I should lose almost the only Man whom I call a Friend.”30 And, when passing Reynolds’s h ­ ouse, Johnson remarked to Boswell, “­There lives a very ­great man.”31 Johnson and Reynolds w ­ ere co-­instigators of the celebrated club that was to include among its members the politician and orator Edmund Burke, the musician Charles Burney, the historian Edward Gibbon, the dramatist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the phi­los­o­pher and economist Adam Smith. So closely, indeed, was Reynolds associated with Johnson that the literary scholar Edmond Malone, another member of the club, felt obliged to devote several pages of the 1798 supplement in his two-­volume edition of Rey­ nolds’s Works (1797) to refuting rumours that Johnson (or Burke) had actually written Reynolds’s Discourses. In a fragmentary memoir quoted by Malone in his introduction, Reynolds described the nature of his debt to Johnson: What­ever merits [the Discourses] may have, must be imputed, in a g­ reat mea­ sure to the education which I may be said to have had ­under Dr. Johnson. I do not mean to say, though it certainly would be to the credit of t­ hese Discourses, if I could say it with truth, that he contributed even a single sentiment to them; but he qualified my mind to think justly. No man had, like him, the faculty of teaching inferior minds the art of thinking. . . . ​The observations which he made on poetry, on life, and on ­every ­t hing about us, I applied to our art; with what success ­others must judge. (Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1:xx–­x xi)

One preoccupation common to Johnson and Reynolds was their understanding of the relation between the general and the par­tic­u ­lar in painting and poetry. Johnson and Reynolds have been accused of contradicting themselves on this topic. Blake, as we have seen, attributed such perceived contradictions to the derivativeness

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of the two men’s thought and their inability to harmonize conflicting influences. Other critics have explained them as evidence of unreconciled tensions between “backward-­looking” (“Neoclassical”) and “progressive” (“Romantic”) tendencies in their thought.32 Sometimes they have been attributed, as in the work of John Barrell, to which we w ­ ill return shortly, to specifically po­liti­cal or ideological tensions or pressures. Such arguments, I believe, are in danger of underestimating the degree to which eighteenth-­century criticism—as we have seen paradigmatically evidenced in Pope’s Essay on Criticism—­progresses through the play of paradox and through a self-­conscious and sophisticated exploitation of the complex and ambivalent resonances of its key terms, rather than by doctrinal or theoretical system-­building. The arguments of eighteenth-­century critics and aes­t he­ti­cians tend to proceed in a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” manner. Readers new to Johnson’s criticism have often commented on the apparently radical contradictions in his critical judgements—as, for instance, when he claims that Shakespeare both affords “the highest plea­sure that drama can give” and that he has “faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.” Near the beginning of his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson claims that Shakespeare’s persons act and speak by the influence of t­ hose general passions and princi­ples by which all minds are agitated, and the ­whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in ­t hose of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. (Yale Johnson, 7:62)

A page ­later, he seems to say precisely the opposite: Characters thus ample and general ­were not easily discriminated and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other. I ­w ill not say with Pope that e­ very speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, ­because many speeches ­t here are which have nothing characteristical; but perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to ­every person, it w ­ ill be difficult to find any that can be properly transferred from the pre­sent possessor to another claimant. (Yale Johnson, 7:62)

But ­t here is in fact no contradiction between ­t hese two passages. ­Here we have a classic instance of the “both/and” method of eighteenth-­century critics. When Johnson says that in other dramatists “a character is too often an individual,” he is suggesting that other dramatists’ characters seem too merely quirky, eccentric, and odd to be actually credible or in­ter­est­ing. Shakespeare, in contrast, manages both to home in on significant features of his characters that mark them out as unforgettably distinctive and at the same time to convince readers and audiences that ­t hose characters’ humanity is plausibly continuous with their own. Shakespeare’s characters, Johnson thought, are not only to be distinguished from the bizarre oddities that populate the “heroic plays” of the Restoration, but also from the insipid nonentities who ­people the plays of such writers as Nicholas Rowe:

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I know not that ­there can be found in [Rowe’s] plays any deep search into nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice display of passion in its pro­gress; all is general and undefined.33

­ ere by “general,” Johnson clearly means merely “generalized” (and thus “nondeH script,” “vague,” “uninvolving”). Shakespeare’s “generality,” Johnson thinks, is of an altogether dif­fer­ent kind. Analogous considerations might apply to Imlac’s remarks about poetry in Johnson’s Rasselas: “The business of a poet . . . ​is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the dif­fer­ent shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to ­every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for t­ hose characteristicks which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.”34

Imlac’s claim in this celebrated passage is not that the poet should deal only in generalities and not in specific detail. His insistence, rather, is that poets do not merely accumulate particularities, but select significant details (“prominent and striking features”) that bring the object vividly alive in the reader’s imagination. Johnson, we may remember, praised Shakespeare as “an exact surveyor of the inanimate world,” whose “descriptions have always some peculiarities,” and expressed admiration for James Thomson b ­ ecause he “at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute” and combines a “wide expansion of general views” with “an enumeration of circumstantial va­ri­e­t ies.”35 Reynolds, in Discourse XI, mirrors Johnson’s disapproval of a mere concentration on minute detail, when commenting on an artist in Rome, who, b ­ ecause he thought “the w ­ hole excellence of art” consisted in “high finishing,” once “endeavoured . . . ​to represent ­every individual leaf on a tree” (Wark, 199). Such laboured particularity, Reynolds suggests, would produce far less of a “true resemblance of trees” than a painter who focused more on the larger structure of the trees’ branches and fo­liage. Reynolds frequently compares the minute naturalism of Dutch painting with the “­grand style” of the Italian school. But his analy­sis of the Dutch paint­ers’ art is not so straightforwardly dismissive as might at first sight appear. Reynolds, to be sure, is keen to differentiate the “lower painter” who, “like the florist or collector of shells” exhibits “the minute discriminations, which distinguish one object of the same species from another” from the “­grand” painter who “like a phi­los­o­pher, ­will consider nature in the abstract, and represent in e­ very one of his figures the character of the species” (Wark, 50). The limitation of Dutch painting, Reynolds says, is that it tends to “exhibit all the minute particularities of a nation differing in several re­spects from the rest of mankind.” But Dutch artists should nevertheless “have their share of more ­humble praise” and only become “ridicu­lous when

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they attempt general history on their own narrow princi­ples, and debase ­g reat events by the meanness of their characters” (Wark, 69). Frans Hals accordingly is praised for the “strong-­marked character of individual nature, which is so remarkable in his portraits, and is not found in an equal degree in any other painter,” and Jan Steen for his “diligent and accurate” observation “of what passed in ­those scenes which he frequented” (Wark, 109). The Dutch artists’ concentration on circumstantial and local detail, Reynolds believed, sometimes prevented that spark of recognition in viewers—­characteristic of the greatest art, and affirmed by Pope in relation to poetry—­t hat is produced when a painting “speaks home” to their condition: “­There must,” he said, “be something e­ ither in the action, or in the object [of a painting], in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the publick sympathy” (Wark, 57). Reynolds’s emphasis on the “general” import of ­great art, however, is by no means incompatible with an appreciation of the right kind of paint­erly detail. “A painter,” he wrote, “must have the power of contracting as well as dilating his sight; b ­ ecause, he that does not at all express particulars, expresses nothing.” But “the detail of particulars, which does not assist the expression of the main characteristick, is worse than useless, it is mischievous, as it dissipates the attention, and draws it from the principal point” (Wark, 192). Though it may be out of place in a large work and is sometimes exercised to an excessive degree (Wark, 162), Rembrandt’s concentration on one object and his custom of exhibiting “­little more than one spot of light in the midst of a large quantity of shadow” gives an “absolute unity” to some of his canvases (Wark, 147). It is not surprising, therefore, that Reynolds was an enthusiastic collector of Rembrandt’s paintings, ­etchings, and drawings and that Rembrandt was an impor­tant influence on Reynolds’s own practice as a portraitist.36 Johnson’s thoughts about “the general” and the “par­tic­u ­lar” in impor­tant re­spects parallel ­t hose of Reynolds.37 It is clear that when Johnson declares, near the beginning of his preface to Shakespeare, that “nothing can please many, and please long, but just repre­sen­ta­tions of general nature,” he is clearly not referring to “Generalizations about Nature.” And it is also clear that by “Nature,” Johnson does not mean (to borrow a phrase of Reynolds’s) merely “what lies immediately before you” (Wark, 124). “General Nature” (which is very close in many re­spects to the “Nature” of Pope’s Essay on Criticism and to Reynolds’s “ideal Nature”) is something that has to be created or revealed by the artist.38 To praise Shakespeare as a “Poet of Nature” is not, thus, merely to praise his documentary realism, his ability to rec­ord the surface details of the life around him. Nor, moreover, is it merely to praise his depictions of ­human nature. As we have seen, Johnson is as impressed by Shakespeare the “exact surveyor of the inanimate world” as by Shakespeare the presenter of “­human sentiments in ­human language.” But neither is Johnson’s “General Nature,” any more than the “Nature” of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, to be simply equated with Plato’s notion of an “ideal” “alternative” real­ity “beyond” or “­behind” the everyday world. Johnson’s “General Nature,” like that of Pope and Reynolds, is manifested in the particularities of existence. Once revealed, General Nature is instantly recognizable, in

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an ungainsayable rush of recognition and plea­sure. But without the artist, it would remain beyond our grasp. One passage where Reynolds’s thinking, in the areas we have been considering, comes particularly close to Johnson’s—to the extent that one might wish to question Reynolds’s assertion that Johnson did not contribute “even a single sentiment” to the Discourses—­occurs in Discourse III, where Reynolds insists that the paint­er’s subject must never be merely temporary manners—­described more fully elsewhere as “par­tic­u­lar customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation of fashion” (Wark, 73). The painter, Reynolds writes, “must divest himself of all prejudices in favour of his age or country; he must disregard all local and temporary ornaments, and look only on t­ hose general habits which are ­every where and always the same” (Wark, 49). Reynolds’s wording h ­ ere is very close indeed to that of Johnson’s Imlac: [The poet] must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard pre­sent laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which w ­ ill always be the same. (Yale Johnson, 16:44)

But, as with Johnson, t­ here is no need to conclude that Reynolds is merely arguing for disembodied Platonic abstraction, or that the search for “general truths” is incompatible or irreconcilable with a proper poetic or paint­erly concern, in the right circumstances, for significant detail. In Discourse III, Reynolds, to be sure, argues for the superiority of “philosophic” painting to that which is merely concerned with “minute discriminations” (Wark, 50). But the “minute circumstantial parts” of a painting, he maintains, though they may be “injurious to grandeur,” may, equally, if “employed” with “judgement,” be “useful to truth” (Wark, 58). Such ideas can be seen to par­tic­u­lar advantage in Reyolds’s response to the work of a distinguished painter-­contemporary: Thomas Gainsborough.

Conclusion: Reynolds and Gainsborough The art of Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds believed, was rooted in “a minute observation of par­tic­u ­lar nature” (Wark, 253). But it was an art for which Reynolds came, albeit belatedly, to have considerable admiration, which he expressed at length in Discourse XIV. In a series of discussions, John Barrell has interpreted Reynolds’s late espousal of Gainsborough in po­liti­cal terms, seeing it as an attempt on Reynolds’s part to distance himself from his ­earlier conception of painting as an exhortation to civic virtue—­a conception that he thought was now being dangerously appropriated by po­liti­cal radicals—in favour of a more conservative cele­bration of “En­g lishness” and of “the customary.”39 But Reynolds’s praise of Gainsborough can, I think, be legitimately approached from a more straightforwardly artistic point of view. Reynolds’s sense of the delicate and paradoxical balancing of generality and specificity that makes for paint­erly excellence is sufficiently flexible to encompass

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many dif­fer­ent ways in which such a balance might be satisfactorily achieved—­ however one might ultimately wish to configure the qualitative hierarchy of ­great paint­ers and the suitability of dif­fer­ent masters as models. Reynolds was fully aware that Gainsborough had not under­gone the systematic artistic training and study of the Old Masters that are so passionately advocated throughout the Discourses. He was, however, also fully conscious that an excess of artistic learning might cause a painter to be “rather distinguished by the tameness of the follower, than animated by the spirit of emulation” (Wark, 247). Gainsborough’s attentive and tirelessly devoted study of h ­ uman, animal, and inanimate nature, together with his “strong intuitive” feel for “the general effect” of his paintings, and the “harmony of colouring” that he had learnt from the Flemish School had, despite the limitations of his training, enabled his “genius” to trump the “feebleness and insipidity” of many “regular gradu­ates in the g­ reat historical style” (Wark, 249, 253). Gainsborough’s minute attention to local detail had not ultimately spoilt the larger design, and thus the “general” effect, of his paintings. His idiosyncratic deployment of “odd scratches and marks,” which, when viewed closely might appear as an “uncouth and ­shapeless . . . ​chaos,” “assumes,” “by a kind of magick,” when viewed “at a certain distance,” “form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect of diligence, ­under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence” (Wark, 258). Such an idiosyncratic fusion of particularity and generality, Reynolds insists, is a risky model for imitation. But in his considered judgement, it made Gainsborough “one of the greatest ornaments” of the Royal Acad­emy, since he had shown how generality and particularity could be si­mul­ta­neously achieved in a single work by an artist of outstanding talent. It was an achievement that Reynolds was only too pleased celebrate in the warmest pos­si­ble terms.

notes 1. ​See, for example, F. R. Leavis’s celebrated criticism of a passage in Shelley’s The Cenci for its “vague, generalizing externality” and for its lack of the “sharp concrete particularity” of Claudio’s soliloquy in Act III of Shakespeare’s Mea­sure for Mea­sure (Revaluation: Tradition and Development in En­glish Poetry [London: Chatto, 1936], 226). I am grateful to Sandra Hopkins, Charles Martindale, Tom Mason, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Philip Smallwood for their helpful comments on an ­earlier draft of this essay. 2. ​Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 131. On Reynolds’s own borrowing “from the stage effects of court painting in the Van Dyckian vein,” see E. H. Gombrich, “Reynolds’s Theory and Practice of Imitation,” Burlington Magazine 80 (1942): 40–45. 3. ​Mark Hallett, “Painting,” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 252. 4. ​Roger Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-­Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), xxiv–­v. 5. ​Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto, 1957), 9–34. 6. ​See The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Edmond Malone (London, 1797), 1:lxxxiv. Edmund Burke attributed Reynolds’s “love of generalizing” to the influence of Zachariah Mudge, a friend of Reynolds’s father. See F. W. Hilles, The Literary ­Career of Sir Joshua Rey­ nolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 7.

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7. ​ The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1957), 451. On Blake’s criticism of Reynolds, see further Frederic ­Will, “Blake’s Quarrel with Reynolds,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13 (1957): 340–49. 8. ​Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (London, 1711), 19. 9. ​Ll. 297–298; The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope: Vol. 1, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 272–273. All further quotations from Pope are from this edition, with line numbers given in the text. It ­will appear henceforth as Twickenham Pope. 10. ​L etter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:238. 11. ​Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (cited hereafter as Yale Johnson), vol. 21, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1958–2018), 25. 12. ​F. R. Leavis, The Living Princi­ple: “En­glish” as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto, 1975), 128 (on Thomas Hardy’s “­A fter a Journey”). 13. ​Christopher Ricks, “Literary Princi­ples as against Theory,” in Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 323, quoting T. S. Eliot in The Egoist, 4 (1917): 151. 14. ​See Betrand H. Bronson, “Personification Reconsidered,” in New Light on Dr Johnson: Essays on the Occasion of his 250th Birthday, ed. F. W. Hilles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 193–194. 15. ​William Youngren, “Generality in Augustan Satire,” in In Defense of Reading, ed. Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, 206–234 (New York: Dutton, 1962); William Youngren, “Generality, Science and Poetic Language in the Restoration,” En­glish Literary History 35 (1968): 158–187. 16. ​Alexander Pope, Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Julian Ferraro and Paul Baines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). This volume contains the Essay on Criticism. 17. ​ De Quincey as Critic, ed. John E. Jordan (London and Boston: Routledge, 1973), 325. 18. ​See Alexander Pope: A Critical Anthology, ed. F. W. Bateson and N. A. Joukovsky (London: Penguin, 1971), 216. 19. ​ The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:128. 20. ​William Empson, “Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” in The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto, 1964), 85. 21. ​H. A. Mason, “The Perfect Critic, or, Pope on Empson,” Cambridge Quarterly 40 (2011): 58. This section of the pre­sent chapter is indebted to Mason’s article. 22. ​See Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ed. William Warburton (London, 1749). 23. ​Joseph Addison, No. 253 (20 December 1711) in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2:483–484. 24. ​Johnson, “Life of Dryden,” in Yale Johnson, 21:437–38. 25. ​[Charles Gildon], The Laws of Poetry, as Laid Down by the Duke of Buckinghamshire in His Essay on Poetry (London: J. Morley, 1721), 74, quoted by Mason, “The Perfect Critic,” 58–59. 26. ​John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939–43), 1:219, quoted in Twickenham Pope, 1:219. 27. ​See particularly Twickenham Pope, 1:219–221. 28. ​See, for example, Geoffrey Strickland, Structuralism or Criticism: Thoughts on How We Read (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 46–47. See also the celebrated discussion of the topic by M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 111–112. 29. ​“Essays upon Epitaphs III,” in Words­worth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London: Routledge, 1974), 154. The Letters of Samuel Johnson: The Hyde Edition, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton, 30. ​ NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994), 1:244. On Reynolds’s relation with and portraits of Johnson, see further Daniel Vuillermin, “Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson,” in The Making of Dr Johnson: Icon of Modern Culture, ed. John Wiltshire (Westfield, Hastings: Helm Information, 2009), 103–128.

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31. ​See Boswell’s journal for 3 June 1784 in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1981), 226. 32. ​See Robert R. Wark, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art (London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1959), xxv. All quotations from the Discourses are taken from this edition and are cited in the text as “Wark,” followed by page number(s). For Johnson, see Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986), 309–311. 33. ​Johnson, “Life of Rowe,” in Yale Johnson, ed. John H. Middendorf (2010), 22:593. 34. ​Johnson, Rasselas, in Yale Johnson, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (1990), 16:43–44. On this topic, see further Howard D. Weinbrot, “The Reader, the General, and the Par­tic­u­lar: Johnson and Imlac in Chapter Ten of Rasselas,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 5 (2017): 80–96. 35. ​Johnson, “Life of Thomson,” in Yale Johnson, ed. John H. Middendorf (2010), 23:192. 36. ​See Donato Esposito, “Regarding Rembrandt: Reynolds and Rembrandt,” in Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2018), 93–105. 37. ​It is in­ter­est­ing to note that Boswell (Life, 3:191) referred to his Life of Johnson as a ‘Flemish picture’. 38. ​For the larger intellectual context of the term, see Scott D. Evans, Samuel Johnson’s “General Nature”: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-­Century Discourse (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999). 39. ​See John Barrell, The Po­liti­cal Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), introduction and chap. 1; Barrell, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the En­g lishness of En­g lish Art,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 154–176 (London: Routledge, 1990); Barrell, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Po­liti­cal Theory of Painting,” Oxford Art Journal 9 (1996), 36–40.

“The Caliban of Lit­er­a­ture” spenser, shakespeare, and johnson’s intertextual scholarship Anthony W. Lee I have confined my imagination to the margin. —­Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare

In 1785, within the safe cocoon available to him ­after the 1784 death of Samuel Johnson, the antiquarian John Pinkerton wrote, “Johnson’s Dictionary hath upwards of 40,000 [words]; but of ­t hese 5000 are obsolete, or never used; and all his words from Sir Thomas Brown [sic], and other pedants, ­ought to have been omitted. The joke is, that with him, ­every body is an authority!”1 ­Today, few serious students of En­glish lit­er­a­ture would regard Browne a pedant. Moreover, Pinkerton was not a close reader of Johnson, or e­ lse he would have checked his sarcastic exuberance by recalling Johnson’s statement in the 1747 Plan of a Dictionary of the En­glish Language of his intent to interrogate “the peculiar sense in which a word is found in any g­ reat author.”2 For Johnson, not “­every body” but rather only a relatively small handful of impor­tant authors constituted his principal authorities—­a list that included Sir Thomas Browne.3 If the joke redounds at last upon Pinkerton, we should not rejoice to find him “hoist with his own petard.” 4 Rather, let us more generously allow his remark to suggest an intriguing way of looking at Johnson’s two major scholarly accomplishments—­the Dictionary of the En­glish Language and his Shakespeare Edition—as amalgamated glossaries and concordances of writers Johnson esteemed ­great: Shakespeare, of course, but also Bacon, Milton, Dryden, and, to take the case of an author whom critics have rarely associated with Johnson, Edmund Spenser. A key premise of the pre­sent chapter is to explore Johnson’s intertextual relationship with Spenser and Shakespeare, in an effort to illuminate more fully his critical engagement with the author of The Faerie Queene. Before we commence this exploration, however, a few foundational observations are requisite. 39

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“Genealogies of Sentiments” One of the most provocative and critically fruitful remarks in the Preface to ­Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary reads: I have sometimes, though rarely, yielded to the temptation of exhibiting a genealogy of sentiments, by shewing how one author copied the thoughts and diction of another: such quotations are, indeed, l­ ittle more than repetitions, which might justly be censured, did they not gratify the mind, by affording a kind of intellectual history. (Yale Johnson, 18:98)

I find Johnson’s declaration coyly demure, both in his delimiting phrase “though rarely,” as well as in his modest gesture that t­ hese genealogies, being “­little more than repetitions,” “might be justly censured.” In my de­cades of grappling with the Dictionary, I have noted a frequent recurrence of such genealogies in the train of authorities that often support the definitions.5 Moreover, much of the time they are not merely trivial repetitions but vital and richly suggestive moraines inviting further critical excavation. Th ­ ese meta-­lexicographical exercises often accumulate to form series of condensed philological aperçus—­experiments in what we ­today would call intertextuality. Intertextuality is a diffuse, contentious, and potentially confusing concept.6 I use the term ­here to refer to the notion that literary (and other discursive) texts are not original enunciations stemming entirely from a unitary subject or originating consciousness, but rather are imbricated within a larger textual universe that in part permits and shapes their meaning. By observing the verbal and semantic affinities often marking the surface level of writing, we may catch glimpses of this larger textual universe. ­Because of the operative power of ­t hese intertextual relationships, meaning in literary works cannot be isolated to individual texts or authors, but emerges as the product of the relationships that precede and form local textual occurrences.7 While intertextuality is a globally functioning concept embracing all linguistic discourses, literary writing, ­because of its self-­referential thickness, offers an ideal site to explore its manifestation. Moreover, ­t hose places in literary texts that self-­consciously announce their affiliation with other texts, by means of allusion (verbal and semantic repetition), offer the richest gateway points for exploring intertextual phenomena.8 Such is the rationale and practice followed in this chapter. Furthermore, viewed from an intertextual perspective, Johnson’s Dictionary and Shakespeare Edition are far more than just lexicographical and editorial interventions. They in fact contain deep, fertile pockets of submerged Johnsonian criticism and autobiographical information that have yet to see the light of day. Returning to the passage quoted above, in the 1755 Dictionary Johnson offers this definition of “genealogy”: “History of the succession of families; enumeration of descent in order of succession; a pedigree.” For him, then, the primary literal meaning of “genealogy” is that of a f­ amily history—­a “pedigree.”9 The term bears personal and familial connotations. Yet he goes on to illustrate this definition with a quotation drawn from Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth: “The ancients

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ranged chaos into several regions; and in that order successively rising one from another, as if it was a pedigree or genealogy.”10 In using the word to trace dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal regions and successive chronological epochs, the passage quoted suggests that “genealogy” was susceptible of meta­phoric extension. We see, then, that Johnson’s concept of “genealogies of sentiments” is potentially capable of embracing both private individual and familial pedigrees, as well as larger public “intellectual histories” of cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic import. Thus, the intertextual passages that frequently link the vari­ous quotations found in Johnson’s Dictionary and Shakespeare Edition may be read at the following ­levels: (1) public philological and lexicographical pronouncements; (2); thumbnail sketches tracing lines of affiliation and influence amongst En­glish writers, and (3) “pedigrees” of Johnson’s personal and private readings, as well as his emotional and critical responses to them. In this re­spect, Johnson follows one of his key symbolic mentors,11 John Dryden, who wrote in Preface to the Fables: Milton was the Poetical Son of Spencer, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: Spencer more than once insinuates that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred Years ­a fter his Decease. Milton has acknowledg’d to me, that Spencer was his Original; and many besides my self have heard our famous Waller own, that he deriv’d the Harmony of his Numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloign, which was turn’d into En­g lish by Mr. Fairfax.12

This passage is perhaps the seed from which the Lives of the Poets would l­ ater exfoliate; in that work, Johnson’s genealogies of sentiment offer miniature encapsulations of the “Lineal Descents and Clans” (discussed below). Lurking beneath the public surface of the first two levels of ­t hese genealogies are hidden pockets of private, subjective import that bear the imprint of Johnson’s personal response to many of the texts and authors he venerated and embraced, responses that may be seen to significantly supplement his impor­tant critical judgments and observations. Johnson’s grouping of literary authorities in the Dictionary and in the Shakespeare Edition offers miniature pedigrees of his own intellectual and emotional life and pre­sents evidentiary intersections of Johnson’s encyclopedic recall of vast reading and his emotional and aesthetic responses to this reading.

“Rhyme”: Johnson, Milton, and Spenser For a typical example of one of Johnson’s genealogies, see the Dictionary entry for the third definition of “rhyme”: RHYME. n.s. [ῥυθμὸς]; rhythme, Fr.] 3. Poetry; a poem. All his manly power it did disperse, As he ­were warmed with inchanted rhimes, That oftentimes he quak’d. Spenser.13

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The word “rhyme,” being a specifically prosodic as well as a generic literary term, implicitly invites a self-­reflective meditation upon poetic aspects of the genealogy. Johnson, himself an impor­tant poet, who wrote in the Dictionary preface that “the chief glory of e­ very p ­ eople arises from its authors,”16 surely would have thoughtfully considered the entry’s meta-­critical possibilities as he grafted ­these poetic slips onto their stem. He accordingly offers two supreme authorities drawn from the En­g lish literary golden age, “the wells of En­g lish undefiled,”17 Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Lycidas. Th ­ ese are worthy authorities, appropriate to emblemize the chief glories of En­g lish verse. However, the third quotation, taken from the minor turn-­of-­t he-­century poet John Philips, seems an oddly diminutive codicil appended to its weighty precursors. But, as Johnson notes elsewhere (in the 1779 “Life of John Philips”), the author of Cyder was a disciple of Milton: “He imitates Milton’s numbers indeed, but imitates them very injudiciously” (Johnson, Lives, 2:69). From an intertextual perspective, we see Johnson pairing Milton with ­Philips in order to recognize an impor­tant influence in recent literary history—­one that, as we see, his scholarly edition and Lives of the En­glish Poets similarly tracks. This recognition likewise alerts the reader that Johnson, by linking Milton to Spenser just before the Philips insertion, is also making a subtle but distinct intertextual critical observation—­the influence of one g­ reat En­glish Puritan poet upon his protégé,18 one who would in fact eclipse his master Spenser’s subsequent fame, just as, in Johnson’s scheme of literary history, John Milton would overshadow the ­later, minor, John. In paragraph 160 of his 1779 “Life of Milton,” Johnson observes, “Of the En­glish poets he set most value upon Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley. Spenser as apparently his favourite.”19 Johnson marks this relationship numerous times in the quotations of the two authors in many of the Dictionary entries. We see in the “rhyme” genealogy an example of Johnson’s use of intertextual quotation to make public, critical observations: he traces the progressive movement from Spenser to Milton to Philips in a kind of fractal, a microcosm “of intellectual [literary] history” that would l­ ater be writ large in his summative, crowning work, the Lives of the En­glish Poets. Thus, the rhyme Dictionary entry suggests a poetical “pedigree” that microcosmically foreshadows some of the architectural structures found in the ­later Lives of the Poets. Also noteworthy for my pre­sent purposes is Johnson’s inclusion of Spenser in the entry. In modern criticism, only a small trickle of published work considers ­t hese two authors together. This seems to me to be a m ­ istake. As long ago as 1936,

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distinguished Johnson scholar W. B. C. Watkins noted, “Except for authorities who have made him a special study, few men have known Spenser more thoroughly than Johnson.”20 Watkins goes on to observe of the vari­ous critical dicta upon Spenser scattered through Johnson’s writings that “if all ­t hese . . . ​are collected they ­will be found to make up a substantial body of criticism.” However, few critics have taken up this invitation to examine in greater detail Johnson’s critical appraisal of Spenser.21 ­Here, I ­will attempt partially to redress this deficiency.

Wicked Weeds: The Tempest and ­Mother Hubberds Tale According to Milton scholar J.  W. Good, Johnson drew 2.9  ­percent of the ­literary illustrations in his Dictionary (1755) from Spenser.22 That is, he quotes Spenser approximately 1,200 times. In the Shakespeare Edition, Johnson refers to Spenser much less frequently, some eight times—­but the inclusions are often impor­tant ones. For an example that ties Spenser across both of Johnson’s major scholarly proj­ ects, consider the following passage, drawn from Caliban’s initial speech in The Tempest: Caliban. As wicked dew as e’er my m ­ other brushed With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye, And blister you all ­o’er!23

In the Shakespeare Edition, a note appended to l.323 remarks of the phrase “wicked dew,” Wicked; having baneful qualities. So Spenser says “wicked weed,” so, in opposition, we say herbs or medicines have “virtues.” Bacon mentions “virtuous Bezoar,” and Dryden “virtuous herbs.”24

On the face of it, this would appear to be a ­simple editorial gloss. Johnson manifests some uneasiness at the figurative application of a h ­ uman attribute (“wicked”) to a nonsentient ele­ment (“dew”), a figure ­today we might be tempted to call a “pathetic fallacy.”25 He moves to justify this apparent linguistic instability by citing one parallel and two “oppositional” passages, all validating Shakespeare’s polyvalent diction by direct appeal to other sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century En­glish literary authorities. If we compare this genealogy to another found in the Dictionary, however, critical complexities emerge. ­There, the third definition of “wicked” reads: 3. Cursed; baneful; pernicious; bad in effect. The wicked weed which ­t here the fox did lay, From under­neath his head he took away. Hubberd.

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A n t h o n y W. L e e As wicked dew as e’er my ­mother brush’d, With raven’s feather from unwholsome fen, Drop on you both. Shakespeare’s Tempest.

The sixth definition of “virtuous” reads: 6. Having medicinal qualities. Some observe that ­t here is a virtuous bezoar, and another without virtue; the virtuous is taken from the beast that feedeth where ­there are theriacal herbs; and that without virtue, from t­ hose that feed where no such herbs are. Bacon. The ladies sought around For virtuous herbs, which, gather’d from the ground, They squeez’d the juice; and cooling ointment made. Dryd.

Inspection of ­t hese fragments yields the realization that the primary motivation of Johnson’s Shakespeare Edition genealogy is philological. It demonstrates that the word “wicked” possesses a medicinal meaning: it is a “philosophick word”26 that h ­ ere literally means “poisonous.” This is a sense that is bereft of the moral connotations implicit in the word modern readers would likely proj­ect. This literal precision exemplifies the public use of Johnson’s intertextual scholarly strategies mentioned ­earlier. However, the very exuberance on display ­here is rather striking: why four authorities, where one would suffice? The genealogy is plumply suffuse—in a word, overdetermined. Closer analy­sis divulges motivations supervenient to purely editorial or lexicographical motivations. The Spenser passage Johnson refers to comes from Prosopopoia, or ­Mother Hubberds Tale: And cast to seeke the Lion, where he may, That he might worke the auengement for this shame, On ­t hose two caytiues, which had bred him blame. And seeking all the forrest busily, At last he found, where sleeping he did ly: The wicked weed, which ­t here the Foxe did lay, From vnderneath his head he tooke away.27

­ other Hubberds Tale was one of Johnson’s favorite works by Spenser; he quotes M from it frequently in the Dictionary and the Shakespeare Edition. According to my analy­sis, Johnson quotes from Spenser 140 times in the 1755 edition ­under the letter “A”; ten are from Hubberd. He quotes from Hubberd three times in his Shakespeare edition—­once more than he does the Faerie Queene. Hubberd is perhaps Spenser’s most Chaucerian poem: it uses the same basic metrical form as found in much of The Canterbury Tales; it opens with an invocation of the month and sea-

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sons similar to that work; it draws upon the estate satire tradition exploited by Chaucer; it deploys a beast fable, as Chaucer did in “The Nun’s Priest Tale”; and so on. Yet the work possesses ele­ments that would have most likely attracted Johnson’s critical approbation, thus making it Spenser’s most, proleptically speaking, Johnsonian poem: it employs heroic couplets, just as Johnson did in his major verse; it is a satire, as Johnson’s two greatest poems are; it is a socially engaged, public work, just as most, if not all, of Johnson’s published writings ­were; and fi­nally, it is a work that mockingly exposes humanity’s susceptibility to be taken in by fallacious yet attractive shortcuts to happiness. This is Johnson’s greatest message, the vanity of ­human wishes, the theme that permeates all of his writings, from his first poem, “On a Daffodill” to his last, “Diffugere nives.” Spenser’s delivery of this theme is more prosodically rugged than Johnson ever framed it, but in content the message is the same, and it is one that Johnson would have approved. To contextualize the passage quoted above: the god Mercury awakens the drugged and deposed Lion in order that the latter ­w ill reclaim native power over his realm and punish the villainous imposters, the Ape and the Fox. Th ­ ese anthropomorphic partners in crime have risen to increasingly greater misdeeds through the course of the satire, penetrating and progressively despoiling vari­ous social levels, from agricultural ­England to the church, to the court, and ultimately usurping the highest level of po­liti­cal power, the crown itself. This latter maneuver is accomplished through the ministration of a “wicked weed,” an herb that reduces the royal Lion to an oblivious slumber. Historically, the spectacle of this pair’s intrusion represents the g­ reat Elizabethan fear of social disorder, particularly that of commoners using sartorial disguise to subvert social conventions. At the level of literary satire, their successful manipulation of the En­glish social system implicitly and symbolically critiques the hierarchical rigidity and innate corruption of that same social order. At a psychological level, the bestial pair perhaps registers Spenser’s subliminal complaint against a rigged game, one voiced from the frustrated perspective of a neglected outsider, a brilliant genius denied sufficient reward, due to the corrupt mismanagement of the aristocratic patrons of his day—to use a familiar Johnsonian phrase, a cry from poetic worth by poverty depressed.28 At this last, subterranean level, the “caytiue” upstarts may be read as vicariously instantiating Spenser’s own fantasized penetration and disruption of an unfair social and courtly world through the disguise of a bestially redemptive vio­lence.29 The theme of usurpation and violent re­sis­tance to institutional corruption emerges with a similarly vehement insistence in Shakespeare’s “wicked dew” passage. Before the play opens, Milan, Prospero’s dukedom, has been usurped by his ­brother Antonio, and he and his ­daughter have been put to sea in an unsafe boat. ­After being shipwrecked on the island now inhabited by Prospero, this same Antonio instigates, with Sebastian, ­brother of Alonso, King of Naples, a plot to kill and replace the Neapolitan monarch—­thus replicating the prehistory of the play. Amidst all this activity, the protagonist of The Tempest, Prospero, overtly a victim of usurpation, covertly reveals himself also to be a tyrant and usurper, one with

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starkly violent tendencies. Prospero had previously befriended and then enslaved the true heir of the island, Caliban, son of the blue-­eyed witch, Sycorax. Throughout the play, Prospero cruelly subjects Caliban to physical torture and psychological torment. In both Hubberd and the Tempest—­poems harnessed into an intertextual co­a li­t ion by Johnson’s lexicographical genealogy—we have parallel symbolic repre­sen­ta­tions of social and po­liti­cal order, repre­sen­ta­tions that are paradoxically at once pacifically idealized and viciously v­ iolated. And in both we have demi-­human characters occupying the margins of official power with volatile rage and frustration, rebels who strive or long to overthrow the “legitimate” impositions that authority uses to oppress them. Johnson’s dyadic alignment of the two passages allows them to form a discrete aesthetic object worthy of critical inspection and appreciation. An intertextual parallelism emerges from the paratactic compression of the two phrases, “wicked dew” and “wicked weed.” The pair microcosmically constitutes a rhetorical and literary artefact that announces the larger artistry woven into the skein of Johnson’s intertextual scholarship. In addition to the thematic semblances already noted, the dyad is knit by linguistic and rhetorical properties. It forms an anaphorically linked isocolon, an utterance tightly unified by the acoustical ligatures of assonance and alliteration. Each member of the dyad performs a dramatic action, ­ uman consciousness upon the elemental world of nature. And the imposition of h in both cases this imposition operates as a kind of alchemical transmutation, issuing in a drug or magical potion capable of malign influence. Furthermore, each of the natu­ral objects in the dyad is semantically unstable and possesses the explosive potential to bifurcate into artificial and natu­ral identities: “weed” can be “an herb noxious or useless” (Dictionary, definition one) or “a garment” (Dictionary, definition two); while “dew” can be, in its substantive form, “the moisture upon the ground” or “an action of terrour” (Dictionary, definition two).30 The vibrant interplay of ­t hese linguistic permutations si­mul­ta­neously animates and complicates the internal dimensions possessed by Johnson’s intertextual dyad. ­These internal complexities demonstrate how seemingly ­simple scholarly glosses can coalesce into a verbal entity with an ontologically intact identity. The dyad is complex enough to allow further interrogation, at an autobiographical rather than a purely aesthetic level—­Johnson’s private intellectual “pedigree.” He was a man driven by power­f ul emotions, and he has left us rec­ords of strong feelings about his wife, m ­ other, f­ ather, and ­brother.31 Yet his books and reading ­were his even more intimate companions; and his relationships with ­these, especially from midlife on, might be said to rise to the level of a textual ­family romance.32 Authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden ­were Johnson’s intimate, day-­to-­day companions, parents to rebel against, siblings to b ­ attle with, cousins to admire and compete with, partners to help birth new textual-­children into the world. Inside, the discrete fragments this jostling and unruly h ­ ouse­hold form—as, for example, in the wicked weed/wicked dew dyad—­small portals that yield larger insights into both Johnson’s public pronouncements and his veiled “domestick privacies” (Yale

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Johnson, 4:321). ­These textual fragments may be attached to an immanent totality that can only be partially glimpsed in the form of t­ hese small textual articulations. Pertinent to our immediate focus h ­ ere, however, is the dyad’s critical reflections upon the two texts, ­Mother Hubberd and The Tempest. The “wicked weed” and the “wicked dew” both semantically foreground moral judgments, each cohering around the adjective “wicked” taken in the moral sense. But when applied to natu­ ral objects, plants and w ­ ater, the compound phrases expand to represent the contamination of a pure, innocent nature. In Spenser, Johnson’s highlighting of the paratextual phrase enforces the realization that the wicked weed (1) is the efficient cause, the drug by which the Fox and Ape realize their scheme to seize the crown, (2) serves as an emblem, a representative symbol that finely compresses the larger immoral plane, or “complot,” by which they disrupt the natu­ral order of society. That is to say, in its fusion of artificially ­human unkindness with a neutral natu­ral phenomenon, the phrase “wicked weed” deftly and incisively conveys the entirety of the Fox and Ape’s monstrous villainies, the pollution of a benign natu­ral order with selfishly motivated malignity. Likewise, Caliban’s “wicked dew” lucidly condenses a sinister, if impotent, fantasy of violent revenge against his unnatural imprisonment, even as its semantic ambivalence expresses the hybrid status of a character si­mul­ta­neously straddling ­human and bestial identities. The dyad forms a two-­sided coin, one side representing an instrument of successful usurpation, the obverse, an ­i magined revenger’s tragedy against the usurper. Perhaps most “gratifying to our minds,” to recur to Johnson’s language from the Dictionary Preface, is the possibility that this dyad might be allowing him to furtively indulge in self-­reflective meditations that explore his own social status and literary identity—­ meditations probing such raw issues as legitimacy and oppression, authority and revolt, marginalization and centripetal social vio­lence.33 The “wicked dew” / “wicked weed” genealogy clearly operates at a deeper level of apprehension than one of mere dry scholarly delineation. This apparently minor ensemble, taken together as an organic aesthetic entity, demonstrates the fertile flexibility inherent within Johnson’s purportedly “neoclassical” and conservative scholarly and linguistic tendencies.34 We have no doubt that Johnson admired the “­great tradition”—­represented in the Dictionary entry by such writers as Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Dryden—­and that he instinctively gravitated ­toward and instrumentally deployed order and hierarchy—as represented in his scholarship by the tidily nuanced definitions and editorial explications enfolded within a larger analytic and hierarchical system of classification akin, perhaps, in some ways, to the schematic tabulations of a Linnaeus or a Buffon. However, the rational scaffolding and “dense histories”35 girding the intellectual and linguistic edifice of a dictionary or a scholarly edition, in their very sobriety and empirical specificity, offered a sure and sober ground of solidity that allows Johnson to exercise light-­ winged, daring flights of imaginative creativity. We might usefully recall ­here Johnson’s description of the imagination from the second paragraph of Rambler 125: “Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and

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impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction and burst the enclosures of regularity.”36 And such delimitations might satisfy the ordinary dictionary-­maker and editor. But Johnson was no ordinary lexicographer and annotator. Rooted within the black-­and-­white superficies of a soberly rigorous ­table of ordered rationality, Johnson permits himself to energize and humanize ­these inorganic intellectual structures by mining minute, living cells, apertures into vital intertextual activities—­those genealogies that he ruefully understates to in the Dictionary preface. As he says in the preface to the Shakespeare Edition, “I have confined my imagination to the margin” (Yale Johnson, 7:108). To put this in another way: Contained within Johnson’s scholarly monuments, Enlightenment documents sponsored by the philosophic and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth ­century, are rich combs dripping with subjective expression. ­These pose re­sis­tance to the Enlightenment perspective through which the scientific identity of t­ hings is mapped onto a reductive, abstract grid. The phi­los­o­pher Charles Taylor has cogently summarized this new worldview, in contrast to the old one that held sway from Pythagoras and Plato through the early sixteenth ­century: To dispense with the notion of meaningful order was to re-­define the self. The situation is now reversed: full self-­possession requires that we ­free ourselves from the projections of meanings onto t­ hings, that we be able to draw back from the world, and concentrate purely on our own pro­cesses of observation and thought about ­things. The old model now looks like a dream of self-­dispersal; self-­presence is now to be aware of what we are and what we are d ­ oing in abstraction from the 37 world we observe and judge.

Johnson’s vital and exuberant intertextual cells instantiate Taylor’s notion of “self-­ possession.” Janus-­like, they at once look back to the emblematic world of premodernism, of Spenser and Shakespeare, where occult sympathies interconnected seemingly disparate phenomena, while anticipating the Romantic world of symbolic correspondences and imaginative, synthetic poetic vision. Extending this train of thought a bit further, it is tempting to suggest that the tensions between a regime of rational categorization and a creatively organic impulse yearning to transcend the limitations imposed by this intellectual order parallel the very tensions previously noted in Hubberd and The Tempest—­tensions, that is, between an excessively restrictive social order and the genuinely ­human aspiration ­toward freedom and au­t hen­tic selfhood.

Conclusion If we accept t­ hese tensions as crystalizing within Johnson’s scholarly poising of the “wicked dew” / “wicked weed” dyad and its genealogical exuberance, then some conclusions may be drawn. Johnson was, like Spenser and Shakespeare, the son of

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a middling tradesman.38 Given his socially ambivalent position, he may have identified with the marginalized and transgressive symbols of outsiders looking in, as fictively emblemized in the Fox, the Ape, and Caliban. Despite his im­mense literary success, Johnson neither comfortably nor fully conformed to his later-­life status as the cynosure of mid-­Georgian respectable propriety, the oracular center and defining moral conscience of his age. Described by one of his contemporaries, with re­spect to his physical deformities and odd, gesticulating manner, as “the Caliban of lit­er­a­ture,” he once said of himself “I am a straggler. I may leave this town and go to G ­ rand Cairo, without being missed h ­ ere or observed t­ here.”39 Like Spenser, he felt betrayed and let down by patrons and social celebrities who possessed considerably greater monetary wealth and cultural prestige.40 Like Shakespeare, he entered London as a provincial rube, rising only by dint of forceful and ambitious industry. Indeed, Johnson’s description of Shakespeare’s entry into London reads as autobiography: Boyle congratulated himself upon his high birth, b ­ ecause it favoured his curiosity, by facilitating his access. Shakespeare had no such advantage; he came to London a needy adventurer, and lived for a time by very mean employments. Many works of genius and learning have been performed in states of life that appear very ­little favourable to thought or to enquiry; so many, that he who considers them is inclined to think that he sees enterprise and perseverance predominating over all external agency, and bidding help and hindrance vanish before them. The genius of Shakespeare was not to be depressed by the weight of poverty, nor ­limited by the narrow conversation to which men in want are inevitably condemned; the incumbrances of his fortune ­were shaken from his mind, as “dewdrops from a lion’s mane.” 41

It is noteworthy to mention, if only in passing, that the closing allusion to Troilus and Cressida collapses two of the key images enfolded within weed/dew dyad, embracing as it does dew drops (The Tempest) and the lion (Hubberd).42 It is as if the imagery collected in the dyad coalesced into a permanent m ­ ental association, a creative trope or recurring fixture, within Johnson’s mind. Particularly fitting and characteristic is that he enfolds this ensemble within an intertextual construct: as he remarks elsewhere, in Rambler 143, “The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament may sometimes display so much judgment as ­w ill almost compensate for invention.” 43 While Johnson’s dogged determination energized his successful conquest of the London literary world—­like Shakespeare, “he had so many difficulties to encounter, and so l­ ittle assistance to surmount them” (Yale Johnson, 7:89)—he remained, at least within an impor­tant aspect of his consciousness, a provincial interloper, a usurper, an idling rambler—an outsider looking in. As Donald J. Greene has noted, he was “the ­Grand Old Man of En­g lish letters, the ­g reat moralist, a landmark of the British cultural scene, expected to pontificate solemnly and judiciously on suitable occasions,” yet “it perhaps amused Johnson to puncture this legend by

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indulging himself in . . . ​t he role of enfant terrible.” 44 It is perhaps ­because of private doubts and insecurities that Johnson declaimed all the more forcefully and vociferously within his public role as the G ­ reat Cham of lit­er­a­ture, why he brooked contradiction with an ever irritable defensiveness. That is, from his perspective, he had to prove to himself, as much as to o ­ thers, that he “belonged,” that he truly deserved the accolades that he accumulated about him in the last two de­cades of his life, when he definitively, if uneasily, occupied the central position con­temporary society granted him. While Spenserian biographical details are tantalizingly elusive, ­there seems to be an intersection of some sort between Johnson’s and Spenser’s lives or between Johnson’s phenomenological apprehension of the text he read as Spenser. The ­great twentieth-­century En­glish scholar F. R. Leavis has described Johnson’s literary criticism as “living lit­er­a­ture, alive and life-­giving.” 45 In my view, this characterization is apt—­but I urge h ­ ere that it should be applied to Johnson’s scholarship as well.

notes 1. ​Robert Heron [Pinkerton], Letters of Lit­er­a­ture (London, 1785), 265. According to Jack Lynch, the 1755 version of the Dictionary contains 42,773 entries; see Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary”: Se­lections from the 1755 Work that Defined the Language, Jack Lynch, ed. (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 8. 2. ​Samuel Johnson, Plan of a Dictionary of the En­glish Language, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–2018), vol. 18, Johnson on the En­glish Language, ed. by Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr. (2005), 48. This collection is cited hereafter as Yale Johnson. 3. ​For more on the relationship between Johnson and Browne, see Anthony W. Lee, “Annotating The Rambler/The Annotated Rambler,” in Notes on Footnotes: Annotating EighteenthCentury Literature, ed. Anthony W. Lee and Melvyn New (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), forthcoming. For another authorial outlier (Soame Jenyns) who, apparently (differing interpretations exist) crawled from the woodworks to posthumously criticize Johnson, see The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, with a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. by G. B. Hill., rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 1:316.n2 (cited hereafter as Boswell’s Life); Samuel Johnson, “Commentary on Crousaz,” in vol. 17 of Yale Johnson, ed. O M Brack Jr. (2004), 395. 4. ​Pinkerton was a respectable scholar who attracted the friendship of such eminent figures as Horace Walpole, Edward Gibbon, and Sir Walter Scott. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., “John Pinkerton.” 5. ​See, for example, Anthony W. Lee, “ ‘Gaping Heirs’: Line Forty-­eight of Johnson’s The Vanity of ­Human Wishes,” The Explicator 75, no. 3 (September 2017): 160–165; Lee, “A New Johnson Self-­Quotation in the Dictionary,” Notes and Queries 65, no. 2 (June 2018): 247–250; Lee, “Samuel Johnson and Milton’s ‘Mighty Bone,’ ” Notes and Queries 65, no. 2 (June 2018): 250–252; Lee, “Dryden, Pope, and Milton in Gay’s Rural Sports and Johnson’s Dictionary,” Notes and Queries 65, no. 2 (June 2018): 241–243. 6. ​See, for example, Anthony W. Lee, Dead Masters: Mentoring and Intertextuality in Samuel Johnson (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 6–7. 7. ​Cf. Jacques Derrida: “Meaning . . . ​is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which ­t here is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly ‘­simple term’ is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority” (“Semiology and Grammatology,” in Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 33).

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8. ​I have attempted to explain this conceptualization by way of analogy to quantum physics in “Rambler 2 and Johnson’s Dictionary: Paratextual and Intertextual Entanglements with Pope, Statius, Dryden, Gay, and Milton,” Eigh­teenth ­Century Intelligencer (March 2018): 9–18, which is based upon a talk delivered at the Library of Congress on 17 November 2017. It may be viewed at https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-8269/. 9. ​See Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language (London, 1755) (cited hereafter as Dictionary), s.v. “pedigree”: “Genealogy; lineage; account of descent.” 10. ​Cf. “For ’tis observable, that the Ancients in treating of the Chaos, and in raising the World out of it, rang’d it into several Regions or Masses, as we have done; and in that order successively, rising one from another, as if it was a Pedigree or Genealogy” (Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, Centaur Classics [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965], 62). 11. ​For the notion of “symbolic mentor,” see Lee, Dead Masters, 16–17. 12. ​John Dryden, Fables, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 7, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 7:24–25. 13. ​Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A. C. Hamilton, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2007), 244, 9.48.7–79. 14. ​John Milton, Lycidas, ll.10–11, The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume 3, The Shorter Poems, ed. by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski and Estelle Haan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 50. 15. ​John Philips, Cyder, ed. by John Goodridge, ed. (Cheltenham: Cyder Press, 2001), 40, 2:413. Philips’s passage also quoted in the Dictionary, s.v. “incondite.” 16. ​ Johnson on the En­glish Language, in Yale Johnson, vol. 18, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr. (2005), 18:109. Cf. this remark by Anna Seward, who on many occasions was no friend of Johnson: “Excepting his orthographick [lexicographical] works, ­every t­ hing which Dr. Johnson wrote was Poetry, whose essence consists not in numbers, or in jingle, but in the strength and glow of a fancy, to which all the stores of nature and of art stand in prompt administration; and in an eloquence which conveys their blended illustrations in a language ‘more tuneable than needs or rhyme or verse to add more harmony’ ” (Boswell’s Life 1:40n3). See also Boswell’s Life, 4:429, where Boswell echoes this observation: “His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet.” 17. ​As Spenser refers to Geoffrey Chaucer in the Faerie Queene (4.2.32.8); also quoted by Johnson in the Preface to the Dictionary (Yale Johnson, 18:95). 18. ​For my use of the terminology of mentor and protégé, see Lee, Dead Masters. 19. ​ The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. by Roger Lonsdale, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 2:69. 20. ​W. B. C. Watkins, Johnson and En­glish Poetry before 1660 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1936), 66. 21. ​For the few exceptions, see Jack Lynch, “Studied Barbarity: Johnson, Spenser, and Literary Pro­gress,” Age of Johnson 8 (1998): 81–108; Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr., “Thomas Warton’s Observations on the ‘Faerie Queene’ of Spenser, Samuel Johnson’s ‘History of the En­glish Language,’ and Warton’s History of En­glish Poetry: Reciprocal Indebtedness?” Philological Quarterly 74 (1995): 327–335; and Maxine Turnage, “Samuel Johnson’s Criticism of the Works of Edmund Spenser,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 10 (1970), 557–567. 22. ​J. W. Good, Studies in the Milton Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1915), 198n112. The other figures on the major authors are Shakespeare, 15.6  ­percent, Dryden 9.2 ­percent, Addison 4.3 ­percent, and Pope 3.5 ­percent. 23. ​Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 1226, 1.2.321–326; cited hereafter as Oxford Shakespeare. Caliban has one previous line, before he appears visually onstage; initially, he is introduced twice, first in Prospero’s conversation with Ariel, then with Miranda. 24. ​Bertrand Bronson, Introduction, Johnson on Shakespeare, in vols. 7–8 of Yale Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo, (1968), 7:123. Note that ­under the fifth definition of “foul” in the Dictionary

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(“hateful; ugly; loathsome”) Johnson aligns a passage from Spenser with one from The Tempest, implicitly comparing the serpent Errour to Caliban’s m ­ other: Th’ other half did ­woman’s shape retain, Most loathsom, filthy, foul, and full of vile disdain. F. Qu. Hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? Shakespeare’s Tempest. 25. ​For Johnson’s essentially Lockean notion of language, in which words are singly yoked to ideas reflecting fixed objects, see J. D. Fleeman, “Johnson’s Poetry,” Proceedings of the British Acad­emy 69 (1983): 355–369; Elizabeth Hedrick, “Locke’s Theory of Language and Johnson’s Dictionary,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 20, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 422–444. 26. ​Or scientific words: see William K. Wimsatt, Philosophick Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948). ­ other Hubberds Tale, ll. 1316–1322, in The Shorter 27. ​Edmund Spenser, Prosopopoia, or M Poems, Richard A. McCabe, ed. (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1999), 269. 28. ​See Samuel Johnson, London, in The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith, Edward L. McAdam, [and J. D. Fleeman], 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 76, ll.176–177. 29. ​For the context of the po­liti­cal satire in Hubberd, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 265–274 (cited hereafter as Hadfield). For the relation of Hubberd to Spenser’s ­career, see K. A. Craik, “Spenser’s Complaints and the New Poet,” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, nos. 1–2 (2001): 63–79; Richard Danson Brown, The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 169–171; Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Re­nais­sance Idea of a Literary ­Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 280; and K. T. van der Berg, “ ‘The Counterfeit in Personation’: Spenser’s Prosopopoia or M ­ other Hubberds Tale,” in The Author in His Work: Essays on a Prob­lem in Criticism, ed. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey L. Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 85–102. 30. ​It should be noted that Johnson cautions against this usage: “It is not used properly”; however, his citation of it acknowledges its living existence in the language, as well as his awareness of this existence. 31. ​See W.  J. Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 13–21, 120–122, 160–162. 32. ​See Johnson’s letter to Richard Brocklesby, penned within three weeks of his death, where he expresses the desire to return to London from Lichfield, ­because “­there are my books to which I have not yet bidden farewel [sic]” (25 October 1784; The Letters of Samuel Johnson: The Hyde Edition, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. [Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994], 4:428). Johnson’s library was his true home, and he rarely felt at home ­unless he was in one or was reading a book. For Johnson’s reading, see Robert DeMaria Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 33. ​The “personalization” of Johnson’s scholarly proj­ects was noticed almost immediately ­after the 1755 publication of the Dictionary; see Boswell’s Life, 1:294–97. For the humanist tradition of such “capricious indulgences,” see Yale Johnson, 18:xxii–­x xv. What the pre­sent chapter discusses, however, is quite dif­fer­ent; unlike the conscious playfulness of describing a “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge,” the intertextual complicities I endeavor to trace exist primarily beneath the surface, erupting from a netherworld at discrete temporal and spatial locations where the interplay between relevant images and baffled emotions demanding expression coincide. It is within the rapprochement between the Freudian model of repression and eruption of dangerous emotions with the “death of the author” intertextual models establish by Kristeva and Barthes that my reading of Johnson claims its own position. Inter-

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textuality is a vast ocean or stream of texts and letters and sentences, akin to a Milky Way that consists of galaxies, constellations, planetary systems and planets. The overall system is impersonal and above ­human consciousness. However, ­human consciousness may be expressed within this overarching model. Nevertheless, e­ very private emergence from within the interiors of the larger system, while authorized and enabled by the entire system, adds something new to the ­whole, even as it is constructed out of precursive materials. Thus, Johnson is able to “create” a novel meaning out of the conjunction between the two phrases from the Tempest and Hubberd. This meaning is at once personal—an autobiographical inscription of Johnson’s own thoughts emerging at a par­tic­u ­lar time and place—­a nd objective and universal—­something crafted out of the fabric of the materials of an eternal recurrence, and hence utterly austere and objective. 34. ​For Johnson’s neoclassicism, see William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism (New York: Vintage, 1957), 313–336, W. J. Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts, W. J. Bate, ed. (1952; repr. Miami: Wolf Den, 2002), 183–188. 35. ​Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), 132. 36. ​Samuel Johnson: The Rambler, in Yale Johnson, vols. 3–5, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss (1969), 4:300. See also Rasselas, chap. 43, in Yale Johnson, vol. 16, ed. by Gwin J. Kolb (1990), 16:150–153. 37. ​Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 7. 38. ​For Spenser’s f­ ather, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, 22. 39. ​Gilbert Cowper, quoted in Boswell’s Life, 2:129, 3:306. 40. ​For Johnson’s defiance of his “patron” Chesterfield, see Paul Korshin, “The Johnson-­ Chesterfield Relationship: A New Hypothesis,” PMLA 85 (1970): 247–259, and Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998), 11–33. 41. ​Yale Johnson, 7:89. Compare the sentence “The genius of Shakespeare . . . ​­were shaken from his mind, as ‘dewdrops from a lion’s mane’ ” to this from the often-­autobiographical Life of Savage: “He might justly represent, that he ­ought to have been considered as a lion in the toils, and demand to be released before the dogs should be loosed upon him” (Yale Johnson, 22:949); cf. also “depressed by the weight of poverty” to London, l.177, “Slow rises worth by poverty deprest” (Johnson, Poems, 79). 42. ​Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Oxford Shakespeare, 762, 3.3.217. 43. ​Yale Johnson, 4:401; for a close discussion of this phenomenon, see Lee, Dead Masters, 65–77. 44. ​Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 204. 45. ​F. R. Leavis, “Johnson as Critic,” Scrutiny 12, no. 3 (Summer 1944): 187–204 (187).

In Silence and Darkness johnson’s verdicts on artistic failure Adam Rounce

Samuel Johnson was never backward in pointing out the invariable tendency in ­human affairs ­towards failure, or at best a sense of limitation qualifying the pos­ si­ble; even the ghost is upbraided, in Hamlet, for not achieving his ends, in a manner that makes him sound almost hapless: “The apparition left the regions of the dead to ­little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it,” let alone the “untimely death” of Ophelia.1 The deadpan register of such pronouncements is a part of the perceived monumentality of Johnson’s critical personality—­itself partly a result of fame, both in his lifetime and immediately afterwards, but also a facet of style: an early biographer claimed that Johnson’s “criticisms w ­ ere often rendered impor­tant, not by the justness of the remarkable which they contained, but by the strength of the language in which they ­were delivered.”2 On the other hand, the aptness of Johnson’s judgments is inseparable from such strength. Just as Boswell’s Johnson talks in striking and inimitable fashion, so Johnson the writer finds memorable ways to describe ­things other­wise commonplace and nondescript (­people not finishing long gestated writings, or completing them to find only disappointment) and creates monumental phrases to point his critical judgments, describing artists and their works in such a way as to suggest a pro­cess of inevitability and giving an uncanny sense to the reader that it can and ­will never be said better. This essay w ­ ill argue that this critical style is especially resonant in Johnson’s writings about failure (and lack of success, which is not necessarily the same ­thing) in the less noteworthy ­careers that make up a large proportion of the shorter biographies in the Lives of the Poets. In his descriptions of unsuccessful works, authors, and artists of dif­fer­ent types (and of their failure as often in life as in art), Johnson develops and deploys an extraordinarily effective type of criticism based on diminution, which dramatizes the inception and reception of failure as inevitable pro­cesses, analogous to the wider types of vanity so often discussed in Johnson’s writings and life. The cumu54

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lative effect of t­hese micro-­dramatizations of failure is that the reader shares Johnson’s understanding of the inescapability of h ­ uman limitation and frustration and that the Lives, like Johnson’s other writings, become as much a criticism of life, to adapt Arnold, as literary criticism per se. As Greg Clingham put it, one major strand in the Lives is “the effect of time on ­human endeavor.” The Lives are thus redolent with “the ubiquitous presence of failure and death,” as the passing of time renders unread and unimportant what was once central, and the “biographer’s retrospective glance . . . ​distinguishes the irony in the discrepancy between [his subject’s] intentions and achievements.”3 It is not a surprise that so many of the Lives of the Poets are as ­little studied as their subjects: critical attention has always been drawn, in the main, t­ owards ­those critical biographies in which Johnson’s writing had impor­tant consequences for literary history, reception, and canonicity and continues to be influential: ­t hese would include the innovations in the “Life of Cowley,” with the analy­sis of the meta­ phoric excesses of the Metaphysicals (themselves a type of failure, for Johnson); deliberately iconoclastic and out­spoken lives that offended (Milton); accounts of figures that cemented their centrality (Pope, Dryden) or of writers impor­tant to the period mainly for reasons other than their verse (Addison, Rowe). Th ­ ere are also ­t hose that are indicative of Johnson’s taste and antipathy to con­temporary fashions (Collins, Gray) or have an erstwhile significance in the Johnsonian canon (the ­earlier, reprinted “Life of Savage,” Johnson’s first major biography; the apostrophe to Gilbert Walmsley in the “Life of Smith”). Many of the Lives, though, are rarely read, even by specialists. Occasionally, critical arguments shine an unexpected light on the dusty covers of less well-­k nown biographies: the sharp disagreements over Johnson’s supposed Jacobitism in the 1990s led to the “Life of Blackmore” being called as evidence, given Johnson’s approval of Sir Richard Blackmore’s consistency of princi­ples (albeit Whiggish ones) and support for the Hanoverian monarchs.4 But such attention has been the exception. This too is unavoidable. Johnson inherited an uneven canon based on the needs and copyright holdings of the booksellers’ consortium, and the place in the collection of often very minor poets has often been questioned, from its first appearance. Johnson had l­ittle if any say in any omissions, and his requested inclusions (Blackmore, Watts, Yalden, Pomfret) w ­ ere more a reflection of his piety than poetic interventions as such, where a motive can be ascribed.5 The contents necessitated a pragmatic approach, as Johnson was compelled to write something on lots of poets whose small, uncertain claims on posterity he could describe only in lukewarm fashion, whilst also noting their limitations. Thomas Tyers remarked of the Lives that it “was a fault in our critic too often to take occasion to show himself superior to his subject, and also to trample upon it,” but while this was arguable of the more controversial judgments on Gray or Milton’s politics, in many of the Lives the subjects had become so obscure as to render any claims of superiority irrelevant, and such trampling more of a regretful shake of the head.6

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The circumstances b ­ ehind the Lives, resulting in its disparate contents, meant that Johnson’s required task throughout was to maintain a critical tone that could be comprehensive, attentive, and (to some extent) diplomatic, even when the materials it considered w ­ ere not apparently worth such sustained attention. The result is that many of the smaller biographies are made up of micronarratives of artistic limitation, describing what potential t­ hese authors had, how they often failed to fulfil it, or how their lack of achievement was a precise reflection of their ability. Philip Smallwood described a strain in Johnson’s criticism, linked to his Juvenal imitations, where the “rising tendency” is “accompanied by a corresponding collapse; a tendency of Johnsonian critical prose in the direction of praise to conclude in bathetic descent.” He sees this as “the play of the mock-­heroic,” and often in the Lives, small but telling ele­ments of bathos diminish the perspective and importance of larger claims or ambitions.7

Johnson repeatedly dramatizes ­these failures through his own narrative model of vanity, as “they mount, shine, evaporate and fall” but with very l­ittle shining, on the ­whole. Such short descriptions of poets take dif­fer­ent though related forms and also involve some of Johnson’s well-­k nown dislikes or prejudices: repeatedly poets in the Lives have a talent that is simply not equal to their often grandiose ambition, and the result is mediocrity, delineated in a variety of ways, from a poet’s chosen form being inappropriate to his needs (especially given Johnson’s own disdain for the default use of lumpen blank verse or the more complacent stock retreats into pastoral), affected by contextual, temporal qualities and only of l­imited relevance (and thus likely to fade), or more generally meretricious—­like the majority of artistic endeavors in Johnson’s view—­made up of some good parts, some bad, but mostly mundane and almost all forgotten, like their authors. The result is that small instances of failure form a series of parallels and implied comparisons in the larger texture of the Lives. The Johnsonian approach to failure in the smaller “Lives” often involves the pre­ sen­ta­tion of an ideal, which is then diminished, or shown to be part of the distance between what can be conceived and its more sublunary actuality. Sometimes attention is drawn to the disjunction between supposedly large talents and reputations and the ­little that has been left ­behind by them to posterity. The Earl of Roscommon, a significant footnote for the influence of his Essay on Translated Verse on Pope and ­others, is nonetheless a leading example of this disparity between apparently ­great powers and their relatively unimpressive results. A ­ fter quoting one of his major sources, Elijah Fenton, who rhapsodized on Roscommon’s profound poetic and critical abilities, Johnson surmises, From this account of the riches of his mind, who would not imagine that they had been displayed in large volumes and numerous per­for­mances? Who would not, ­a fter the perusal of this character, be surprised to find that all the proofs of this genius, and knowledge, and judgment, are not sufficient to form a single

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book, or to appear other­w ise than in conjunction with the works of some other writer of the same petty size? But thus it is that characters are written: we know somewhat, and we imagine the rest. (Lives, 2:20)

Fenton’s encomium is misplaced, ­because Roscommon produced so ­little writing as to make it hyperbolic and near bathetic. Such talents should have ensured some more substantial works as their proof. It is Fenton, rather than Roscommon, who is being admonished h ­ ere, but the final sentence contains a significant thought for Johnson’s understanding of biography, a form he enjoyed ­because of the way the imagination constructs the larger idea of a life from such materials as anecdotes, memoirs, letters, and writings, alongside other partial glimpses, which are then transfigured into a ­whole: we know somewhat, and we imagine the rest, hence Johnson’s own noting in Rambler 60 of such details as Sallust’s description of Catiline’s walking in an involved way reflects upon and dramatizes his role as a conspirator. Fred Parker describes “this sharp illumination of the personal that one wants from biography,” but also suggest that the Lives do not offer such transfiguration, as its biographies are too unknowable and too filled with gaps and ambiguities to fit such a model and instead give many examples of “the distance between the biographer and his subject.” 8 Parker cites the same sentence, “we know somewhat,” from “Roscommon” in support of the idea “that we recognise the dimension of conjecture and speculation and so, by implication, the fictiveness of most biographical intimacy.”9 ­W hether or not Johnson’s represents his poetic lives as collages that form totalities or as a necessary series of gaps and fragments, Fenton’s knowledge of Roscommon’s potential obscured his relatively scant literary productions, and his imagining of Roscommon is misleading, b ­ ecause not proportionate to the larger evidence. But what Johnson also describes is one of ­those larger truths that can make even the most apparently nondescript of his writings so meaningful: the idea of Roscommon fulfilling his apparent potential is natu­ral—­Fenton merely transposed his knowledge (Roscommon was a formidably learned and skillful thinker and writer) into what he ­imagined Roscommon should be; the distance between this and the scant pages of his published works, not sufficient to form a volume on their own, is one of the repeated vanities that populate the Lives and act as a metonym for Johnson’s idea of the limits of authorship more widely, where what is notable is how rarely potential of any kind finds the sort of expression and fulfilment that Fenton implies. Roscommon is thus typical rather than distinguished, what­ever his gifts: Johnson’s strong implication is that he has not accomplished what­ever he intended, and in this, he is far from alone. The types of failure that populate the Lives repeat the general idea found in Johnson’s description of the distance between Roscommon’s talents and the slim productions that resulted from them. This idea does of course take varying forms, two of the most prevalent being the related idea of mediocrity (most lit­er­a­ture not rising above it) and the workings of time, with its tendency to render urgent polemics obsolete and redundant and to reveal the superficially excellent to be mundane

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and commonplace, given the perspective of de­cades. Along with his view of Swift, Johnson’s “Life of Rochester” is the biography most obviously and completely at odds with the modern view of its subject as a poet of g­ reat significance and consequence, though considerations of morality, piety, and the attitude of his own era ­towards published obscenity are of course cogent ­here (it remains hard to see Johnson having anything but contempt for large parts of Rochester’s work u ­ nder any circumstances). What is now seen as a major, if truncated ­career is defiantly minor for Johnson and based in part on the noise of notoriety: The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings; the compositions of a man whose name was heard so often, w ­ ere certain of attention, and from many readers certain of applause. This blaze of reputation is not yet quite extinguished; and his poetry still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed. (Lives, 2:12)

The images of excess are calculated to show the self-­consuming nature of a reputation built upon extraliterary scandal, gossip, and a de­cadent allure, even if ­t hese same ­factors guaranteed a readership that would last for some time; Rochester’s genius is to some degree overshadowed by such splendor, but the blaze of such reputation means of course that it ­will burn out, sooner rather than ­later. (­There is also an implied critique of personality—­t he “glare” of Rochester’s public character is oppressive and fixes itself to his poetry). At least, though, in all his writing “may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to excellence. What more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men began to be displayed?”10 Rochester on some level, it is suggested, had the ability to do other­wise, even if he wasted his talents. The passing of years ­will make his works less noticed ­because less scandalous and intriguing. A far more frequent refrain in the Lives concerns poets whose appeal has proven to be superficial and whose works have become dated and near obsolescent. Sometimes the framing of such works highlights the unbridgeable gap between a poem’s relative potential and the inefficacy of the poet. John Dyer is given credit for a good title, if ­little e­ lse: a­ fter the accomplishment of his finest poem, Grongar Hill, “the idea of the Ruins of Rome strikes more but pleases less, and the title raises greater expectation than the per­for­mance gratifies” (Lives, 4:125). Striking rather than pleasing (a formulation also used to devastating effect in the critique of Gray’s Pindaric Odes) is suggestive, like the glare of Rochester, of the flawed magniloquence of Dyer’s vision: his poem promises more than it delivers; hence the title being more in­ter­est­ing than the result. Writings that raise “greater expectation than the per­for­mance gratifies” are a cornerstone of the minor Lives: dealing with repeated examples meant that Johnson developed a shorthand to distinguish his idea of at least relative potential from more complete mediocrity. In this re­spect and in this com­pany, Dyer’s in­ter­est­ing title comes to seem high praise. In Johnson’s brief account of Thomas Yalden, other than praising his “Hymn to Darkness” (an antitype to Cowley’s “Hymn to Light”),

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Johnson’s criticism of Yalden relies on omission and recalls the popu­lar adage of not saying anything when ­t here is nothing nice to say (“He wrote another poem on the death of the duke of Gloucester”). When he is compelled to be more specific, the praise is not effusive: Of his other poems it is sufficient to say, that they deserve perusal, though they are not always exactly polished, though the rhymes are sometimes very ill sorted, and though his faults seem rather the omissions of idleness than the negligences of enthusiasm. (Lives, 3:111)

Despite his poems supposedly deserving perusal (itself hardly a bold affirmation), the subsequent qualifications somewhat undermine this tentative claim. The result is a perfect microcosm of relative failure—­t hese poems are just about worth reading, except that that they are likely to offer l­ ittle—­with the general premise followed by a set of undermining qualifications. That so lukewarm a criticism ends the account of a writer Johnson apparently lobbied to be included in the collection only adds to the mystery of why Johnson considered Yalden worthy of such attention. ­There are many other points where failure is more pointed, and the sort of notice given to Yalden’s works, howsoever brief, seems far more copious. Via the very economy of his criticism, Johnson indicates a ­great deal. On the one page given to him, we are told that the poet Richard Duke was “the familiar friend of Otway; and was engaged, among other popu­lar names, in the translations of Ovid and Juvenal. In his Review, though unfinished, are some vigorous lines.” The next sentence is masterfully succinct: “His poems are not below mediocrity; nor have I found much in them to be praised” (Lives, 2:181). The formulation of “not” and “nor” ­here creates something like the faintest pos­si­ble praise through its negatives: his poetry is not worse than mediocre (but, sadly, it is no better), and (according to the perfectly balanced second part) ­t here is l­ittle in it that can be remarked upon in any positive way. It is not abject or incompetent, but it has nothing noteworthy to recommend it. This is perhaps the most precise way that Johnson could find to describe Duke’s poetry, without being more bemused about its presence in the collection to which the Lives ­were an accompaniment. Duke is part of that substantial contingent amongst the minor Lives where any attention once given to their works and their personality has wilted in the intervening years, leaving instead only anecdotal or other evidence of their former significance. William Walsh the poet had by Johnson’s day dis­appeared, whereas his place as “knowing Walsh” w ­ ill always leave a mark in studies of eighteenth-­century poetry ­because of his informal tutelage of Pope on the aesthetics of poetry. Of his own verse, Johnson is less impressed: In his Golden Age Restored, t­ here was something of humour, while the facts w ­ ere recent; but it now strikes no longer. In his imitation of Horace, the first stanzas are happily turned; and, in all his writings, t­ here are pleasing passages. He has, however, more elegance than vigour, and seldom rises higher than to be pretty. (Lives, 2: 78)

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The difficulty is both remoteness (his topical humor has withered) and superficiality: elegance is not the worst of qualities, but if the end result is only “to be pretty,” it is unlikely to appeal overly, nearly a c­ entury on. Failure is of course relative, but Walsh’s elegance has not preserved his poetry, nor compensated for its lack of vigor. In a related vein, the poets in the collection who have been steadily forgotten are often ­t hose who did not aim at anything more profound than diversion or entertainment; Johnson relates that such figures fulfilled this aim, but in so ­doing ensured that their verse seems remote to posterity, beyond its original audience. Thus William King is praised for the creation of poetry that reflected his somewhat dilettante and hedonistic perspective on the world. A ­ fter describing his character, Johnson suggests that it can be assumed that “his poems w ­ ere rather the amusements of idleness than efforts of study; that he endeavoured rather to divert than astonish; that his thoughts seldom aspired to sublimity; and that, if his verse was easy and his images familiar, he attained what he desired.” Th ­ ere is though, a caveat: “His purpose is to be merry; but, perhaps, to enjoy his mirth, it may be sometimes necessary to think well of his opinions” (Lives, 2:184). As so often in Johnson, the final sentence qualifies the previous apparent ac­cep­tance of the premise and raises the significant question of ­whether the comic value of King’s work can be at all appreciated if his values and ideas are antithetical to the reader; merriness alone is fine, but it is indicative in this case of a shallowness and vacuity that reflects upon limitations of intellectual ambition and understanding. The passage gives him relative due, whilst undermining the point of such writing, if it is to no real end beyond the whimsy of temporary plea­sure; the distance between King’s merry verses and the con­temporary reader is so g­ reat that Johnson can describe their effects, whilst making clear that they are unlikely now to chime. For Johnson and his readers, the more melancholy side of such criticism, given how much of the poetry in the Lives was marooned from the pre­sent, is leavened by a familiar deadpan comedy that at least renders the ravages of time less aggressive, even as it has to acknowledge their workings. Moreover, t­ here are many examples where the poetic ambitions of the author in question w ­ ere far from the most impor­tant part of their life and c­ areer. This is especially true of t­ hose in public life or the nobility (many poets between 1650 and 1770—­t he years germane to the Lives—­occupied both categories, of course). David Nunnery has described how Johnson in the Lives moves away from the tradition of biography where personal details ­were included “to demonstrate the subject’s public importance by means of their intimate involvement in ­g reat affairs” or “some praiseworthy virtue.”11 Instead, the public roles of the writers and their poetic output are often at odds, with the amateur aspect of their poetry often granted artificial and temporary attention only b ­ ecause of their roles and titles. The position and po­liti­cal influence and acumen of the Earl of Halifax ensured “many a blandishment” that the statesman would have never have received for his poetry, “of which a short time has withered the beauties. It would now be esteemed no honour, by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told, that, in strains ­either familiar or solemn, he sings like Montague [sic]” (Lives, 2:191). In this small i­ magined narrative, the per-

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fectly judged comedy of the tone, with the incongruity between the now useless hyperbole and the prosaic name, conjures up a more absurd strain of failure and acts a reminder of the myriad ways in which poetry was often an ancillary aspect to the fame of writers like Halifax and of how quickly too their potential as tokens of what is now called “social capital” also died on the vine: like the fictional Swift in Lintot’s shop, Halifax’s kind of writing now hath passed, and the same fash­ion­ able taste that promoted him (and his title and potential patronage) has now forgotten him and moved on to other ephemeral and transitory objects of praise. A similar critique of artificial reputation boosted by exaggerated praise is the masterful turn in the “Life of Sheffield,” where Johnson (­after describing his ambivalent character) uses intricate parallelisms to deflate the Duke of Buckingham’s poetic pretensions: He is introduced into this collection only as a poet; and, if we credit the testimony of his contemporaries, he was a poet of no vulgar rank. But favour and flattery are now at an end; criticism is no longer softened by his bounties, or awed by his splendour; and, being able to take a more steady view, discovers him to be a writer that sometimes glimmers, but rarely shines; feebly laborious, and, at best, but pretty. His songs are upon common topicks; he hopes, and grieves, and repents, and despairs, and rejoices, like any other maker of ­little stanzas: to be ­great, he hardly tries; to be gay, is hardly in his power. (Lives, 3:46)

­ fter the testimony of his peers is rejected as a sort of empty puffery, with the iniA tial image of his reputation being built upon his treating his sycophants like a potentate, the same sort of vocabulary indicates the limitations of Buckingham’s work: splendor and softness produce pretty writing that glimmers only and is labored, commonplace, and derivative. The succession of verbs from “hopes” to “rejoices” reflects its palpable insincerity and formulaic vein. The final put-­down removes even the possibility of his talents not having been fulfilled, as the linking between “­great” and “gay” renders him incapable of more, given that the latter is beyond his control. Yet the final sentence of the “Life” seeks to accommodate the eulogiums of Dryden, Pope, and o ­ thers upon his Essay on Satire and to account for this inflated reputation: “His verses are often insipid, but his memoirs are lively and agreeable; he had the perspicuity and elegance of an historian, but not the fire and fancy of a poet” (Lives, 3:47). It is not Buckingham’s fault that he was a mediocre and commonplace poet, but his admirers willingly credited him with genius for their own ends and purposes or they mistook the nature and limits of his gifts. A dif­fer­ent type of failing, this concerns the strange and sometimes ungovernable ways in which writing is over-­or undervalued for reasons that have ­little to do with intrinsic merit.

In its direct attempt to remove the artificial esteem of “favour and flattery” from his poetic reception, the “Life of Sheffield” shows Johnson’s determination to represent judiciously the limitations and failures of authors, especially where reputa-

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tion has been inflated by other ­factors, even when it seems to work against the rationale of the contents of The Works of the En­glish Poets as a ­whole. This leads to the irony that much of the contents of the volumes that the Lives accompany is defined as barely worth reading, the effusions of not particularly talented writers bought and read initially only for the most arbitrary reasons and soon falling victim to the whims of fashion and time. Th ­ ere is a larger literary-­historical sense at work h ­ ere, one that Johnson locates within the vanity of artistic ambition itself, where most attempts at lasting monumentality are doomed to failure, ­either on the part of poets, or their giddy and impressionable admirers. As Parker remarks, “Johnson’s distanced, time-­conscious perspective is itself a form of critical test of judgment,” and its effect “is regularly ironic, and in a sense, belittling” (with the latter being a reminder of the littleness of ­human importance in the scheme of ­things, rather than a personal critique per se).12 The Lives could hardly act as a recommendation for the excellence of the collected poetry of their subjects (­unless Johnson wrote almost entirely in bad faith); hence, Johnson’s clear directive in certain cases that very ­little of an author is worth reading, but can at least be isolated from the rest of their oeuvre. In one par­tic­u­lar case, Johnson all but admits that the poems u ­ nder examination are not worth reading: James Hammond’s Love Elegies had been published posthumously by the Earl of Chesterfield in 1742: “While the writer’s name was remembered with fondness, they w ­ ere read with a resolution to admire them” (a suggestion of how the public can be determined to like the idea of something what­ever its merits). Chesterfield’s effusive praise also helped promote a readership for ­t hese vehicles of pastoral pathos, but on entirely false grounds, Johnson claims: But of the prefacer, whoever he was, it may be reasonably suspected that he never read the poems; for he professes to value them for a very high species of excellence, and recommends them as the genuine effusions of the mind, which expresses a real passion in the language of nature. But the truth is, ­t hese elegies have neither passion, nature, nor manners. (Lives, 3:117)

The directness of address h ­ ere is a result of dif­fer­ent ­factors, including Hammond’s not having any of the qualifications that might mitigate the failure of poets: he was not a statesman or erstwhile impor­tant figure writing verses for fun; nor has any temporary currency or polemic engagement been removed from them with the passing of forty years. For Johnson, Hammond’s elegies are simply bad poetry, below the mediocrity that is described elsewhere, and their being posthumous does not improve them. Blame is directed against the lazy pretense of his adherents for promoting his verse in terms that are scarcely credible and seem ­either disingenuous or ignorant of what they describe. As Johnson concludes, “Hammond has few sentiments drawn from nature, and few images from modern life. He produces nothing but frigid pedantry. It would be hard to find in all his productions three stanzas that deserve to be remembered” (Lives, 3:117). The Love Elegies are a form

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of vanity publishing, fooling a gullible public with a pretense of feeling and pathos; even given Johnson’s aversion to much pastoral, his disgust at the “frigid pedantry” offered by Hammond is a stern dismissal of the point and purpose of such failed writing and its inability to resemble what its supporters claim of it. The vanity and futility of authorship, both in mistaken judgments by past readers (or nonreaders, Johnson would claim, in the case of Hammond and Chesterfield) and in the fallible authorial sense of what is most valuable in their writing, become part of the larger repre­sen­ta­tion of failure in the Lives and a major counterpoint to the consequence and achievement of writers such as Pope, Dryden, and Milton (for all that Johnson’s detractors found his praise in the latter “Life” niggardly). Vanity is part of the natu­ral pro­cess of the artist trying to accomplish more than their earthly talents and other contingent f­actors can allow; the idea of futility is more of an extraneous pro­cess, affecting writers regardless of their knowledge, confidence, or self-­possession. Johnson’s sense of a wider futility and fatalism underpinning the failure of certain authors comes across in small, wry reflections on the unlucky star some poets are apparently born u ­ nder. He did not much like the poetry of Thomas Otway: “Of the poems which the pre­sent collection admits, the longest is the Poet’s Complaint of his Muse, part of which I do not understand; and in that which is less obscure, I find ­little to commend” (Lives, 2:26) He cannot see why luminaries such as Dryden praised Otway so highly, but his final comment is a back-­handed compliment of genius, which si­mul­ta­neously makes clear the inevitability of the decline of Otway (an early model of the starving artist) as a victim of forces beyond his control, what­ever his own erstwhile failings: “He appears, by some of his verses, to have been a zealous royalist, and had what was in ­t hose times the common reward of loyalty; he lived and died neglected.”13 ­There is some grim compassion in the black humour h ­ ere, as the loyal Otway is punished while many more pragmatic figures switched sides and flourished. The lives of poets are not a good grounding in poetic justice. Otway’s neglect ends his narrative on a note of genuine pathos, produced in part by the recognition of the inconstancy and bad faith of his contemporaries, regardless of the poetic quality of his work. An analogous case, though with a much more prolific subject and less tragic end, is Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson had asked to add Blackmore to the Lives based almost entirely on his admiration for his Creation (1712), for Johnson a definitive Christian riposte to the dangerous impiety of Lucretian thought, so attractive at the end of the seventeenth ­century. Johnson made plain his relative lack of interest in the rest of Blackmore’s voluminous poetry and had to detail the successive failure of most of his works, especially the epic poems based on British monarchs ­after his first work, Prince Arthur (1696), namely King Arthur (1700), Eliza (1709), and Alfred (1723). the result in the “Life” is an odd near tragicomic narrative in which the taste of the public in rejecting Blackmore’s meretricious and vast canvases of Whiggish history without consideration is not wrong, but Blackmore’s vain compulsion to produce poetry he presumably

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knew would be despised is seen as an equally natu­ral and near-­heroic pro­cess, even if it is on the fringes of absurdity: He was not yet deterred from heroick poetry. Th ­ ere was another monarch of this island, for he did not fetch his heroes from foreign countries, whom he considered as worthy of the epick muse; and he dignified Alfred, 1723, with twelve books. But the opinion of the nation was now settled; a hero introduced by Blackmore was not likely to find ­either re­spect or kindness; Alfred took his place by Eliza, in silence and darkness: benevolence was ashamed to favour, and malice was weary of insulting. (Lives, 3:83)

It is wonderfully pawky criticism that refuses to directly ridicule Blackmore, amongst the most ridiculed of all En­glish poets, but g­ ently notes his productivity and its consequences. The central meta­phor places his ­later epics “in silence and darkness,” as if unread and unnoticed they ­were placed directly in an old store rather than be considered for the main library; they have reached the point of irrelevance where critical energy cannot be mustered ­either for vitriol or defence. This is not entirely Blackmore’s fault—­his war with vari­ous satirists prevented him from finding a readership f­ ree from prejudice—­but the Sisyphean production of ­t hese unread epics of failure is both something he was compelled to do and an exercise in utter futility, making him both victim of his fate and responsible for it. It could hardly be other­w ise, as Johnson portrays him as having to write what every­body knew could not but fail. Johnson’s description of the fate of t­ hese poems is a perfect diminuendo: “Of his four epick poems, the first had such reputation and popularity as enraged the criticks; the second was, at least, known enough to be ridiculed; the two last had neither friends nor enemies” (Lives, 3:83). Blackmore’s utility as an author had passed, and he was no longer the target of satire, let alone in the market for new readers; the reduction in attention to a sort of vacuum, where no reader could be conceived, encapsulates the failure of most writing and its inability to find any audience in its own lifetime, let alone thereafter. Blackmore’s case is special, in that the levels of invective t­ owards him had prevented anything he wrote being taken seriously (“Contempt is a kind of gangrene,” as Johnson puts it (Lives, 3:83) with exactitude for the effect on reputation), but he is also like many other writers exercising his talent to l­ittle purpose. The poise of Johnson’s judgment in this instance is marked: it may not be entirely Blackmore’s fault that he has lost any hope of an audience, but given his willing part in this futile pro­cess (over a span of twenty-­seven years), he deserves no better, and it would be vain to expect more than “silence and darkness,” a g­ reat negative or absence, the failure of even a critical tribunal to notice you, let alone judge.

Johnson is relatively kind to Blackmore, partly from genuine appreciation of the Creation (which for him alone justifies and expiates for all his other unread poems) and partly b ­ ecause despite being the victim of successive generations of brilliant wits, Blackmore maintained a dignity and sense of decorum. His vanities ­were

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benign and commonplace, and he survived being a figure of fun with l­ ittle demonstration of egotism. Johnson was more than willing to upbraid authorial vanity when it appeared more overtly, and some of the most significant descriptions of failure in the Lives concern hyperbolic claims ­either by or for poets, a misjudgment of the value of their work, and a refusal to accept their own relative lack of importance in the greater scheme of t­ hings. The balloon of pomposity is most often pricked when Johnson comes across an inflated or spurious claim or someone boasting of their own genius. The Earl of Dorset was flattered by many, not least Dryden, who, “undertaking to produce authors of our own country superiour to ­those of antiquity, says, ‘I would instance your lordship in satire, and Shakespeare in tragedy.’ ” The prob­lem, as Johnson points out, is that this extraordinary praise does not bear much examination: “Would it be ­imagined that, of this rival to antiquity, all the satires ­were ­little personal invectives, and that his longest composition was a song of eleven stanzas?” It is not Dorset’s fault—­“the blame however of this exaggerated praise falls on the encomiast”—­but the anecdote shows the prevalence of flattery, especially from the impecunious, howsoever talented, like Dryden (Lives, 2:62, 63). The absurd contrast between the gigantic examples of Horace and Juvenal and the small squibs of Dorset (whose longest composition is a short song) is designed to make the reader laugh, as well as to consider how inapt, contingent, and askew many literary judgments are; that no one would seriously consider Dorset and Shakespeare as peers rivalling the Ancients indicates, for Johnson, how often hyperbole and exaggeration are the besetting sins of literary evaluation and how rarely authorship is considered in its true perspective. A similar case is the superhuman power of reading ascribed to the student William King at Oxford: “He is said to have prosecuted his studies with so much intenseness and activity, that before he was eight years standing he had read over, and made remarks upon, twenty-­t wo thousand odd hundred books and manuscripts.” Johnson responds to this astonishing claim with a deadpan arithmetic, to contain his incredulity: The books ­were certainly not very long, the manuscripts not very difficult, nor the remarks very large; for the calculator w ­ ill find that he despatched seven a day for ­every day of his eight years, with a remnant that more than satisfies most other students. (Lives, 2:182)

It is the height of absurdity to claim that King could have consumed so many texts, ­unless they w ­ ere decidedly on the short side. Again the comic air is introduced by diminution—­t he vastness of King’s supposed reading has to be countered by the reduction of the texts to fit more ­human proportions. It does King no favours to claim for him a genius that he could not possibly possess, and all the exaggeration ultimately points to are the limits that his g­ reat intellect was supposed to transcend. The vanity of such assertions in the Lives and their being repeatedly and deftly undermined by Johnson are a reflection of the larger pattern where the attempt to

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claim too much or to control the fate of your writing is a type of hubris. Whenever a large assertion is made of clear foreknowledge of genius, it is almost certain to be treated ironically by Johnson and his implied reader. Even his sympathies for Richard Savage, for instance, led him to concur with the common judgment that his long poem The Wanderer was rather uneven and “strikes with the solemn magnificence of a stupendous ruin” rather “than the elegant grandeur of a finished pile.” Johnson only has to quote Savage’s response to this “universal” criticism of the poem to indicate the difficulties of his personality: “But Mr. Savage was always of a contrary opinion, and thought his drift could only be missed by negligence or stupidity, and that the ­whole plan was regular, and the parts distinct” (Lives, 3:144). Jack Lynch has remarked upon the incongruous and unusual side of the “Life of Savage”—­composed and first published de­cades ­earlier, of course—­that in contrast to the other Lives, where Johnson is “exceptionally sceptical” about all sorts of evidence and other claims, he is “unaccountably credulous about Savage” and believes many patently unlikely assertions and suggestions. In this instance, however, Johnson does not need to comment, let alone point out, how damaging this overweening pride and failure to accept criticism of his work would prove to Savage in his tragically unsuccessful ­career.14 If Savage’s hubris was melodramatic and vivid, James Thomson’s was more prosaic. He thought that his covenant with posterity would be not the hugely popu­lar The Seasons, but through his extended epic pro­gress poem, Liberty (1734). Johnson and Whig panegyric w ­ ere not natu­ral bedfellows, and t­ here is an ele­ment of glee in how he describes the result: Upon this g­ reat poem two years w ­ ere spent, and the author congratulated himself upon it as his noblest work; but an author and his reader are not always of a mind. Liberty called in vain upon her votaries to read her praises and reward her encomiast: her praises ­were condemned to harbour spiders, and to gather dust; none of Thomson’s per­for­mances ­were so ­little regarded. (Lives, 4:99)

The narrative ­here invokes dust and spiders to point out the end of Thomson’s vanity, as his poem is forgotten, aged, and mouldy almost from the moment it falls from the press; it does not do to think too highly of your own productions. This is an ostensible criticism of the bland Whiggery of Thomson’s unread epic, but also a metonym of the pretensions of authorship more generally, one moral of the Lives being that the more an author tries to assert his status and importance, the more likely he is to fail. Lofty ambitions almost always lead to failure: the world, for Johnson, is arbitrary and contingent, and the reasons for success or its opposite are not easy to circumvent or anticipate; the pride of assuming that a par­tic­u­lar work is ­ ill meet its just rewards deserves the fate of Liberty, both for its your greatest and w dull trudge through a familiar theme and for its author having congratulated himself on his achievement before the public had a chance to reach their verdict. Johnson’s view of failure, it can be concluded, permeates the Lives on a level easily overlooked. ­There are of course notorious claims, where celebrated works such as Lycidas or Gray’s Pindarics are attacked in a manner designed to provoke a

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readership. ­There are many cases where authors have been forgotten, or their work has failed to sustain interest over the lengthy period since its publication. ­There are also t­ hose examples where poetry was always a minor part of a subject’s life and now fails to register at all, other than in terms of completism (making some of Johnson’s biographies an unusual advert for the poetry they ­were supposedly introducing). Johnson is sometimes dismissive of the failings of authors, sometimes droll, but often tolerant of the way their fate fits into the larger mixed fortunes of most of the world, in terms of ambition, fulfilment, and the inability to satisfy a vanity that is nonetheless inevitable. His most satirical responses are saved for ­those who make grandiose claims for themselves, or try too hard to ensure their earthly fame. The final “Life” in the collection, that of Lord Lyttelton, contains an inspired sideways mockery of a par­tic­u ­lar type of self-­important fastidiousness, itself suggestive of failure. Much of the controversy and the most trenchant criticism of Johnson’s attitudes in the Lives was expected, w ­ hether from stalwart defenders of Milton or from enthusiasts for con­temporary poetry, aghast at the dismissal of parts of Gray and Akenside and much of Collins and the promotion in their stead of apparent poetasters like Yalden and Blackmore. It is less clear why Johnson’s “Life of Lyttelton” touched such a nerve; it was not presumably for the description of the weaknesses of Lyttelton’s poetry alone, as ­t here are vari­ous anecdotes and remarks about it, Johnson fell out with at least one of Lyttelton’s friends (Elizabeth Montagu) over it, and many con­temporary responses even by his admirers felt that the rudeness shown to Lyttelton (a significant politician and well-­connected patron of writers) was something of a black mark against Johnson’s character. Hannah More, for one, was “sorry that [Johnson] has lost so much credit by Lord Lyttelton’s; he treats him almost with contempt; makes him out as a poor writer, and an envious man.”15 Lyttelton is presented by Johnson as an influential if somewhat calculating public figure, and his connections to Pope, Thomson, and ­others notwithstanding, his literary productions are treated as a small part of his ­career. His poems are summarized with the sort of syntactic contrast familiar from Johnson’s ­earlier descriptions of authors whose minds ­were largely elsewhere: “Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of lit­er­a­ture and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and ­little to be admired. Of his ‘Pro­gress of Love,’ it is sufficient blame to say that it is pastoral.” So it goes on, with the last remark almost a self-­parody to the reader long familiar with Johnson’s prejudice ­towards the genre, concluding that the juvenile “Advice to Belinda” possesses “a power of poetry which cultivation might have raised to excellence” (Lives, 4:190). This judgment is not kind, but it does not seem sufficient to produce the widespread condemnation that Johnson received. It seems more probable that Johnson was felt to have transgressed certain invisible but sacred bound­aries in his descriptions of the character of the nobleman: one remark that caused trou­ble was his noting the way Lyttelton responded to positive reviewers of his Dialogues of the Dead: “And poor Lyttelton, with ­humble gratitude, returned, in a note which I have read, acknowl­edgments which can never

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be proper, since they must be paid e­ ither for flattery or for justice” (Lives, 4:187). The use of “poor” was thought improper by a writer so far beneath Lyttelton in the social scale, and Johnson was accused of patronising him.16 A large part of the short “Life of Lyttelton,” however, is not concerned with his poetry at all, but rather with an historical work, the publication of which Johnson pre­sents as an idée fixe taken to the point of extravagant folly: “His last literary production was his History of Henry the Second, elaborated by the searches and deliberations of twenty years, and published with such anxiety as only vanity can dictate.” What follows is a mock-­ epic tale of the ends of vanity and the fruitless attempt to ensure that your publications reflect your own self-­estimation: The story of this publication is remarkable. The ­whole work was printed twice over, a g­ reat part of it three times, and many sheets four or five times. The booksellers paid for the first impression; but the charges and repeated operations of the press ­were at the expense of the author, whose ambitious accuracy is known to have cost him, at least, a thousand pounds. He began to print in 1755. Three volumes appeared in 1764; a second edition of them in 1767; a third edition in 1768; and the conclusion in 1771.

Johnson maintains his unusual level of accuracy and interest in the mundanity of the printing-­house, as Lyttelton protects his prose even further, by hiring someone to point it: Andrew Reid, a man not without considerable abilities, and not unacquainted with letters or with life, undertook to persuade Lyttelton, as he had persuaded himself, that he was master of the secret of punctuation; and, as fear begets credulity, he was employed, I know not at what price, to point the pages of Henry the second. The book was at last pointed and printed, and sent into the world.

The obsession with pointing and the suggestion that Reid manipulated Lyttelton into employing an utterly superfluous ser­v ice recall another example where punctuation represents something of a flaw in a character: in his Shakespeare edition, Johnson was quick to distance himself from the pomposities of one of his pre­de­ ces­sors, Lewis Theobald, remarking that “I have sometimes ­adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement.”17 Again, the disjunction between the trifling result and the self-­importance attached to it is the source for Johnsonian humour at the expense of vanity. Meanwhile, Lyttelton’s Henry the Second was not yet ­free from vicissitudes: When time brought the history to a third edition, Reid was e­ ither dead or discarded; and the superintendence of typography and punctuation was committed to a man originally a comb-­maker, but then known by the style of doctor. Something uncommon was prob­ably expected, and something uncommon was at last done; for to the doctor’s edition is appended, what the world had hardly seen before, a list of errours in nineteen pages. (Lives, 187–188)

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The punchline fi­nally appears, as the narrative of attempted perfection and exactitude ends with a pamphlet-­length list of errata, compiled by the former comb-­ maker, one Robert Sanders, who acted as something like Lyttelton’s secretary, though it suits the mood of the anecdote for Johnson to describe him as akin to a fakir.18 Lyttelton’s obsession with revision and correction thus concludes with his work being full of ­mistakes. The concomitant to his years of fussing over making the work perfect is that it is marred, in an ironic unintended consequence that rewards his ill-­judged attempts to prepare his work in its ideal form. The extended description telescopes events and exaggerates Lyttelton’s anx­i­eties, but it still acts as a microcosm of artistic failure as one part of the larger vanity of h ­ uman wishes: Lyttelton’s attributing such importance to the appearance and exactness of his writing (to the extent of hiring someone ­else to punctuate it) undermines his authority as a writer, not least in his worrying over what are, in the long term, trivial concerns. The need to try to control ­every f­ actor is followed to the extent that less and less control is pos­si­ble; this is the futility of authorship, of attempting to maintain a hold on the way your works appear and how they are received. Such efforts are in vain and almost always fail. Apparently incidental and at the very end of the collection, the discussion of the thwarted publication and pointing of Lyttelton’s History contains many of the most germane ideas about authorial striving and failing to be found throughout the Lives. Johnson’s small accounts of failure are a crucial part of the critical biosphere that makes up the Lives of the Poets, not least in that the larger Lives can be fully understood and appreciated only in contrast to them. Without them, we cannot appreciate the misfiring and misguided nature of most authorship or the inevitable pro­cess whereby writing strives to accomplish that which must invariably fall short. Exceptions such as Pope and Milton are all the more clearly defined by the recounting of the qualified ­careers of their numerous less successful brethren. Failure in the Lives is sometimes used for lampooning folly or excess, but often it is accepted in a more neutral manner. The many ­little narratives describing the dif­ fer­ent sorts of failings, frustrations, vain ambitions, or misfortunes show Johnson’s awareness of how inherent ­human flaws and necessities are reflected within authorship and how Johnson’s critical aesthetic is to a large extent built around understanding them and their vicissitudes in the face of time and other ­silent enemies.

notes 1. ​Johnson on Shakespeare, vols. 7–8 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1011; the series is hereafter cited as Yale Johnson. 2. ​Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in O M Brack Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 213. 3. ​Greg Clingham, “Life and Lit­er­a­ture in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162, 165. 4. ​Dustin Griffin, “Regulated Loyalty: Jacobitism and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” En­glish Literary History 64 (1997): 1020.

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5. ​Of the many summaries of the contents of the Lives, Lonsdale’s is the most recent and cogent; see Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, edited by Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 1:61–65, hereafter cited as Lives; I have attempted to explain in detail why Johnson lobbied for the four poets (Yalden, in truth, remains something of a mystery). See Rounce, “ ‘Plea­sure or Weariness’: Additions to and Exclusions from the Lives of the Poets,” in New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation, ed. Anthony Lee (Newark: University of Delaware, 2018), 47–68. 6. ​Tyers, A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson (1784), in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (1897; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 1: 371. 7. ​Philip Smallwood, Johnson’s Critical Presence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 97, 99. 8. ​Fred Parker, “Johnson and the Lives of Poets,” Cambridge Quarterly 29 (2000) : 324, 325. 9. ​Parker, “Johnson and the Lives of Poets,” 327. 10. ​ Lives, 2:15. 11. ​Nunnery, David. “Informational Biography and the Lives of the Poets,” Age of Johnson 22 (2012), 1. 12. ​Parker, “Johnson and the Lives of Poets,” 330. 13. ​For a critique of Johnson’s dismissal of Otway’s passionate excesses, see Jessica Munns, “The Interested Heart and the Absent Mind: Samuel Johnson and Thomas Otway’s The Orphan,” En­glish Literary History 60 (1993): 611–623. 14. ​Jack Lynch, “Generous Liberal-­Minded Men: Booksellers and Poetic C ­ areers in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” Yearbook of En­glish Studies 45 (2015): 104. 15. ​ Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2:193. It was alleged by Towers that Johnson “wrote his life with some personal prejudice against [Lyttelton],” the evidence being Piozzi’s anecdote where Johnson resented the delight taken in Lyttelton’s com­pany by his friend, Hill Boothby: “I cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like her’s” (Towers in Brack and Kelley, Early Biographies, 213; Johnsonian Miscellanies, 1:257). 16. ​Hester Lynch Piozzi notes that the censure of Montagu “and all her ­little senate” was directed against the “contemptuous Expression Poor Lyttelton”; Johnson told her it was “only ­because he had not flatter’d her by any mention of her three Dialogues added to my Lord’s.” She had ­earlier remarked that Montagu was “a Monkey though to quarrel with Johnson so about Lyttelton’s Life” (Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs.  Hester Lynch Thrale (­L ater Mrs. Piozzi), ed. Katherine C. Balderston, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942–1951], 2:622, 491). For an account of Montagu snubbing Johnson at a dinner party, and a letter by Lyttelton’s friend William Weller Pepys, who had a public argument with Johnson about him, see Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2:421, 417. For Montagu, see Betty Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture: 1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 175–66. See also Piozzi’s Anecdotes for Johnson’s admiration of Pepys a­ fter the argument (Johnsonian Miscellanies, 1:257), and, according to Thomas Percy, Johnson’s counter-­ claim that he withheld a ludicrous anecdote from the “Life” for fear of making Lyttelton seem ridicu­lous (Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2:3). 17. ​ Johnson on Shakespeare. Yale Johnson, 7:97. 18. ​For more on Reid, Sanders, and the errata list, see Lonsdale’s commentary, Lives, 4:515, where it is also noted that the episode was originally a single paragraph, expanded ­a fter extra information was received from John Nichols, formerly apprentice to William Bowyer, where the History was in its protracted press (4:514).

Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land Aaron R. Hanlon

The eighteenth-­century physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater believed it was pos­ si­ble to discern much about the character of strangers by observing how they walked. The 1789 English-­language translation of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy reflects his understanding of the relationship between gait and character: “I can never expect, for instance, a gentle and calm temper from a man who is always bustling about violently; nor apprehend ­either indecent transport or excess from one whose deportment is uniformly grave and steady.”1 The 1804 translation of Essays on Physiognomy includes a passage that associates the study of gait with tips for travelers: “He who hastens too fast, or lags ­behind, is no companion of mine,” wrote Lavater. “I rather seek him who walks with a ­free, firm, and even step; who looks but ­little about him; who neither carries his head aloft nor contemplates his legs and feet.”2 ­Going out for a walk—or a “ramble”—­was a prominent eighteenth-­ century pastime, associated with health of body and mind. But it was also, as Joanna Guldi notes, “a manner of identity-­making thanks to a variety of observational and repre­sen­ta­tional practices inherited from the eigh­teenth ­century,” including the practice of physiognomy.3 G ­ oing for a ramble—­whether locally, in densely populated London, or in extended form, traveling the countryside by a mix of walking and other means—­placed ramblers in the position to watch o ­ thers and 4 to be watched. The popularity of rambling supplied the social conditions for such inductive tendencies in encounters with strangers, the desire to determine the other­wise unknowable character of strangers based on their facial expressions and how they carried themselves. The interest in determining character this way would become a feature in medical science, painting, and visual satire, with physiognomists such as Charles Bell—­a physician turned artist—­instructing paint­ers in facial observation, and caricaturists such as James Gillray scrupulously portraying not just the facial expressions, but gaits of their subjects in visual satire.5 From this brief sketch of the related practices of rambling and physiognomy in the eigh­teenth ­century emerge two considerations for our understanding of the 71

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novels of Tobias Smollett in par­t ic­u ­lar and the eighteenth-­century novel more broadly. The first is that rambling was inextricably tied to repre­sen­ta­tion, which made rambling not only a pastime, but also a conceit in eighteenth-­century ­fiction that joined repre­sen­ta­t ions of physical mobility to repre­sen­ta­t ions of cognitive activity and character. A rambler, in other words, could be an itinerant character, but also a character with an agile or episodic way of structuring thoughts and narrative.6 Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary definition allowed for both. To ramble is “to rove loosely and irregularly; to wander,” which Johnson exemplifies both literally (Swift: “Coming home a­ fter a short Christmas ramble, I found a letter at my t­ able”) and figuratively (Pope: “Chapman has taken advantage of an immea­sur­able length of verse, notwithstanding which, t­ here is scarce any paraphrase so loose and rambling as his”). Johnson’s examples also allowed for “ramblings of fancy” (South), which could be an admirable but also perilous trait.7 Launcelot Greaves, for example, frequently applies m ­ ental dexterity to get the better of corrupt magistrates such as Justice Gobble and snide detractors such as Mr. Ferret, switching registers, as it suits him, between his identity as a haughty aristocrat and his identification with the plight of the downtrodden. But he also has moments of what we might charitably call itinerancy of thought, as when he embarrassingly abandons his beloved Aurelia when distracted by another distressed traveler. Launcelot is both a rambler in the physical sense—an itinerant figure—­a nd in the cognitive sense, a figure whose mind rambles. What he represents of t­ hese two traits naturally builds readers’ impressions of his character; and Smollett, who modeled Launcelot on Don Quixote, was certainly aware of the virtues and drawbacks of the rambler’s rambling mind. The second consideration is that rambling became a central conceit in the eighteenth-­century novel—­and especially in Smollett’s novels—­that functioned to bring characters into contact with a multitude of social types in a multitude of settings, which in turn put pressure on repre­sen­ta­tions of observation and empiricism in the novel. Characters could witness the same events or observe the same details but come away with differing impressions of real­ity. As novelists layered repre­sen­ta­tions of numerous social encounters upon repre­sen­ta­tions of numerous character types situated in dif­fer­ent locales, novels generated heaps of fictional data with which to assess character and refine one’s analytical acumen. Rambling in this broader sense—­not just g­ oing out for a walk, but being willing and able to travel and encounter o ­ thers with frequency—­was a crucial ele­ment of the rise of physiognomy and the interpretation of the character of strangers in scenarios in which one had other­w ise l­imited information about t­ hose one came into contact with on the road. As Guldi observes, “The preeminent site for the application of physiognomy was the public space of travel where eighteenth-­century strangers met.” 8 If rambling was a common conceit in the eighteenth-­century novel for itinerancy as well as for the distracted mind, interrupted thought, and episodic narrative account, it was also a conceit that reproduced the public space of travel in fiction and generated novelistic data about characters’ judgments arising from social encounters.

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As a rich strand of Smollett scholarship demonstrates, one of the principal objects of Smollett’s novelistic judgment is the law and its variously faulty and inequitable applications.9 For Smollett, who supported dif­fer­ent ­legal consequences for p ­ eople of dif­fer­ent social ranks and favored lesser penalties for criminals of the noble ranks as a means of maintaining social order and decorum, rambling was a key novelistic feature for establishing difference and making subsequent social and ­legal distinctions.10 While it is clear that Smollett was heavi­ly influenced by the rambling and episodic structure of both picaresque and quixotic narratives—he published a major translation of Don Quixote in 1755—­one of the most salient affordances of a prose-­fiction structure based on the rambling protagonist is the ability to generate comparisons and mark differences. In this way, Smollett’s novelistic ramblers—­Roderick Random, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Perigrine Pickle, Launcelot Greaves, and Matthew Bramble—­are frequently the engines that generate comparative portrayals of the law’s functions and failures. Taken together, Smollett’s novels illustrate a broad sense of the law of the land, which is to say the customary function of law, or how law actually works (or fails to work) when decoupled from the pretentions of law as an instrument of justice. Further, “law of the land” takes on both literal and figurative meaning in Smollett’s novels, b ­ ecause the account of British landscapes enabled by Smollett’s ramblers functions like a survey of Britain’s ­legal landscapes and customary practices concerning justice. Accordingly, this chapter explores the function of rambling and ramblers in a ­couple of Smollett’s novels and how t­ hese contribute to Smollett’s other­w ise well-­ documented critique of the law. I argue in par­tic­u ­lar that Smollett’s l­ater novels portray rambling as a high-­minded endeavor capable of refining ramblers’ capacities for judgment and that this portrayal of refined rambling is akin to some of Samuel Johnson’s rhetorical strategies in The Rambler (1750–1752), another series of texts that takes the rambler conceit as a basis for generating comparative difference and demonstrating dexterity of mind. “High-­minded” h ­ ere means a preoccupation with higher virtues and moral princi­ples and an educated mode of address that bespeaks a didactic purpose and a worldly self-­image. My objective is not to claim a direct line of influence between Johnson’s The Rambler and Smollett’s l­ ater novels featuring high-­minded ramblers—­mainly Launcelot Greaves (1760–1762) and Humphry Clinker (1771)—­particularly ­because Smollett’s 1755 translation of Don Quixote comes between The Rambler and ­t hese novels. Rather, I aim to demonstrate common narrative strategies between Johnson and Smollett that elucidate the affordances of the rambler conceit.

Smollett and Johnson Smollett and Johnson ­were not close friends, though they did associate with, praise, and even assist one another during the 1750s and 1760s. As Lewis Knapp speculates, their common experiences and dispositions—­including a lack of patronage and a hack-­w riter background, periodic financial strug­gles, an intense moral interest reflected in their literary output, and their generally conservative politics—­might

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have made them particularly sympathetic to one another. Johnson knew Smollett well enough to reach out to him in 1759, in a letter via John Wilkes, to ask Smollett’s assistance in relieving Johnson’s “Black Servant, whose name is Francis Barber,” from having been pressed on board the HMS Stag. Johnson—­twelve years older than Smollett, and the vastly more celebrated writer of the two—­contributed to Smollett’s British Magazine in 1760 and to the Critical Review in 1763. In 1760, Smollett wrote in his Continuation of the Complete History of E ­ ngland that Johnson, who was “inferior to none in philosophy, philology, poetry, and classical learning, stands foremost as an essayist, justly admired for the dignity, strength, and variety of his stile.”11 So we know that Smollett read, published, and admired Johnson, particularly for his “stile” and his ability to “investigat[e] the h ­ uman heart, tracing e­ very in­ter­est­ing emotion, and opening all the sources of morality,” as Smollett writes.12 The phrase “opening all the sources of morality” is especially pertinent for this essay, as it tidily describes what appears to be a common narrative strategy for Smollett and Johnson: the use of the episodic, peripatetic point of view to mine the array of “sources of morality” and open them up to the world. Smollett, who published periodicals and serial novels, identified Johnson “foremost as an essayist”; and if the periodical nature of Smollett’s literary output is permissible as evidence, Smollett, like many other novelists of his time, found both monetary and didactic value in episodic forms that could be broken down into smaller pieces comparatively focused on dif­fer­ent locales, characters, subjects, and events. Smollett and Johnson also shared an interest in the law, though perhaps for dif­ fer­ent reasons. Johnson collaborated with Sir Robert Chambers on A Course of Lectures on the En­glish Law Delivered at Oxford University, 1767–1773, a lecture series for undergraduates designed to “correct a biased, triumphalist version of En­glish ­legal history,” as Nicole M. Wright notes.13 Drafted as a sequel to Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765)—­which is to say drafted in the spirit of Blackstone’s interest in opening the law up to wider audiences, but also drafted with the aim of distinguishing the Lectures from Blackstone’s monumental offering—­t he Lectures ­were primarily the work of Chambers, the young successor to Blackstone’s Vinerian Chair at Oxford.14 An amateur when it came to l­egal scholarship, Johnson played a supporting role in the development of the Lectures, yet this role certainly indicated both interest in and fa­cil­i­t y with the study of law. Smollett was the son of a judge, though his relationship with the law was decidedly less scholarly than Johnson’s. Smollett had to defend himself from three ­legal actions during his lifetime, the last of which culminated in a prison term for libel. As Alice Parker describes, “Benevolence, rather than misfortune, took [Smollett] into the prisons of London.”15 The first two cases against Smollett arose when Peter Gordon, to whom Smollett had lent money, and whom Smollett visited in prison, refused to pay him back, and Smollett engaged Gordon in a physical altercation. Gordon’s landlord, Edward Groom, was drawn into the ensuing fight, and both Gordon and Groom sued Smollett for trespass and assault. “With force and arms, that is to say with Swords Staves Stones Knives Clubbs fists Sticks and whipps,” the complaint reads, Smollett “beat wounded and ill treated” the two men.16

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Smollett claimed it was self-­defense and was acquitted of assault with intent to murder, but the jury awarded damages to Gordon and Groom in the amount of £20 10s. and 40s., respectively, which put considerable financial pressure on Smollett at the time.17 The third l­ egal action against Smollett, the “Knowles Affair,” had yet more severe consequences for Smollett, who was arraigned for seditious libel. In 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, Admiral Knowles led a failed expedition to capture Rochefort, a French Atlantic port thought to be poorly fortified, and ­later wrote a pamphlet defending his actions and aiming to set the rec­ord straight about his military conduct. Smollett published a critique of the Knowles pamphlet in the Critical Review in May 1758. In the critique, Smollett calls Knowles “an ignorant, assuming, fribbling pretender,” who “has played the tyrant with his inferiors” and “commanded a sq—­—­n occasionally for twenty years, without having even established his reputation in the article of personal courage.”18 Smollett was convicted of libel and sentenced to a prison term of three months. ­These experiences, coupled with Smollett’s belief that, given his station, he was ill-­served by the law in t­ hese dealings, explain much of the prominence of corrupt officers of the court and quandaries of justice in Smollett’s novels. Taken with Smollett’s admiration of Johnson’s style and writerly interest in the exposition of the sources of morality, Smollett’s experiences on the wrong side of the law become part of his wider novelistic interest in justice, or in lapses in justice. Further, Smollett’s affinity with Johnson turned out to be fruitfully compatible with the former’s interest in the picaresque and quixotic traditions, such that the resulting novels are a blend of Johnsonian rambling—­t he varied, not always coherent point of view, with an eye on justice—­and picaresque rambling. We know from Boswell that, similarly, Johnson identified in his youth with Don Quixote, was an avid reader of chivalric romance, and considered himself quixotic in his lifelong inability to ­settle on a singular profession, his itinerancy-­in-­interests.19 This form of “professional” itinerancy makes an appearance in Rambler 19, in which Johnson cautions against “the danger of rang[ing] from one study to another.”20 Smollett’s ­later novels in particular—­Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker—­showcase high-­minded ramblers in the Johnsonian mode whose itinerancy is the central narrative strategy for moral and ­legal critique.

The High-­Minded Rambler Launcelot Greaves is modeled on Don Quixote, and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) features the only character in Smollett’s oeuvre who constitutes a picaro, though the latter part of this statement merits some qualification.21 The episodic structure of Smollett’s novels, largely made pos­si­ble by itinerant protagonists, draws on both picaresque and quixotic traditions. For the purposes of this study of rambling in Smollett’s novels, it is impor­tant to disambiguate the quixotic and picaresque ele­ ments of Smollett’s ramblers as well as to note their structural similarities. As Anthony Close argues, “Although modern criticism has tended to treat the Quijote

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and the picaresque novel as virtually opposed fictional worlds, they are much more closely related.”22 Don Quixote incorporates ele­ments of the picaresque tradition, not only in its episodic narrative structure, which introduces its protagonist and its readers to a multitude of social types that span the socioeconomic “high” and “low,” but also in its direct portrayals of picaros, characters such as Sancho Panza and Ginés de Pasamonte, the latter of whom tells Quixote that he is working on an autobiography that w ­ ill surpass Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), widely credited as the first picaresque novel.23 Whereas picaros are characters who emerge from the lower socioeconomic ranks and attempt upward mobility through cunning and not altogether ­wholesome means, quixotes are high-­minded characters originating from noble or educated, professional ranks (aristocracy, clergy, high-­ ranking military, academics).24 In this sense, Launcelot Greaves, an educated, wealthy aristocrat, is quixotic, while Ferdinand Count Fathom, a low-­bred trickster, is picaresque. As Smollett’s narrator introduces Ferdinand, This mirror of modern chivalry was none of t­ hose who owe their dignity to the circumstances of their birth, and are consecrated from the cradle for the purposes of greatness, merely b ­ ecause they are the accidental ­children of wealth. He was heir to no vis­i­ble patrimony, ­unless we reckon a robust constitution, a tolerable appearance, and an uncommon capacity, as the advantages of inheritance.25

This is a quin­tes­sen­tial rendering of a picaro. Nevertheless, Smollett’s characters frequently blend quixotic and picaresque characteristics. Roderick Random is, like Ferdinand Count Fathom, of questionable lineage (picaresque), yet he excels in school, voraciously applying himself to classical learning, and adopting the airs of the educated professional (quixotic). Peregrine Pickle is born a country gentleman and educated at Oxford and as such is given to high-­minded ideals (quixotic), but is rejected by his ­family and forced to make way in the world ­under very dif­fer­ent circumstances, raised by a seaman in a ­house of shipmates (picaresque). The novels featuring Smollett’s more expressly quixotic characters—­Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker—­were both written ­after Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote was published in 1755. I have already suggested how Launcelot Greaves is a thoroughgoing quixote—­ who Paul-­Gabriel Boucé notes can easily appear too servile an imitation of Quixote—­but Matthew Bramble of Humphry Clinker also exhibits quixotic qualities.26 Bramble is a landed gentleman (Brambleton Hall) of the rank Walter Harte describes in Essays on Husbandry (1764) as “country gentry of moderate estates.”27 The gouty Bramble, on a quest to restore his health, also acquits himself with an idealistic, high-­minded, scholarly mode of address: A man must not presume to use his reason, ­unless he has studied the categories, and can chop logic by mode and figure—­Between friends, I think ­every man of tolerable parts ­ought, at my time of day, to be both physician and ­lawyer, as far as his own constitution and property are concerned. For my own part, I have

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had an hospital t­ hese fourteen years within myself, and studied my own case with the most painful attention; consequently may be supposed to know something of the ­matter, although I have not taken regular courses of physiology et cetera et cetera.—­In short, I have for some time been of opinion (no offence, dear Doctor) that the sum of all your medical discoveries amounts to this, that the more you study the less you know.28

The high-­mindedness of rambling characters is an impor­tant engine of social critique in Smollett’s novels. If eighteenth-­century travelers and physiognomists trained themselves on the details of strangers’ facial expressions and gaits, readers of novelistic fiction could observe descriptions not only of ­t hese, but also of the speech patterns and interiority of rambling characters. Such characters frequently depart from the scene of the incident, but not from the scene of the novel. In other words, as Susan Manning and Deidre Lynch have both demonstrated, eighteenth-­century readers often looked to literary characters as generators of analogies for real-­world character development and refinement; they looked to characters and minute details of character traits as a way of refining their own character-­reading practices and positioning themselves in an economy rife with change, uncertainty, and quandaries about whom to trust.29 And so readers could and would train a physiognomist’s scrutinizing eye on the particulars of character description for much the same purpose as a curious traveler would mind the gait and facial expressions of a stranger at the inn: to develop some sense of the character of the character ­under scrutiny. ­These forms of character scrutiny are themselves associated with the high-­minded in eighteenth-­century life and fiction, given the medicalization of people-­watching physiognomy introduced and the common eighteenth-­century associations of good moral character with careful discernment, mea­sure, and judiciousness. It is this interest in the critical and repre­sen­ta­tional capacities of high-­ mindedness—­which resembles more of a quixotic than picaresque disposition—­that makes Smollett and Johnson comparable in their renderings of rambling personas. Johnson’s Rambler personas are frequently backward-­looking in a quixotic fashion—­ the Rambler begins with an address on classical poetry—­though Smollett’s ramblers, as I have suggested, are more picaresque than quixotic. If we attend to Smollett’s major novels published ­after both Johnson’s Rambler and Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote, however, we find that Smollett’s ramblers take a high-­minded turn ­toward the latter end of his c­ areer.30 In what follows I compare Johnson’s Rambler with the high-­minded ramblers of Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker.

The High-­Minded Rambler Greg Clingham observes of Johnson that “he and his works represent a complex cultural authority that provide some readers with deep, intelligent instances of moral, social, and literary insight, while symbolizing for o ­ thers the worst excesses of absolutist and ethnocentric rationalism produced by the Enlightenment.”31 This

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ambivalence comes through starkly in The Rambler, which combines the “deep, intelligent instances of moral insight” of entries such as Number 114 (Johnson’s castigation of capital punishment) with entries such as Number 34 (“the uneasiness and disgust of female cowardice”), in which, as Manushag Powell notes, “Johnson seems to lash out at his presumptuous, presumably female would-be advisors by dedicating this insulting portrait of a foolish and contemptible w ­ oman as recom32 pense for the censure he says he’s received.” The ambivalence of The Rambler—­ which goes hand in hand with its formal tendency to ramble across subjects and voices—is compounded by variations in its audience and reception history. Though Leopold Damrosch cautions us not always to read The Rambler as a ­whole, Johnson was aware of the promise of periodicals such as The Spectator to become collected volumes at some point in the ­future and thereby to bolster an author’s literary reputation.33 Booksellers started publishing collected volumes of The Rambler essays within six months a­ fter Johnson started the periodical proj­ect, an effect of which was that most eighteenth-­century readers first encountered The Rambler as a complete collection. Its nineteenth-­century editions had a larger press run, which indicates that The Rambler was even more widely read in the nineteenth ­century.34 As a consequence of this publication history, The Rambler had several groups of audiences, such that it is difficult to determine precisely for whom Johnson wrote. In no. 106, for example, Johnson cautions against modish writing—­particularly in natu­ral philosophy and philology—­t hat is likely to be forgotten as advances and new expositions render the original work obsolete or obscure: Some writers apply themselves to studies boundless and inexhaustible, as experiments in natu­ral philosophy. ­These are always lost in successive compilations, as new advances are made, and former observations become more familiar. ­Others spend their lives in remarks on language, or explanations of antiquities, and only afford materials for lexicographers and commentators, who are themselves overwhelmed by subsequent collectors, that equally destroy the memory of their pre­de­ces­sors by amplification, transposition, or contraction. ­Every new system of nature gives birth to a swarm of expositors, whose business is to explain and illustrate it, and who can hope to exist no longer than the founder of their sect preserves his reputation (203–204).

Johnson’s key to avoiding modish writing and maximizing the possibility of sustained literary reputation is to take ­human nature as the prime object of study and proceed from t­ here. As Johnson writes in No. 106, “­There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame. He who has carefully studied h ­ uman nature, and can well describe it, may with most reason flatter his ambition” (204). Korshin reads this passage as an indication that Johnson “wrote for the largest pos­si­ble audience,” taking ­human nature as a broad baseline from which to appeal widely.35 This would suggest that while Johnson aimed for a large and variegated audience, the basis of his strategy in this re­spect was a high-­minded concept, the unifying capacity of ­human nature as the thread that runs through every­one and links our basic moral

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sensibilities. Further, that Johnson compares himself with Francis Bacon—­a nd particularly the essay form with which Bacon achieved success and fame—­suggests that Johnson was aware of the structural advantages of the essay for reaching a wide audience. The question remains, however, which aspects of The Rambler—­a text that is ostensibly characteristic of Johnsonian moral seriousness—we can precisely call high-­minded. If Johnson’s audiences w ­ ere numerous and varied, we can draw inferences from them, but ­will also have to attend to thematic and stylistic aspects of The Rambler to gain a better sense of what specifically makes it high-­minded in address, concerns, and ambition. As Paul Korshin notes, Johnson’s “prob­ably” largest audience for The Rambler encountered it in an anthologies: The first collections of British essays date from the 1780s, and the first anthologizers began to publish at about the same time. Th ­ ese ­people w ­ ere often schoolmasters or ­others (to use Lady Bracknell’s phrase) “remotely connected with education”; often they w ­ ere respectable minor writers like Vicesimus Knox and W.  F. Mavor. Knox, Mavor, and their associates plundered the entire field of eighteenth-­century periodical lit­er­a­ture to assem­ble their collections. In an age with only a modest idea of the nature of literary property, the essay was an ideal subject for the anthologizer and, as we would expect, the favorites included The Spectator and The Rambler.36

We have some evidence, then, that an educated audience of schoolmasters and other compilers “remotely connected with education” played a role in placing The Rambler essays among other choice excerpts from periodicals. This certainly made sense, as Johnson’s subject ­matter in The Rambler tended to comport with the objectives of higher learning. In just the earliest entries, Johnson’s essays considered subjects including morality and prose fiction (No. 4), the difference between writing and conversation (No. 14), wit and learning (No. 22), and biography (No. 60). In many such cases, Johnson pre­sents the field of study ­under consideration in light of or in relation to higher moral questions about the potential of certain habits of thought or be­hav­ior, undertaken in study or professional life, to contribute to moral improvement or dissipation. In No. 4, for example, on the moral stakes of what and how we read, Johnson observes how readers of fiction (romances, novels, “familiar histories”) are drawn to adventuring protagonists who are “levelled with the rest of the world,” rather than “remote from all that passes among men”: For this reason ­t hese familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions. But if the power of example is so ­great as to take possession of the memory by a kind of vio­lence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the w ­ ill, care ­ought to be taken, that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects. The chief advantage which t­ hese fictions have over real

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life is, that their authors are at liberty, though not to invent, yet to select objects, and to cull from the mass of mankind, t­ hose individuals upon which the attention ­ought most to be employed; as a diamond, though it cannot be made, may be polished by art, and placed in such a situation, as to display that lustre which before was buried among common stones (21–22).

In effect, central persona in The Rambler is preoccupied with the high-­m inded insofar as the subject ­matter routinely places habits of mind at the center of the moral universe. Even when discussing ­matters of general well-­being, as in No. 6, on happiness, Johnson elevates the internal workings of the mind to a degree of importance above external pressures. This is not out-­a nd-­out Stoicism—­ Johnson chastens “such extravagant philosophy,” which “is overthrown by the experience of ­e very hour”—­but it is a recognition that happiness is not to be sought externally: We may very properly inquire, how near to this exalted state it is in our power to approach, how far we can exempt ourselves from outward influences, and secure to our minds a state of tranquillity: for, though the boast of absolute in­de­ pen­dence is ridicu­lous and vain, yet a mean flexibility to ­every impulse, and a patient submission to the tyranny of casual trou­bles, is below the dignity of that mind, which, however depraved or weakened, boasts its derivation from a celestial original, and hopes for an u ­ nion with infinite goodness, and unvariable felicity (30–31).

From a stylistic standpoint, then, The Rambler took up elevated ­causes—­v irtue, morality, habituation—in a frequently earnest and didactic style. Johnson troubled himself less with the forms of wry wit and satire more commonly found in The Spectator; and though The Rambler contains epistolary entries in which Johnson assumes the personas of w ­ omen and other characters distinct from himself, it is less reliant as a ­whole on characters and character-­t ypes of the sort that The Spectator offers. The Rambler’s central persona is (quite understandably) the high-­minded, Johnsonian type, more stylistically coherent than the more popu­ lar periodicals of early ­century. Having established a few of the ways The Rambler is high-­minded—­stylistically, in terms of audience, and in terms of subject ­matter—we might also consider how The Rambler rambles, at least in the sense that its form is comparable to the episodic structure of Smollett’s novels. This is a particularly pressing question in light of the fact that, as I have suggested, The Rambler’s central persona is stylistically coherent, even if his subject m ­ atter changes unpredictably from essay to essay. It is this latter feature of The Rambler that supplies its itinerancy of thought, not through an addled persona or assortment of personas, but through the essay form as a nimble medium. For readers who do encounter The Rambler as a collected volume, the ­whole reflects a nimbleness and capaciousness of mind capable of speaking to ­matters of virtually universal concern through many smaller concerns. The Rambler is structured altogether like a series of ave­nues that all connect to a major

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road, with the major road leading ­toward high-­minded moral conclusions. If The Spectator, which aimed to “enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality,” was sometimes willing to play the picaresque trickster en route to moral instruction, The Rambler was more likely to approach morality from the direct, high-­minded point of view.37 In this way, The Rambler availed itself of a narrative strategy for interrogating justice and elucidating moral princi­ples comparable to that which Smollett turns to in his portrayal of high-­minded ramblers in Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker. The main function of this common narrative strategy in Johnson and Smollett is to take rambling as an occasion for comparative exposition and analy­sis of scenarios that draw on characters’ demonstration or lack of moral princi­ples. The result is a mosaic portrait of the localized triumphs and failures of justice.

Matthew Bramble and Launcelot Greaves “I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest,” quotes Boswell of Johnson, “and p ­ eople are apt to believe me serious: however, I am more candid than I was when I was younger. As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.”38 I have suggested in a number of ways that Johnson comes across as high-­minded and serious, but also as deeply interested in what it means to be good. The patriarch of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, Matthew Bramble, has a similar persona, built on a disposition similar to that of Johnson’s high-­minded persona. Bramble is unwell, suffering from gout, and his travels through ­England and Scotland for health purposes are the driving force of action and encounter in Smollett’s novel. In many instances, Bramble is coarse, grumpy, serious, and sometimes severe; but Smollett also portrays him as both kind and moral.39 Whereas Bramble can be found complaining to Dr. Lewis and anyone ­else who ­w ill hear him about how “the pills are good for nothing” and that he is “as much tortured in all [his] limbs as if [he] was broke upon the wheel,” he also sympathetically identifies with—­and intervenes to assist—­ the defeated and melancholic Baynard, who loses control of his spending and his ­mental wellbeing (7).40 Baynard is, like Bramble, a country gentleman, but a struggling one, trying to maintain the integrity of his f­ amily and his farm; which is to say, the stakes of Baynard’s dissipation are easy enough for Bramble to identify with. But Bramble is also generous t­ oward strangers and t­ hose of lesser socioeconomic standing he encounters on the road. In one sense, Bramble’s charity stems from the fact that he is generally fair-­minded and tries to re­spect the sovereignty and dignity of o ­ thers. For example, while the group is crossing rough w ­ aters in a storm, and becoming nauseated as a result, Tabitha Bramble asks Matthew to invoke his status as a justice of the peace and compel the boatmen to turn the boat around. Matthew refuses, “telling her, that his commission did not extend so far, and, if it did, he should let the ­people take their own way; for he thought it would be ­great presumption in him to direct them in the exercise of their own profession” (220–221). ­Here Bramble not only judiciously recognizes the ­legal limits of

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his own jurisdiction—­a justice of the peace did not have authority to operate beyond his local bounds—­but also that it would be both fair and circumspect not to presume one’s privileged social standing should overrule the experienced and informed decisions of the boatmen. Bramble’s itinerancy in this case allows readers to witness a bit of Bramble’s ­legal philosophy. In addition to being fair and judicious, Bramble is charitable in the strict sense. Perhaps the most telling example of this is his be­hav­ior ­toward the ensign’s w ­ idow, whom he observes in the pump room with what Sir Watkin Phillips describes in his letter as a “poor emaciated child, far gone in consumption” (21). Bramble arranges to meet with the ­woman and gives her a twenty-­pound note, at which point she becomes demonstrably overjoyed (we learn shortly ­after that as the ­widow of an ensign she gets by on meager pension of fifteen pounds per annum). When Bramble’s ­sister Tabitha witnesses this, she throws a fit and seizes the note back from the perplexed w ­ oman, ­a fter which Matthew scolds his s­ ister and forcibly removes her from the room. This scene, as related in Watkin Phillips’ letter, demonstrates how Smollett uses the rambling conceit to comment on ­matters of justice and character judgment. Phillips practices and relates his own physiognomic judgment in the letter, which provides an occasion to mea­sure Phillips’s judgment against Bramble’s. Phillips “detected” Bramble “in such a state of frailty, as would but ill become his years and character,” introducing into the narrative a physiognomic misreading of Bramble’s vulnerability (Bramble in his right mind and is ultimately a better judge of the destitute w ­ oman’s character). Phillips then observes that the eventual recipient of Bramble’s charity appeared “a decent sort of a ­woman, not disagreeable in her person,” at whom he witnesses Bramble looking “with a very suspicious expression” in his eyes (21). In this moment Phillips is still trying to figure out what Bramble already has: the ­woman appears “a decent sort” and is therefore a justifiable recipient of the charity to come. Phillips notes furthermore the scrutinizing eyes of Bramble in the latter’s attempt to judge the w ­ oman’s character from a distance, continuing his physiognomic misreading of Bramble, who has immediately judged the ­woman worthy recipient of charity. We ­later learn from Phillips’s letter that the w ­ oman is indeed of “excellent character” and “works very hard at plain work, to support her ­daughter, who is ­dying of a consumption” (24). As characters make physiognomic judgments of the character of ­others from afar—­some accurate (Bramble) and some confused (Phillips)—­Smollett’s ensign’s ­widow scene is a microcosm of the traveler’s imperative more broadly: the need to determine character without much to go on, as well as the stakes of being a sound or a poor judge of character. Furthermore, the rambling conceit in Humphry Clinker is what enables this encounter—­a nd ­others like it in the novel—by placing a destitute ­widow in the sight of an especially perceptive country gentleman like Bramble, who has neither background references nor local knowledge with which to make choices about whom to trust. The ensign’s ­w idow scene reflects how Smollett makes use of the rambling conceit ­because it frames Bramble’s charitable act as a ­matter of justice. When

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Phillips begins to shed tears over the w ­ idow’s violent expressions of gratitude (and perhaps over Bramble’s willingness to stand up to Tabitha and make sure the act of charity is affirmed), and Phillips finds himself on the other side of the door with an indignant Tabitha, she balks at his concern, deeming the ­widow’s conduct “Monstrous!” Phillips c­ ounters, “I thought it was but an act of justice to set her to rights” (24). It turns out, as I have noted, that the w ­ idow is indeed a legitimate and deserving case for Bramble’s charity, not a prostitute soliciting Bramble’s com­pany. We learn, then, not only that Bramble’s judgment of what is just aligns with the evidence of the ­w idow’s laudable conduct, but also that Phillips understands what has tran­spired not simply as an act of generosity, but specifically as an act of justice. And once again, the opportunity Smollett creates for placing questions of judgment, justice, and evidence u ­ nder the microscope in scenes such as this is a function of the rambler conceit, which places a high-­minded rambler like Bramble into contact with a multitude of social scenarios on the road that test his judgment and demonstrate his moral character. Humphry Clinker also represents officers of the law more explic­itly as a means of commenting on justice. When what Bramble describes as “a constable and his gang” demand to enter the f­ amily lodging in pursuit of Humphry Clinker (­under suspicion as a highwayman) with a warrant from Justice Buzzard, the ­family is confused not only b ­ ecause ­t here appears to be insufficient evidence for the warrant, but also ­because of the manner in which the constable enters the premises. Tabitha “scolded the constable for presuming to enter the lodgings of a gentleman for such an errand” in a way that highlights Smollett’s sense that rank should be a ­factor in how the machinations of justice are carried out, while the high-­minded Bramble remains calm and goes “directly to the justice,” bypassing the lower-­ranking officers altogether (142). When Bramble goes to witness Justice Buzzard’s ­handling of Clinker’s case, he finds “the justice himself put a very unfavourable construction upon some of his answers, which, he said, savoured of the ambiguity and equivocation of an old offender; but, in my opinion, it would have been more just and humane to impute them to the confusion into which we may suppose a poor country lad to be thrown on such an occasion” (143). In other words, Buzzard is less concerned with justice than with prosecution and operates with prejudice, as when he ignores the importunities of o ­ thers to recognize that Clinker, on account of his “simplicity,” does not seem fully aware of the stakes and methods of the court proceedings (144). Such portrayals of court officials like Buzzard as less interested in justice than their own prejudicial or personal investments are typical of Smollett’s novels, but they also provide opportunities to contrast the high-­minded, principled stance of characters like Bramble with the crude mechanisms of “justice” one encounters on the road. The combination of the high-­minded observer and the chance to observe broadly creates the impression of a broad survey of the ­legal landscape. For his part, Clinker could also testify to the shortcomings of Buzzard’s courtroom, just as the indignant Tabitha could testify to the haste of Buzzard’s “constable and his gang”; however, what distinguishes such testimony from Bramble’s is Smollett’s

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framing of Bramble as a character who both understands at a high level what justice should look like and seems to have the worldly experience required to make sound comparative judgments. Clinker possesses the latter but not the former, while Tabitha possesses neither. Launcelot Greaves also makes use of this combination of high-­minded capacity to understand the stakes and machinations of justice at a high level and the rambling experience to make evidence-­based comparisons between scenarios in which justice is properly served and ­t hose in which greed, callousness, and other moral shortcomings stand in the way of justice. As Hilary Donatini writes, “In his benevolent be­hav­ior at Brambleton Hall and charitable disposition on the road, Matt [Bramble] resembles the ideal patriarchal justice, a Sir Launcelot Greaves–­ type of nurturing neighborhood ­father figure.” 41 The comparison with Greaves is apt, b ­ ecause he, in quixotic fashion, maintains a keen sense of justice even in his moments of ostensible madness. The central figure of lapsed justice in Launcelot Greaves is Justice Gobble, “whose ­father was a taylor, had for some time served as a journeyman hosier in London, where he had picked up some law-­terms, by conversing with hackney-­w riters and attorneys’ clerks of the lowest order.” 42 Gobble marries into wealth and spends his ­career on the bench “commit[ing] a thousand acts of cruelty and injustice against the poorer sort of ­people, who ­were unable to call him to a proper account” (84). We meet Gobble when Greaves finds himself prematurely detained at Gobble’s behest. Ferret has turned Greaves in ­under the pretense that Greaves is endangering the public with his quixotism. The high-­minded Greaves notably investigates the character of Gobble, as well as “the meaning of his own detention,” before making any rash moves to extricate himself (83). And when he summons the wisdom of the other prisoners in his attempt to understand what sort of adversary Gobble is, he finds “a crew of naked wretches crowded around him,” all with serious accusations against Gobble, pleading for “justice upon the villain who hath ruined us all!” (83, 86). ­Because Greaves has been roaming the countryside in quixotic fashion, he approaches the wronged prisoners with a sense of compassion honed on the road, where he has seen injustice a­ fter injustice and sought to rectify t­ hese in his own way. In this encounter with the prisoners, Greaves even has a chance meeting with one of his own m ­ other’s servants who nursed him in infancy (87). Such implausible encounters, which populate eighteenth-­century novels (among ­others), can appear in the rambler’s case a plausible consequence of rambling itself, the broad surveying of the land. And ­because Greaves has enough perspective to understand in such moments that the claims of the aggrieved are themselves plausible, he can proceed with confidence that an action in f­ avor of his fellow prisoners is an action of justice (by contrast, Don Quixote famously ­frees a bunch of criminals in the galley slaves episode in part 1, chapter 22). Greaves’s method of achieving justice is not the threat of the lance, but fa­cil­i­t y with the law. “Thus animated” by the story of his m ­ other’s former servant, Greaves

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consults with his friend, Thomas Clarke, “concerning the steps he should take, first for their deliverance, and then for prosecuting and punishing the justice” (88). This is not the swift heroism of a chivalric knight, but a pro­cess that requires steps: Greaves’s demand to see a copy of the document that commits him to detainment (with the amount of bail that would be required to ­free the wealthy Greaves); a writ of habeas corpus; and a series of threats against the jailor for failure to comply with ­t hese requests (88). In an indictment of Gobble, we learn that in fact no warrant has been issued and that Gobble, called out for his unscrupulous pro­cess, is inclined to release Greaves. Gobble’s pride turns out to be the fulcrum of his downfall, however, when he decides not to let the prisoners go immediately, but to summon them to the courtroom to be publicly chastised. Smollett supplies Gobble, in his harangue, with the diction and mode of address commensurate with t­ hose of an officious fool: The laws of this land has provided—­I says, as how provision is made by the laws of this h ­ ere land, in reverence to delinquems and manefactors, whereby the king’s peace is upholden by we magistrates, who represents his majesty’s person, better than in e’er a contagious nation u ­ nder the sun: but, howsomever, that t­ here king’s peace, and this ­here magistrate’s authority cannot be adequably and identically upheld, if so be as how criminals escapes unpunished. Now, friend, you must be confidentious in your own mind, as you are a notorious criminal, who have trespassed again the laws on divers occasions and importunities; if I had a mind to exercise the rigour of the law, according to the authority wherewith I am wested, you and your companions in iniquity would be sewerely punished by the statue.(89)

Gobble proves both an unjust and affectatious judge—­a fraud—in his way of speaking, but the contrast between Gobble and Greaves makes Gobble’s shortcomings more pronounced: If I understand your meaning aright, I am accused of being a notorious criminal; but nevertheless you are contented to let me escape with impunity. If I am a notorious criminal, it is the duty of you, as a magistrate, to bring me to condign punishment; and if you allow a criminal to escape unpunished, you are not only unworthy of a place in the commission, but become accessory to his guilt, and, to all intents and purposes, socius criminis (89).

In catching Gobble in his perilous logical flaw—­and in expressing himself in more convincingly learned and legalistic language—­Greaves turns the ­tables on the corrupt justice, exercising his own superior socioeconomic rank and education over Gobble, who is used to lording his own stature over the destitute and vulnerable. Greaves rejects Gobble’s offer to let him go ­free, forcing Gobble to back up his severe accusations with appropriate l­egal action and vowing to bring the justice to justice instead over the course of a l­ egal contest. Once Gobble realizes that Greaves is of noble origins and is extraordinarily wealthy, he becomes “seized with such pangs

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of terror and compunction, as a groveling mind may be supposed to have felt in such circumstances” (91). Thus Gobble, checked by Greaves, has come to experience the sort of justice that a high-­minded rambler can bring about. Gobble experiences Greaves’s superior status and moral compunction as an advantage over him in the way Gobble’s victims experienced Gobble’s cruelty by fiat. Greaves, meanwhile, has seen enough of the Gobbles of the world to know that it is more just to identify with the downtrodden than with o ­ thers of his own rank, who use their positions of influence to get the better of the less fortunate. Greaves seeks not simply to humiliate Gobble, who is no match for Sir Launcelot in education, rank, or wealth, but to morally instruct him. When Gobble tries to make peace with Greaves, Greaves makes clear that their dispute is not personal, but a m ­ atter of the justice and the law of the land: If your acting in the commission as a justice of the peace concerned my own par­tic­u­lar only, perhaps I should wave any further inquiry, and resent your insolence no other way but by ­silent contempt. If I thought the errors of your administration proceeded from a good intention, defeated by want of understanding, I should pity your ignorance, and, in compassion, advise you to desist from acting a part for which you are so ill qualified: but the preposterous conduct of such a man deeply affects the interest of the community, especially that part of it which, from its helpless situation, is the more intitled to our protection and assistance (93).

For Greaves, then, Gobble’s lack of princi­ple is a graver and more consequential offense than ignorance, as it leads not only to the miscarriage of justice, but to the abandonment of what Greaves identifies as an essential duty of the ­legal system: to protect, not exploit, the most vulnerable.

Conclusion By turning the power and vocabulary of law around on Gobble, Greaves accomplishes and illustrates a fundamental princi­ple of justice that comes through starkly in The Rambler, particularly in No. 81, on “The g­ reat rule of action.” Justice, in this formulation, is fundamentally about the extent to which we can see enough of our own needs and vulnerabilities in the character of o ­ thers, as opposed to treating ­others as foils for our own needs and desires. As Johnson puts it, The mea­sure of justice prescribed to us, in our transactions with ­others, is remarkably clear and comprehensive: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them.” A law by which ­every claim of right may be immediately adjusted as far as the private conscience requires to be informed; a law, of which ­every man may find the exposition in his own breast, and which may always be observed without any other qualifications than honesty of intention, and purity of ­w ill (61).

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Johnson continues: One of the most celebrated cases which have been produced as requiring some skill in the direction of conscience to adapt them to this g­ reat rule, is that of a criminal asking mercy of his judge, who cannot but know, that if he was in the state of the supplicant, he should desire that ­pardon which he now denies. The difficulty of this sophism w ­ ill vanish, if we remember that the parties are, in real­ ity, on one side the criminal, and on the other the community, of which the magistrate is only the minister, and by which he is intrusted with the publick safety (62).

In the first passage, we find a parallel dictum for Bramble’s treatment of the ensign’s ­w idow. Bramble’s judgment enables him not only to perceive legitimate need, but to offer charity with some understanding that if their roles ­were reversed, Bramble would want to be treated charitably. As I have suggested, he identifies readily enough with a fellow country gentlemen like Baynard, and offers assistance. But in offering assistance to the ­widow, he is required to exercise a dif­fer­ent form of other-­regarding, to avoid the misjudgments Phillips and Tabitha make and see someone of significantly lower rank as honest and worthy of aid. We can see further, in Johnson’s second passage above, how close is Greaves’s demonstration of justice—­and his parsing of personal contempt for Gobble’s failures and the wider duty to community that justice entails—to what Johnson recommends in The Rambler. The logic of Johnson’s formulation rests on two axioms in par­tic­u­lar that the rambling conceit underwrites and elucidates. One, a principled notion of justice, insofar as it can be universally understood and applied, arises from the ­mental exercise of other-­regarding. Johnson is clear that princi­ ples of justice arise from the ability of individuals to put themselves into sympathetic relation with o ­ thers, even strangers. If physiognomic scrutiny among strangers on the road is a crude, sometimes prejudicial, sometimes voy­eur­is­tic, and sometimes pragmatic form of other-­regarding, it nevertheless holds the capacity to prompt travelers to train the scrutinizing eye on themselves, or to become aware of what the ­t hings they seek in ­others say about themselves. Lavater’s reflexive phrase with which I started this chapter—­“ is no companion of mine”—is emblematic of the capacity of even crude forms of other-­regarding to redirect scrutiny back onto the self and thus to consider Johnson’s axiom “whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them.” The section of the 1804 translation of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, which situates physiognomic perception as a pertinent skill for travelers, also urges travelers to “illuminate [their] own minds by the light of o ­ thers,” to go beyond physiognomic conjecturing, to pursue curiosity, and to engage with ­others who might illuminate one’s own worldview.43 The second axiom suggests that, as in Rambler 81, consideration of a multitude of cases, or a multitude of ­angles that may, in Johnson’s words, “perplex [the] universal princi­ple”—­a function of the rambling perspective—­broadens the scope and magnitude of other-­regarding, providing a larger data set with from which to

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determine all the ways justice is and is not served. Though Johnson’s Rambler and Smollett’s ­later novels, Launcelot Graves and Humphry Clinker, employ the rambling conceit in dif­fer­ent ways, both authors use the conceit to multiply the number of ­angles from which to approach the question of justice and thus to fortify their common princi­ples of justice.

notes 1. ​Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London, 1789), 3:207. 2. ​Quoted in Joanna Guldi, “The History of Walking and the Digital Turn: Stride and Lounge in London, 1808–1851,” Journal of Modern History 84, no. 1 (2012): 123. The quote originally appears in Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London, 1804), 3:223. 3. ​Guldi, “The History of Walking and the Digital Turn,” 123. 4. ​“­Going for a ramble” also made for a double entendre in the eigh­teenth ­century, a meaning I do not intend in this chapter. 5. ​Guldi, “The History of Walking,” 125. 6. ​“Ramble” could also refer to “a wandering pro­gress” and “rambling thought or speech; incoherence”; s.v. “ramble, n.” OED Online, (Oxford University Press, July 2018), http://­w ww​ .­oed​.­com​/­v iew​/­Entry​/­157751​?­rskey​=­gV1ank&result​=­1&isAdvanced​=­false. 7. ​Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1990). 8. ​Guldi, “The History of Walking,” 123. 9. ​See for example the early biographical studies of Smollett’s encounters with the law, including Alice Parker, “Smollett and the Law,” Studies in Philology 39, no. 3 (1942): 545–558; Lewis Knapp and John Chapone, “Rex versus Smollett: More Data on the Smollett-­K nowles Libel Case,” Modern Philology 41, no. 4 (1944): 221–227, and Paul-­Gabriel Boucé, “Smollett and the Expedition against Rochefort (1757),” Modern Philology 65, no. 1 (1967): 33–38. See more recent work by Hilary Teynor Donatini, “Smollett’s Justices,” Age of Johnson 23 (2015): 273–300. Books including Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Lionel Kelly, ed., Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1987) also touch on aspects of Smollett and the law. 10. ​Donatini, “Smollett’s Justices,” 274. 11. ​Lewis Knapp, “Smollett and Johnson,” Modern Philology 66, no. 2 (1968): 152–153. 12. ​Knapp, “Smollett and Johnson,” 153–154. 13. ​Nicole M. Wright, “ ‘A More Exact Purity’: L ­ egal Authority and Con­spic­u­ous Amalgamation in Early Modern En­g lish Law Guides and the Oxford Law Lectures of Sir Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson,” University of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2013): 866. 14. ​Donald J. Greene, “Samuel Johnson and ‘Natu­ral Law,’ ” Journal of British Studies 2, no. 2 (1963): 70. See also Wright, “ ‘A More Exact Purity,’ ” 872. 15. ​Parker, “Smollett and the Law,” 546. 16. ​Parker, “Smollett and the Law,” 547. 17. ​Parker, “Smollett and the Law,” 548. 18. ​Parker, “Smollett and the Law,” 550. 19. ​James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36. 20. ​Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vol. 4 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 108. All citations are to this edition of The Rambler. 21. ​Paul-­Gabriel Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett (London: Longman, 1976), 72. 22. ​Anthony Close, “The Legacy of Don Quixote and the Picaresque Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Pre­sent, ed. Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. 23. ​Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (London: Penguin, 2000), 1:22, 182.

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24. ​See Aaron R. Hanlon, “­Toward a Counter-­Poetics of Quixotism,” Studies in the Novel 46, no. 2 (2014): 141–158. 25. ​Tobias Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. O M Brack Jr. and Jerry C. Beasley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 8. 26. ​Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 92. 27. ​Quoted in Taylor Corse, “Husbandry in Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett’s Georgic Novel,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 57, no. 3 (2017): 585. 28. ​Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker, ed. Alexander Pettit and O M Brack Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 24–25. All references are to this edition. 29. ​See Susan Manning, The Poetics of Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 30. ​I exclude The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) from this accounting of Smollett’s “major” novels of his late c­ areer largely b ­ ecause, while Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker feature protagonists and storylines that are comparable to Smollett’s more picaresque novels in his early ­career, Atom is more expressly a po­liti­cal rather than social satire. 31. ​Greg Clingham, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. 32. ​Manushag N. Powell, “Johnson and His ‘Readers’ in the Epistolary Rambler Essays,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 44, no. 3 (2004): 583. 33. ​The idea that we should not always read The Rambler as a ­whole volume—as opposed to as a periodical series—­appears in Leopold Damrosch, “Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in The Rambler,” En­glish Literary History 40, no. 1 (1973): 71. But as Paul Korshin argues in “Johnson, the Essay, and The Rambler,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51, Johnson’s “edition of Shakespeare and his preparations for the dictionary ­were long-­term proj­ects, but a series of periodical essays, as an active participant in con­temporary letters like Johnson knew, could create a following and, through publication in a collected version, widen the author’s reputation.” 34. ​Korshin, “Johnson, the Essay, and The Rambler,” 52. 35. ​Korshin, “Johnson, the Essay, and The Rambler,” 53. 36. ​Korshin, “Johnson, the Essay, and The Rambler,” 53. 37. ​Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:44. 38. ​James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 4:239. The emphasis in the quote is Boswell’s. 39. ​R. M. Ford locates a “verbal echo” in the phrase “All is sublimity, silence, and solitude” from Humphry Clinker in Johnson’s phrase “all was rudeness, silence, and solitude” in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). echoed in Johnson as This suggests the possibility that, in addition to circumstantial similarities between the Johnson and Bramble personas, Johnson may have recalled this language from his own reading of Humphry Clinker. See Ford, “A Verbal Echo: Humphry Clinker and Johnson’s Journey,” Notes and Queries 20, no. 6 (1973): 221. 40. ​Corse observes Bramble’s sympathetic identification with Baynard in “Husbandry in Humphry Clinker,” 591. 41. ​Donatini, “Smollett’s Justices,” 293. 42. ​Tobias Smollett, Launcelot Graves, ed. Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick and Robert Folkenflik (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 84. All references are to this edition. 43. ​Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (1804), 3:216.

The Social Life of Thomas Cumming, or “Clubbing” with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker Robert G. Walker

The penultimate item in the last volume to appear of the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s works, Johnson on Demand, is “General Rules of the Essex Head Club (1783),”1 a significant inclusion not b ­ ecause it is compelling reading—­unless one is fascinated by specific dictates of how reckonings should be made and attendance enforced—­but b ­ ecause it serves as a useful reminder that, even as he neared the end of his life, Johnson valued his friendships, both formal and informal, to the extent that he would devote his attention to t­ hese rules for his newly formed club in the midst of what would be his final illness. One of ­t hose friendships was with Thomas Cumming, the “Fighting Quaker,” whose life, outside of when it touched briefly on Johnson’s, has largely been ignored ­until recently.2 ­Here I focus on newly discovered biographical items that cast still more light on this in­ter­ est­i ng eighteenth-­century character. Cumming (ca. 1714–1774) was not a member of any of the three clubs most commonly associated with Johnson, the Ivy Lane Club, the Literary Club, or the Essex Head Club—he had been dead for nine years when the last-­named was founded—­ but he seems to have been a clubbable man, to use the word Johnson in­ven­ted, at least in the sense that he sought out and greatly enjoyed social gatherings. Johnson had a clubbable spectrum on which he rated James Boswell high and Sir John Hawkins low.3 Cumming runs the gamut on this spectrum, with a pugnacious nature that at times interfered with his desire for conviviality. Still, anecdotal and documentary evidence suggests the Cumming-­Johnson friendship extended over at least four de­cades. It must have begun in the ­middle of the 1740s, according to a story Johnson tells in 1783, nine years a­ fter Cumming’s death. Jacobite uprisings w ­ ere frequently the occasion of questioning the patriotism of nontraditional religious sects, “so in 90

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1745, my friend, Tom Cumming, the Quaker, said, he would not fight [to defend the Crown], but he would drive an ammunition cart” (Life, 4:211–212). Cumming is also mentioned several times in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Life, 5:98, 101, 230), and he received a letter from Johnson during his final illness in 1774.4 Johnson was not Cumming’s only famous friend. Correspondence indicates he knew Ben Franklin from the time he spent in Amer­i­ca in the early 1750s, and their friendship certainly extended into the next de­cade, as Cumming referred Franklin to some banker friends when Franklin moved to London.5 Even though specific evidence has not been found of a personal relationship between him and fellow Scot Tobias Smollett, Smollett’s spirited defense in his History of ­England (1760–1765) of Cumming’s military activity in Senegal during the Seven Years’ War, the activity that earned Cumming his paradoxical sobriquet, “The Fighting Quaker,” suggests at least a pos­si­ble acquaintance. Smollett characterizes Cumming as the “honest Quaker” for his be­hav­ior and specifically defends him in a lengthy footnote: “If it was the first military scheme of any quaker, let it be remembered it was also the first successful expedition of this war, and one of the first that ever was carried on according to the pacific system of the quakers, without the loss of a drop of blood on ­either side.” 6 The life story now emerging is as paradoxical as the nickname. Cumming was a con­spic­u­ous Quaker convert who nevertheless had firm friendships not only with Anglicans such as Johnson but also apparently with Methodists and Moravians.7 The typical association of Quakerism with avoidance of small talk and reluctance to socialize outside the sect seems not at all applicable to Cumming.8 Fi­nally, he exhibited what we might call a feistiness that was apparent not just during war­ time. All t­ hese characteristics are pre­sent in a newly discovered anecdote about his activities in Edinburgh in the early 1740s.

Cumming among the Scottish Masons Discussing the conviviality of the Freemasons, David Murray Lyon cites the following in his History of the Lodge of Edinburgh: It was while the Lodge of Edinburgh was engaged in “drinking the common and ordinary healths” on Summer St John’s-­day 1741, that a member of the Society of Friends was thus pointedly referred to as a disturbing ele­ment in the festivities that ­were being observed in a ­sister Lodge: “It being reported by a visiting ­brother that one Thomas Cuming, teacher of stenography and a Quaker, had been guilty of ane indignity to the Lodge of Canongate Kilwinning, it was resolved not to admitt him in this Lodge, ­either as a member or visiting ­brother, untill he give satisfaction for his offence.”9

It is difficult to account for the presence in a Mason Lodge of a member of the Society of Friends—­one of whose distinguishing characteristics is a religious objection to taking oaths of any kind.

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Despite the alternative spelling of the surname, we can confidently identify the person mentioned ­here as Johnson’s friend, both by the geography—­Cumming was a native of Scotland and was associated with both Edinburgh and Glasgow at this time10—­and by the reference to one of his early vocations, teaching stenography.11 The difficulty Lyon points out about the presence of a Quaker amidst the Masons may be addressed in two ways.12 Lyon himself continues immediately by explaining another aspect of Mason conviviality, their custom at the time (but subsequently prohibited) of allowing musicians ­free initiation in the interest of livening up the festivities.13 The name “Thomas Cumming” appears on a list of members of the Musical Society of Lodge St. Giles around this same time, so perhaps Johnson’s Cumming had musical talents other­wise not discovered.14 But without stronger evidence and given Cumming’s rather ecumenical view of social gatherings, it seems wiser to conclude simply that this is one more example of his making social connections wherever he could find them while occasionally jeopardizing such connections with his combative personality. To this point the tongue-­ in-­cheek description of Cumming given by his friend Dr. Alexander Hamilton in the latter’s History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club is striking: “He was above mea­sure forward in thrusting himself into companies of all Sorts, and Immediately mixing in the Conversation, with that freedom and forwardness, as if he had all his life been in Intimate friendship and acquaintance with e­ very one in the Com­pany. . . . ​We ­shall soon see, what disturbances he excited in the ancient and honorable Tuesday Club, by the Sole force of his Impudence, effrontery and buffonery.”15 In addition, Cumming’s intellectual and commercial as well as social interest in Freemasonry may be represented by one of the five titles he seems to have published in 1745–1747, while he was a printer and bookseller in Cork, Ireland. The Swiss-­born but naturalized En­glishman John Coustos (1703–1746) was arguably the most famous victim of the Portuguese Inquisition in the first half of the eigh­teenth ­century. ­After he was freed due to the intervention of King George II, he wrote The Sufferings of John Coustos, for Free-­masonry, and for Refusing to Turn Roman Catholic in the Inquisition at Lisbon (1746), which Cumming reprinted in 1747.16

Membership in Hamilton’s Tuesday Club in Baltimore For several reasons Dr. Hamilton’s History, just mentioned, is an impor­tant document in recovering Cumming’s biography. The club that the Edinburgh-­born Hamilton (1712–1756) founded in 1745 and that Cumming joined in 1750 was or­ga­nized to provide prominent men of vari­ous professions a place to socialize and exercise their tendencies for satire and facetiousness in the spirit of Swift and, proleptically, Sterne. In Hamilton’s words, “Who can blame . . . ​t he members of the . . . ​Tuesday Club, for Laughing at all the world, as well as at themselves, and furnishing a fund of Laughter to all ­t hose who have a turn for the Gelastic humor” (3:351). Hamilton was per­sis­tently clubbable: missing the society of his Scottish friends, many of

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whom ­were members of the Whin-­Bush Club in Edinburgh, he joined the Ugly Club of Annapolis in 1739, and ten years l­ater he and several other Tuesday Club members founded a Freemason’s lodge in Annapolis (xvi–­x vii, xxiii). But it was ­toward the Tuesday Club that Hamilton devoted the bulk of his literary efforts, composing a History that described, prob­ably with exaggeration and certainly with wit, the club’s members and activities. This History was unpublished ­until the twentieth ­century, and that was serendipitous for ­t hose of us seeking to learn about Tom Cumming, since it is very unlikely to have had any influence on the vicious satire published in London against Cumming in 1774, a satire that has been cited as the cause of his death. I w ­ ill return ­later to the anonymous satire, which appeared in Town and Country Magazine, and I ­will speculate at that time about its probable author, basing my speculation on, in part, a shared favorite tavern. For now, I w ­ ill make the obvious point that coincident biographical information in t­hese two disparate and unrelated sources, the authors of which ­were inspired by entirely dif­fer­ent motives, has ­great credibility. Some of this information is factual: Cumming is mentioned as a teacher of stenography by both, so we know that the Thomas Cumming who was mentioned in the minutes of the Edinburgh Freemasons and the one who advertised such courses in the Caledonian Mercury in 1741–1742 was the same person. When Hamilton describes Cumming’s freedom and forcefulness “in thrusting himself into companies of all Sorts,” we credit the description, no ­matter how playfully it was offered.

Business and Personal Connections in London ­ fter Cumming returned to London in the mid-1750s, the public rec­ord of his life A revolves primarily around of the story of his ultimately successful efforts to persuade Pitt and the British government to attack Senegal during the Seven Years’ War. His un-­Quaker-­like commanding of one of the warships created controversy prob­ably more po­liti­cal than religious, but certainly most Quakers w ­ ere not pleased with this type of notoriety. (I noted Smollett’s defense, above.) Apart from this military affair and related ­matters such as the pension he was awarded in lieu of the trading concession he expected for his ser­v ice, sparse documentary evidence has come to light about his activities in London except for the following recently discovered information within a newspaper report of the fire that destroyed the Hackney Coach-­Office in London in the early morning in November 1770, information that fits nicely with the ­little we previously knew about him at the time. The government agency for the regulation and licensing of Hackney coaches dated from the last de­cade of the seventeenth ­century and resided in the Coach-­ Office, which opened on Surrey Street, Strand, 24 June 1696, and remained t­ here ­until a serious fire destroyed the building and all its rec­ords on Saturday, 17 November 1770. The agency was relocated to Somerset Place in 1782.17 On the Monday ­a fter the fire the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser gave a particularly vivid account, which I quote in full:

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R o b e r t G . Wa l k e r Saturday morning, about 20 minutes a­ fter two, a fire broke out at the Coach-­ office, the bottom of Surry-­street in the Strand, which entirely consumed the same, together with the house of — Neale, Esq; above it, and on the other side, the h ­ ouse of Mr. Comyns, the Quaker, who planned the taking of Senegal. The flames raged with ­great fury for a considerable time, and it was with much difficulty Mr. Crosby, head clerk of the Coach-­office, and three young w ­ omen, his ­daughters, saved their lives by getting along the gutter on the roof into the garret of Robert Smith, Esq; whose h ­ ouse, having a strong party-­wall, happily put a stop to the farther spreading of the conflagration. Mrs. Comyns, ­mother of Mr. Comyns, being old, was carried out on a feather-­bed. Though all the goods, furniture, &c, in the h ­ ouses consumed w ­ ere destroyed, no lives ­were lost. It is said that all the office books ­were destroyed. Mr. Burnthwaite, linen-­draper in the Strand, assisting at the fire, had the misfortune to break his leg.18

­ ere is new information both about Cumming’s f­ amily and about the location of H one of his London residences. Previously, the primary source of information about Cumming’s ­family was his ­will, written shortly before his death in 1774, in which s­ isters, nieces, and nephews are specified, but not his m ­ other. This is b ­ ecause, despite her rescue from the fire in November 1770, she died four months ­later, as observed in an obituary notice in the London Eve­ning Post: “The same day [i.e., Monday, 18 March 1771] in the 90th year of her age, [died] Mrs. Cumming, ­mother to Mr [sic] Thomas Cumming, by whose means, in the course of [the] last war, Senegal was annexed to the crown of ­Great Britain.”19 That she dwelled with her son at least briefly during her final years, despite having other living c­ hildren and despite her being almost certainly a native of Scotland, adds to an emerging picture of Cumming as a man worthy of Johnson’s friendship. Equally impor­tant to that friendship, perhaps, is the location of Cumming’s ­house. Recall that the relationship between Cumming and Johnson dated from the 1740s and continued ­until Cumming’s death. But during that span we know that Cumming lived for a time in Amer­i­ca—­the early 1750s—­and that his business dealings apparently meant extensive travel. From this account of the fire we now know that he made his home, at least part of the time, in the area of London favored by Johnson for his residence. Working from a list Johnson provided Boswell and from other evidence, L. F. Powell established that Johnson resided at Johnson’s Court, No. 7 Fleet Street, from September 1765 to March 1776 (Life, 3:535). Cumming’s ­house, obviously, is not in existence, nor is Johnson’s at No. 7 Fleet Street, but a rough estimate of the distance between the latter and Surrey Street suggests it was ­under 0.3 miles, a six-­minute walk, which indeed made them neighbors in 1770. We must temper such an assumption, however, with the consideration that from Johnson’s meeting with Henry Thrale in 1765 u ­ ntil Thrale’s death in 1781, he lived with that f­ amily much of the time. The story of the fire has yet another factual tidbit to offer. We find this in the Gazetteer the following day: “Mr. Comyns, whose ­house in Surry-­street was burnt

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down on Saturday morning last, is now in Ireland” (20 November 1770). We have in­de­pen­dent confirmation that Cumming was in Ireland around this time, negotiating on behalf of bookseller John Murray for an alliance with Dublin booksellers. Cumming and Murray exchanged letters between Dublin and London from December 1770 through March 1771.20 The intertwining of Cumming’s business and social connections is well illustrated ­here. Murray had recently retired from the Marines and, with Cumming’s advice, had purchased a publishing com­pany at 32 Fleet Street from William Sandby. At that time he changed his surname from Macmurray—he was from Edinburgh originally, which should be no surprise to us by now. He apparently used his former naval connections in his business, and that may also have created a bond between him and the merchant Cumming. And among the first booksellers Cumming contacted in Dublin on behalf of Murray was George Faulkner, whom he prob­ably knew personally from his activities in the printing trade in the mid-1740s.21 Murray’s bookshop in London was also his residence (Zachs, 26); it was even closer to Cumming’s than was Johnson’s and served, as we s­ hall see ­later, as the location for club-­like assemblies.

A Terminal Satire “Memoirs of Tomocomingo, the Celebrated Po­liti­cal Quaker,” the vituperative 2,100-­word “letter” that appeared in the Town and Country Magazine in January 1774, is both useful and puzzling.22 Its usefulness as a check on the facts of Cumming’s life, especially in conjunction with Dr. Hamilton’s History of the Tuesday Club, has been mentioned. The puzzle, for anyone who reads it with some knowledge of its subject, is who wrote it and why. Cumming’s life was replete with conflict, of course, conflict that seems to center on t­ hose two now-­forbidden dinner ­table subjects, politics and religion. In his case the subjects w ­ ere curiously joined, as his con­spic­u­ous Quakerism clashed with the most famous event of his life, the taking of Senegal. The satire certainly treats t­ hese issues: the opening salvo must refer to the militant-­Quaker paradox, calling him “one of the most eccentric characters in the w ­ hole circle of hy­poc­risy.” The satirist’s shotgun attack, however, coupled with Cumming’s known tendency t­ oward aggressiveness in social situations, suggests to me that we are dealing ­here with the twin motives of personal animosity and financial profit. It seems that the nineteenth-­century editor John Wilson Croker was the first to identify the Town and Country satire specifically as the source of the allegedly fatal attack on Cumming. In annotations to his edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Including the Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1831), he relates Piozzi’s anecdote “that Cummyns the famous Quaker, whose friendship [Johnson] valued very highly, fell a sacrifice to their insults, having declared on his death-­bed to Dr. Johnson, that the pain of an anonymous letter, written in some of the common prints of the day, fastened on his heart, and threw him into the slow fever of which he died.” The attack appeared, Croker suggests, in “the Town and Country Magazine, in

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which, by a wooden cut, and ­under the name of Tomacumingo [sic], his person and princi­ples are certainly severely handled.”23 Severely handled is an understatement. The satirist’s biography is more than a ­little tinged with truth, yet it is a truth seen consistently with a jaundiced eye. Cumming was first a shoemaker’s apprentice in Edinburgh, where he “had the address, without the assistance of an habeas corpus, to move his master’s body out of his shop, and succeed to his stool and his awl.” His next occupation was as a teacher of shorthand, followed by work as a printer in Ireland, where he ingratiated himself with the aforementioned George Faulkner (“Peter Paragraph”) and ­others, who apparently bankrolled his move to Amer­i­ca. He was by now a Quaker convert, having been unsuccessful in his attempt to seduce the “celebrated Quaker preacher, Mrs. D[rummond].” He was, instead, seduced by her into Quakerism. In Amer­i­ca, through his cunning, duplicity, and even “Luciferian majesty,” he “soon gained credit, and became a trader in vari­ous merchanizes,” including the gum trade, which in turn sparked his move back to London and his African exploits. The satirist’s view of ­those exploits, he tells us, is much dif­fer­ent from that in “the apocryphal books of Tobias, the Historian [i.e., Smollett],” who had written “in a stile and manner much superior to what the subject deserves.” Cumming is subsequently rejected both by the Court and by his religious sect. The Quakers refuse to allow him to participate in their annual meeting with the king, despite his application “to a certain Lexicographical doctor, famous for his rounding of periods, to pen him an address in his celebrated stile, which he proposed presenting in person.” The satirist’s position regarding Cumming is obviously diametrically opposed to Smollett’s and Johnson’s, yet ­here he treads somewhat carefully when bringing up ­t hose two famous literary figures. Personal diatribes conclude the brief piece. Cumming is accused of confiscating his nephew’s pay ­after obtaining for him a place in the navy, a half-­truth at best.24 He is alleged to have had inappropriate sexual affairs with, among ­others, his cook, his maids, and his coachman’s wife: “He seemed emulous to rival the most profound woman-­hunter about the metropolis.” The concluding paragraph, with its allusion to the Carriage House fire, sums up the attack and the satirist’s style: “Alas! poor Tomocomingo! With thy h ­ ouse burnt down, and thy credit blown up, what can we do more for thee, than erect thee a monument in wood (not of brass) to be gazed at—­compared—­and despised.” The easiest question to answer is why such a personal attack of a well-­k nown public figure that includes assertions of licentiousness would appear in the Town and Country. Matthew Kinservik has observed that the magazine, founded in 1769 by Alexander Hamilton (obviously not the Dr. Alexander Hamilton of the Tuesday Club but yet one more Edinburgh native), “began r­ unning a regular column that featured a new upper-­class sexual exposé each month, and transcripts of adultery t­ rials that became a popu­lar form of soft-­core pornography.”25 So the satirist obviously knew exactly where to place his scandal-­mongering piece. Just as obviously, the writer must have been privy to the social circles in which Cumming ran, and I would venture that he knew him personally, or at least gos-

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siped about him. With the exception of Cumming’s being a shoemaker in his early days, the bare facts sketched above about his variegated ­careers are in­de­pen­dently verifiable, and even the anecdote of the nephew being placed in the Navy has factual truth.26 Fi­nally, the satirist shows some skill as an author: nicely done vitriol is not easily executed, as daily American tele­v i­sion po­liti­cal commentary demonstrates. But, admittedly, t­ here ­were prob­ably many ­people who fit t­ hese criteria in 1774. Junius has been tentatively suggested as the author and, indeed, it may be he.27 Another equally ­v iable candidate is the historian and popu­lar writer Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786).

What Was Eating Gilbert Stuart? The trail to Stuart begins with the second full paragraph of the Town and Country satire: You have, most prob­ably, reader, had the plea­sure of smoaking a pipe, and drinking a glass of port, with our broad-­brim’d hero at the Five Bells b ­ ehind the New Church, at the Devil, or the Genoese Arms; but if fortune has so ­little befriended you in this re­spect, you may nevertheless have seen him at the Trumpet in Shire-­ Lane, the Yorkshire ale­house in Bloomsbury-­market, or, lastly, at the Peacock in Gray’s-­inn lane, where he usually terminates his diurnal peregrination.

The six pubs named ­here are identifiable, unsurprisingly, and have vari­ous degrees of fame or infamy. The Five Bells b ­ ehind St. Mary Le Stand was considered by one Masonic lodge “a more fitting place for the Installation of a ­Grand Master” than another pub.28 The Devil—­f ull name The Devil and St. Dunstan—in Fleet Street near ­Temple Bar was Ben Jonson’s retreat and ­later one of Goldsmith’s. Genoese Arms seem likely a ­mistake or an alternative for Genoa Arms, mentioned among other places in an Alexander Pope letter to Humphrey Wanley in 1725.29 The Kit-­Cat Club met at the Trumpet in Shire Lane, which had acquired an especially bad reputation by the second half of the ­century, as had the Yorkshire Grey Tavern in Bloomsbury Market, which I take for the Yorkshire Ale­ house. But most in­ter­est­ing for our purpose is the culmination of Cumming’s ­imagined pub crawl, the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane (see figure 6.1), the notorious haunt of Gilbert Stuart. Stuart’s reputation has enjoyed a relative rehabilitation recently, as the emphasis has shifted to a more even assessment of his literary and intellectual achievements instead of his personal failings. The shift is apparent in a comparison of the Dictionary of National Biography article (1898) by William Prideaux Courtney and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article (2004) by William Zachs, who also wrote Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786.30 Courtney is especially helpful in pointing out accounts con­temporary with Stuart that link him conspicuously with the Peacock and with venomous literary attacks. Legend had it that Burton Ale, a strong beverage, was first served at the Peacock in 1639. The inn remained famous for that brew more than a hundred

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Figure 6.1  Th ​ e Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane. Undated e­ tching. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photo­graphs Division.

years ­later and also, according to Thomas Maurice (1754–1824), for “a superior class of ­people” who ­t here imbibed: Bankers, merchants, doctors, barristers, peers, and even princes incog. crowded together beneath its ­humble roof, quaffed with delight the mellif luous nectar. . . . ​One of its most constant visitors, Dr. G. S—­t . . . ​is said to have been so addicted to large potations of this glutinous composition, that the f­ ree passage of the venal fluid was absolutely obstructed by it. Some facetious person . . . ​ honoured him with the subsequent epitaph. Of Scotland’s Queen HE told the mournful tale, And died the victim of base BURTON ALE!31

George Chal­mers (1742–1825), in his biography of Thomas Ruddiman, defended his subject from attacks by Stuart, who was related to Ruddiman: “Such was Gilbert Stuart’s laxity of princi­ple, as a man, that he considered ingratitude as one of the most venial of sins. . . . ​Such ­were his disappointments, both as a writer, and a man, that he allowed his peevishness to sour into malice; and indulged his malevolence till it settled in corruption.” In a remark that certainly could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the Town and Country satirist, Chal­mers writes,

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“He first attempted to detract from Ruddiman’s reputation, as a scholar, and afterwards laboured to ruin his character, as a man.”32 Yet another Scot, Thomas Somerville (1741–1830), provides a view of Stuart much along the lines we have just seen, but with some additional pertinent details. Somerville was a young clergyman from the Scottish Boarders visiting London for the first time in the spring of 1769, when he became acquainted with Stuart, a fellow lodger at the ­house of “Mr. Murdoch, a bookseller.” Somerville describes subsequent meetings with Stuart “and several authors of inferior note at the h ­ ouse of Mr. Murray, bookseller, Fleet Street”: The extravagant self-­sufficiency of [Murray’s] guests, their barefaced reciprocal flattery, and the contempt which they expressed for the most esteemed living authors, often provoked my indignation. I speak, however, principally of ­Gilbert Stuart, to whom the club [!] assigned oracular authority. I was astonished at the effrontery, as well as imprudence, with which he dared to avow a want of all princi­ple and honour. He shewed me two contrasted characters of Alderman Beckford, the idol of the mob, which he was to insert in the antagonist newspapers most in circulation, one a panegyric, and the other a libel, and for each of which he expected to receive the reward of a guinea.33

Perhaps, then, the motive thus far sought in vain for the libelous Town and Country satire was no more complicated than the desire to make a guinea. The case for Stuart as the author of the satire is not conclusive by any means, but given the period’s attitude t­ oward anonymous publication, that should not surprise. The attitude is well-­illustrated by an anecdote from one of Boswell’s journals describing the anonymous publication of his Letter to Lord Braxfield (1780), a letter that argues for criminal t­ rials in Scotland to be conducted “in the most solemn, exact, and regular way.”34 Boswell obfuscates from the beginning (“I employed Mr. Adam Neill to print it, as I might be suspected for the author had Mr. Donaldson been the printer” [207]), deliberately absents himself from Edinburgh society on the day it comes out (“I kept out of the way” [210]), and not only denies authorship when asked but suggests other pos­si­ble authors. A writer now familiar to us is used twice by Boswell as a red herring: “The author was allowed to be well-­informed. I asked if Gilbert Stuart could have done it” (211). And four days ­later: “He thought it must be written by a man of business, well acquainted with the Court. I mentioned Gilbert Stuart” (213). More than his being just one of the “usual suspects” among anonymous writers supports the Gilbert Stuart case. The long-­standing personal and business connection between Stuart and John Murray is surely in­ter­est­ing, especially since at one time (ca. 1770) Cumming was assisting Murray in some of his business ventures while Stuart was holding court at Murray’s home and office, as noted above. Stuart fits in terms of the type of periodical writing he engaged in, his typical style, and his con­spic­u­ous lack of reluctance to re­spect personal confidences or friendships. Neither his writing nor his drinking was ever temperate, but his be­hav­ior

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during his first extended stay in London was especially intemperate, coming on the heels of professional disappointment in Edinburgh: “He repaired to London, where he became a writer in reviews, and made all the literary men of Edinburgh the subjects of his envious and malignant attacks, from 1768 to 1773.”35 We do not know that the two men even met at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, where according to the satirist Cumming “usually terminates his diurnal peregrination” and where Stuart prominently socialized, but the satirist’s mention of this par­tic­u ­lar club is yet another in­ter­est­ing coincidence. By November 1773 (and perhaps ­earlier) Stuart had ended his first stay in London,36 and the satire was not published ­until January 1774, but anyone wishing to credit Stuart’s authorship ­will have ­little difficulty with this fact. Perhaps, in a rare moment of discretion, he wished to put some miles between himself and his London associates before the piece appeared, although he had well demonstrated his willingness to conduct long-­distance attacks in the opposite direction, from London upon the Scots. U ­ nless or ­until we have further evidence indicating that Stuart and Cumming knew each other personally, we are left with a second reasonable candidate for the authorship of the satire, along with Junius. Courtney’s article mentions an anonymous letter in the Scots Magazine, November 1799, “suggest[ing] that Stuart was the writer . . . ​of the letters of Junius.” It is relatively more likely that he was the writer of the letter attacking Cumming in the Town and Country.

notes 1. ​Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Demand, vol. 20 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. O M Brack Jr. and Robert DeMaria Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 607–609. 2. ​The most comprehensive study to date, on which I depend throughout, is Melvyn New and Robert G. Walker, “Who Killed Thomas Cumming the Quaker? Recovering the Life-­Story of an Eighteenth-­Century Adventurer,” Modern Philology, 116 (February 2019), 262–298; hereafter “Thomas Cumming the Quaker.” References in print in the past fifty years to Cumming apart from his relationship with Johnson are generally incidental, brief, and wrong. 3. ​Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 4:254n2: “I [i.e., Boswell] was in Scotland when this Club [the Essex Head Club, 1783] was founded. . . . ​Johnson, however, declared I should be a member, and in­ven­ted a word upon the occasion: ‘Boswell (said he) is a very clubable man.’ ” Charles Burney noted that Johnson said of Hawkins, “Sir John, Sir, is a very unclubable man” (Life, 4:254n2), but the authenticity, or at least the date, of this second anecdote has been questioned. 4. ​The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1992), 2:140–141. James L. Clifford considers Cumming one of Johnson’s “London cronies,” dating their acquaintance from 1740–1744 (Young Sam Johnson [New York: McGraw Hill, 1955], 241). 5. ​See The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Woods Labaree (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 10:345–351. 6. ​Tobias Smollett, The History of E ­ ngland from the Revolution to the Death of George the Second, 6 vols. (London, 1794), 5:113n. Smollett ­later continued his defense of Cumming in the fictionalized Adventures of an Atom (1769). See The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 70–71. 7. ​Evidence of such cross-­denominational friendships is found in Cumming’s ­w ill. See ­Robert  G. Walker, “ ‘Curious Particulars’: The ­Will of Thomas Cumming, the Fighting Quaker,” Johnsonian Newsletter 70 (September 2019), 19.

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8. ​A discussion of “the Quaker challenge” to rules of civility and, by extension, to inclusive social interaction is provided by Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 230–233. 9. ​David Murray Lyon, The History of the Lodge of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1873), 189. 10. ​See Melvyn New and Robert  G. Walker, “Thomas Cumming and William Leechman: An Early Spat for the ‘Fighting Quaker,’ ” Scottish Literary Review 11 (Spring/Summer 2019): 3–8. 11. ​See “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 272–273. 12. ​Recent scholarship has not solved the difficulty, which may be uniquely Scottish. See David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s ­Century 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 203–204: “The ‘1670’ Aberdeen Lodge membership list contains one further mystery: several of ­t hose listed ­were Quakers. How could members of a religious sect notorious for the refusal of its adherents to take oaths and for its rejections of ceremonies be initiated into a masonic lodge? Two of them . . . ​emigrated to New Jersey in the 1680s, thus becoming the first known freemasons in Amer­i­ca. How they reconciled freemasonry and their Quaker faith is among the masonic secrets they took to the grave with them.” 13. ​Lyon, 189ff. 14. ​Jennifer ­Macleod, “The Edinburgh Musical Society: Its Membership and Repertoire 1728–1797,” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2001, 308. 15. ​Alexander Hamilton, History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Micklus, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 2:212; hereafter cited in the text. Hamilton’s fictionalized history coincides roughly with Cumming’s time in Amer­ i­ca, ca. 1750–1754, a de­cade ­a fter the incident with the Masons. 16. ​See “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 286. 17. ​William Henry Overall, ed., The Dictionary of Chronology or Historical and Statistical Register (London, 1870), 375. 18. ​ Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 19 November 1770. 19. ​ London Eve­ning Post, 16–19 March 1771. For Cumming’s other relatives, see Walker, “ ‘Curious Particulars,’ ” which prints an annotated transcription of his ­w ill. 20. ​William Zachs, “John Murray and the Dublin Book Trade 1770–93,” Long Room 40 (1995): 26–33; hereafter cited as Zachs. 21. ​For Cumming’s ­earlier experience in publishing, see “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 286–287, which points out a passage in the Town and Country satire that mentions Cumming’s forming a relationship in Dublin with “Peter Paragraph, with whose vanity and peculiarities the public are not unacquainted.” George Faulkner (ca. 1703–1775) was satirized as Peter Paragraph in Samuel Foote’s The Orator (1762). 22. ​Town and Country Magazine 6 (January 1774), 14–16. Subsequent quotations from this anonymous satire are not specified by page ­because of its brevity. 23. ​I quote the anecdote as printed in Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (1897; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 1:274. For Croker’s identification of the magazine, see John Wilson Croker, ed., Life of Samuel Johnson, 5 vols. (London, 1831), 2:454n. 24. ​The nephew has been identified as John Samuel, who ­later served on the Bounty. See “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 296. 25. ​Matthew Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-­Century ­England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 10. 26. ​See “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 296n69. For why the satirist may have in­ven­ted Cumming’s role as a shoemaker, see Robert G. Walker, “Quakers, Shoe­makers, and Thomas Cumming,” ANQ: A Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 34, no. 1 (2021), doi: 10.1080/0895769X.2019.1637708. 27. ​For the case for Junius, see “Thomas Cumming the Quaker,” 297–298.

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28. ​ Ars Quatuor Coronatorum being the transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, ed. W. H. Rylands (London: H. Keble, 1906), 19:98. 29. ​Pope asked Wanley, the first keeper of the Harleian Library, to purchase on his behalf “a Douzaine of quartes of goode & Wholesome Port Wine, such as yee drinke at the Genoa Armes,” from which Wanley’s wine merchant did business. See The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 2:304. Wanley noted in his diary a negotiation with Warburton worth retelling: “Mr. Warburton came to me, at the ‘Genoa Arms,’ and then took me to another tavern and kept me up all night, thinking to muddle me, and so to gain upon me in selling his MSS. But the contrary happened. . . . ​He took just what was offered,” quoted in Edward Edwards, F ­ ree Town Libraries, Their Formation, Management, and History in Britain, France, Germany, & Amer­i­ca (London: Trübner and Co., 1869), 214 30. ​William Prideaux Courtney, “Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786),” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 55:82–84; William Zachs, “Gilbert Stuart (1743–1786)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1093​/r­ ef:odnb​/2­ 6704; William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992); hereafter Without Regard. Zachs recounts several of the anecdotes previously cited by Courtney, which I mention subsequently; significant new contributions to Stuart’s story come from his examination of the unpublished correspondence between Stuart and John Murray. Zachs notes the following proximity: “­A fter a brief return to Edinburgh, Stuart moved into more permanent lodgings at 13 Southampton Buildings in Holburn . . . ​in June 1770. He was a short walk from John Murray’s shop at 32 Fleet Street and in close proximity to his favourite tavern, the Peacock in Grays Inn Lane” (45). 31. ​Thomas Maurice, Memoirs of the Author of Indian Antiquities, Part 3, 2nd ed. (London, 1822), 3, 3n. “Scotland’s Queen” refers to Stuart’s last and arguably best work, the History of Scotland, from the Establishment of the Reformation, till the Death of Queen Mary (1784). 32. ​George Chal­mers, The Life of Thomas Ruddiman (London, 1794), 290. 33. ​Somerville’s use of “club” ­here suggests the multiformity of such organ­izations in the ­century. See Peter Clark’s brief overview, “Clubs,” in Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. Jack Lynch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 143–150, which notes their importance “for integrating mi­grants and young ­people into urban communities and for promoting social networking within and between communities” (149). A good recent study of the culture of clubs, coffee­houses, and taverns during the period is Vic Gatrell, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (London: Allen Lane, 2013). 34. ​James Boswell, Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck 1778–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1977), 202n5; hereafter cited in the text. In Without Regard, Zachs calls attention to the same passages in Boswell’s journal that I do, not to suggest that Stuart was a natu­ral guess for an anonymous writer, but to argue that “in the ­matter of ­legal reform and in politics generally Stuart and Boswell held similar views” (129). 35. ​Henry Brougham, Lives of the Men of Letters of the Time of George III (1845), cited from Brougham’s Works (Edinburgh, 1872), 2:275. 36. ​November 1773 marked the initial publication of the Edinburgh Magazine and Review, which Stuart established in Edinburgh. Zachs writes that Stuart “returned to Scotland in April  1773” (Without Regard, 62), apparently basing the date on correspondence between Stuart and Murray in the bookseller’s archive.

Not “Just a Macheath” young boswell and old cibber in boswell’s london journal 1762–1763 Gordon Turnbull

The national emergence of drama in Scotland from the hold of severe Presbyterian proscription into a freedom of theatrical display finds a striking individual correlative in the social, psychological, and authorial development of the young James Boswell. The twentieth-­century recoveries and the ongoing publication of his private diaries, letters, and other papers have allowed his modern biographers and critics to note the par­tic­u­lar potency of his theatergoing experience in his emotional and characterological progression. As Frederick Pottle has put it, “From his eigh­teenth year Boswell began to be associated with actors and actresses, with momentous results for his ­f uture.”1 Much critical response to Boswell’s youthful diaries and other rec­ords in this kind of context—­his fixation on, investment in, and absorption of literary, theatrical, and fictional models for (real or i­magined) emulation—­has focused on the seductive magnetism of the glamorous, polyamorous, and gallows-­cheating bandit-­hero Macheath, in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, especially as the character had been portrayed by the charismatic leading man of the Edinburgh theater in young Boswell’s time, the gentleman-­actor West Digges.2 But the focus on the Macheath figure, whom indeed Boswell found imaginatively appealing as a rebel against constraining social norms of masculine propriety, sells short the range and complexity of his absorptions and replications of his theatrical experience and engagements. As a young man, Boswell had as much social conformity on his mind as he did fantasies of rakish libertinism and gallows-­cheating banditry. As he pondered his life’s course, mulling prospects of marriage and the dynastic succession of the ­family estate, Auchinleck, in Ayrshire, he strug­gled to accommodate both his libidinal energies and his situation as scion of an accomplished Edinburgh l­egal ­family and a ­f uture Scottish laird—­ but with a pronounced Londonophilia. Within this strug­gle, the marital and domestic plots of En­glish Restoration and early eighteenth-­century comedies of manners, 103

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set mostly among the minor aristocracy in London, fed his imaginings of pos­si­ ble selves and ­futures, imaginings that remain discernible subtextually in his self-­record. From 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of ­England and he and the royal court removed from Edinburgh to London, “the development of the Scottish Drama and Scottish Theatre, as a national growth, was materially checked, if not completely s­ topped.”3 Even a­ fter 1660, when James’s grand­son came to the throne as Charles II following the Cromwellian Protectorate, theater in Scotland continued to strug­gle against suppressive forces. The historical term “The Restoration” has of course also long served as a period and style designation for En­glish drama, an adjectival label for the re-­efflorescence of theater a­ fter closure during the Cromwellian Protectorate. The designation applies in ­England, but not in Scotland. “In 1662, theatre in Scotland was ­limited to two short seasons at the Tennis Court Theatre in Edinburgh [in the grounds of Holyrood House]; it was patronised only by the aristocracy . . . ​a nd ­under frequent attack from the Church.” 4 Theater, actors, and plays in Scotland for de­cades afterward faced per­sis­tent disapproval from and suppression by Presbyterian authority. They enjoyed occasional flickerings into life, as when from 1679 to 1682, Charles II’s b ­ rother, James, Duke of York (­later King James II and VII) resided, with his wife Mary of Modena, in Scotland as the King’s high commissioner. The ­couple spent most of that time in Edinburgh, and in the words of an account written more than a c­ entury ­later by the Edinburgh ­lawyer, historian, and man of letters William Tytler, “kept a splendid court . . . ​at the Palace of Holyrood­house. Balls, plays and masquerades ­were introduced: ­t hese last, however, ­were soon laid aside. The fanat­i­cism of the times could not bear such ungodly innovations. . . . ​The fate of the stage seems to have been equally adverse. The spirit of the times was still too much tinctured with fanat­i­cism to expect that the execrated profane entertainment of the stage would then succeed. A play-­house was always held in abhorrence, and anathematized by the clergy.”5 With the ending of the Stuart royal line, theater in Edinburgh (indeed art in general) “was discouraged through the morbid fanat­i­cism of the dominant portion of the populace obtaining complete supremacy.” 6 Tytler, born in 1711 and writing in 1792, had over the course of his long lifetime seen the emergence of theater in Scotland from Calvinist suppression into flourishing popularity. Throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, theater in Edinburgh had always strug­g led and sputtered, never quite flourishing, but it had also proved resistant, never quite being annihilated, even though, in 1727, the Presbytery of Edinburgh caused an “Admonition against Plays” to be read from e­ very pulpit. The Canongate Concert Hall, founded in 1746, survived the still suppressive attacks on it by Presbyterian authority by proceeding as though it w ­ ere not a theater, through the absurdly transparent ruse of offering plays “gratis” between concerts of ­music (which patrons paid to come to hear), and, while technically illegal, benefited from the aristocratic patronage and protection of James, Lord Somerville.7 Changes in social attitude allowing the relative success of the Canongate theater accompanied the waning of the older austere Calvinism and the emergence of Church of Scotland Moderates,

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and a landmark moment came in 1756, with John Home’s Douglas, a Scottish play written—to the outrage of the traditional clergy—by a man who was himself a Presbyterian minister. “By playing a significant role in the victory of the Moderates in the Church of Scotland, the theatre was enabled to flourish in a way which seems almost unbelievable in view of the organised attacks launched upon it by power­ ful ele­ments within the Church between 1660 and 1760.” 8 In 1767, a new purpose-­ built Theatre Royal opened in Edinburgh’s New Town, u ­ nder the patentee David Ross (1728–1790), with the prologue for its opening contributed by Ross’s good friend James Boswell. By 1800, “­There w ­ ere nine permanent theatres spread throughout Scotland,” theater had evolved into “an acceptable intellectual, social and moral pastime” and indeed “the most popu­lar form of organised entertainment in the country.”9 By the time he contributed his prologue for the new Theatre Royal in 1767, Boswell had been an avid theatergoer—in Edinburgh and in London during visits ­there in 1760, 1762–1763, and early 1766—­for almost a de­cade. His accounts of himself in journals and other writings from ­t hese years, when the management and actors of Edinburgh’s Canongate emerged from ­under Knoxian Presbyterianism’s restrictions and became acceptable, mirror the national trajectory. He recorded in his “Ébauche de ma vie” (Sketch of my life), the autobiographical summary he wrote to introduce himself to Rousseau in Môtiers in December 1764, the effects of the severe Calvinism inflicted on him in early boyhood by his loving but intensely pious ­mother, Euphemia Erskine, and the Edinburgh Presbytery’s rigorous and demanding forms of worship. ­These effects ­were to some extent mitigated by his first boyhood tutor, John Dun, a young trainee Church of Scotland clergyman of a Moderate cast, ­later presented by Boswell’s f­ather as the parish minister of Auchinleck, who introduced him to the pleasures of lit­er­a­ture.10 According to a revealing remark Boswell made in an unfinished first draft of the “Ébauche,” his ­mother, when she was once forced to attend the theater, cried, and would never again return.11 The Moderate Scottish churchman, Hugh Blair, both a clergyman and professor of rhe­toric and belles-­lettres, was a man whom the young Boswell had heard preach in Edinburgh and in whose com­pany he attended the theater in London. “Blair is a very amiable man. In my earliest years I admired him while he was Minister in the Canongate.”12 In London on 9 April 1763, Boswell had planned some theatergoing with Blair to see Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes at Covent Garden, but the ­house being crowded, he left his seat to an acquaintance (London Journal, 194). He reports another excursion with Blair to the theater in London, this time prob­ably at Drury Lane in the Spring of 1768, in a now well-­k nown account, and his footnote to it, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), describing a “wild freak of youthful extravagance,” a “boyish frolick,” when he “entertained the audience prodigiously, by imitating the lowing of a cow.”13 What­ever Blair’s understandable concern on this occasion for Boswell’s fame, the frolic as­suredly indicates a level of comfort (in the world of theater and theatrical display) and relaxation (in the presence of a Presbyterian clergyman) not available to him in his ­earlier years.

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At the age of twenty-­five, Boswell, on his way back to Britain a­ fter a l­ ittle more than two years of travel in Eu­rope, found himself wondering openly about the heavy impact that theater had had on him in his late adolescence and early manhood. In Marseilles, in his journal entry for 21 December 1765 reporting an eve­ ning at the theater ­t here, he wrote: “Let me ­here ask myself how, in the name of all that is strange, was I, when nineteen and more, so enthusiastic an admirer of plays and players?” He answers himself: “I can explain it. My education had been the most narrow. I had a scanty share of ideas; I had no freedom of thought.”14 Confined and thwarted as he was in his strict h ­ ouse­hold, he found in the Edinburgh stage and in the com­pany of ­women and men of the theater, operating outside both parental and official social restraint, a relief and release from his “narrow” education and from a Calvinist sense of h ­ uman identity as a preordained fixity, a way to expand his scanty “share of ideas,” a greater “freedom of thought,” a widening of emotional and imaginative horizons. The Canongate theater’s actors and management ­were imported mostly from London, as, for the reasons given above, no native Scottish acting or management population on which to draw had been allowed to develop. They gave the Edinburgh theatergoers largely the same repertory as the London theaters, drawing much of their material from, among other ­things, plays popu­lar in Restoration and early eighteenth-­century ­England. Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was just one of them. The appeal of Macheath and of Digges-­as-­Macheath for Boswell is undeniable and demonstrable, but the perception of it as having some sort of primacy has been heavi­ly influenced, and indeed exaggerated, by a footnote in Pottle’s edition of Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, which first appeared in late 1950 and has been frequently reprinted and reissued. In the journal entry for 3 May 1762, Boswell reports his visit to a capitally condemned Newgate prisoner, the violent highwayman Paul Lewis, who was to be executed the at Tyburn the next day. Lewis, says Boswell, “was just a Macheath.” According to Pottle’s footnote to this diary entry: “In one way or another the figure of Macheath dominates this entire journal”—­a rare, prob­ably unique, moment of serious exaggeration from a normally careful, tactful, and wholly reliable editor and scholar.15 Pottle ­later repeated the general point in his authoritative biography of Boswell’s ­earlier years: “West Digges, leading man of the Edinburgh com­pany, a handsome profligate of good f­ amily and education who had once been an officer in the Army, became [the young Boswell’s] ideal of deportment. For several years one can see in Boswell’s dreams of himself as he would like to be a good deal of Digges’s impersonation of Macheath, a role Digges is said to have played better than any other actor in Britain.”16 But it must be stressed that the perception of this judicially condemned malefactor, Lewis, as a Macheath, was far from unique to Boswell. It formed very much part of the flamboyant Lewis’s own self-­theatricalization, noted at the time by many with no knowledge what­ever of West Digges or the Edinburgh stage. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1763, “When this gentleman [i.e., Lewis] came to Newgate, where he was well known, he was honoured with the title of captain, and he thought fit to assume the character of Captain Macheath: he shewed his gallantry

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and his wit by singing bawdy songs and abusing the parson.”17 Con­temporary press and other accounts made a point of describing Lewis’s deliberately Macheath-­ esque antics, performed for audiences among the prison population and for the many spectators who came, just like Boswell, out of curiosity to see him.18 The theatergoing Boswell indeed located appealing fantasies and sets of theatrical tropes and paradigms as he sought autobiographical self-­renovation outside the reach of the Calvinist restraints and proscriptions of his Edinburgh youth and absorbed theatrical moments and figures that chimed with his own imaginings, longings, and aspirations. I have discussed elsewhere the depth and complexity of his par­tic­u ­lar engagement in London in 1762–1763 with Frances Sheridan’s comedy The Discovery, to which the author had asked him to contribute a prologue.19 ­Needless to say, Macheath was by no means the only character that the young Boswell had seen acted on the Edinburgh stage, and indeed not the only one acted by the admired Digges, and the character does not “dominate” the “entire” London journal of 1762–1763. Theater, which in Boswell’s own account enlarged his “scanty share of ideas” and gave him more “freedom of thought,” radically informs his proj­ects of characterological adaptation, and vital to them is the role played in the young Boswell’s imagination of Cibberian plots involving provincial/metropolitan dissonance, and marital restitution, u ­ nion, and harmony. On the very day of his arrival in London for his second visit to the city, Friday, 19 November 1762, Boswell’s immediate agenda was, revealingly, theatergoing, to be followed soon thereafter by the seeking out of his Edinburgh theater acquaintances who w ­ ere then in London. A ­ fter installing himself in an inn—­that is, before having even found himself suitable lodgings for this London stay—he took in an eve­ning of theater, an immediate physical as well as emotional and aesthetic comfort. He went to “Covent Garden, to see [Jonson’s] ­Every Man in his Humour. [Henry] Woodward played Bobadil finely. He entertained me much. It was fine a­ fter the fatigues of my journey, to find myself snug in a Theatre[,] my body warm, & my mind elegantly amused” (London Journal, 8). Less than a month ­later, he went to try to call on John Lee, actor and former man­ag­er of the Edinburgh theater, “with whom I associate fine gay ideas of the Edinburgh Theatre, in my Boyish days, when I used to walk down the Cannongate, & think of Players with a mixture of narrow-­ minded horror, & lively-­minded plea­sure: and used to won­der at painted equipages & powdered Ladies” (14 December 1762, London Journal, 45–46). Two weeks ­after his plan to call on Lee, he met and reconnected with another of his impor­ tant Edinburgh theatrical acquaintances, the actor and dramatist James Love. “I had Love at breakfast with me. He called up to my mind many Theatrical ideas of Mr. Garrick, Old Cibber &c. I then went to Lady Betty’s” (29 December 1762, London Journal, 68.) This conflation of James Love with the ­great David Garrick and with Colley Cibber, in whose plays Boswell had seen both Love and Garrick as well as Digges act, is revealing, and the name “Lady Betty” w ­ ill be returned to below. In his journal for 2 April 1763, about a month before he had put himself through the painful distress of witnessing the execution of the Macheath-­like Lewis and

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two other condemned criminals at Tyburn, he reports a more innocent but still revealing urban adventure of confronting and then conquering emotional anxiety, a climb to the top of the Monument: ­ fter dinner[,] I sauntered in a pleasing humour to London-­Bridge[,] viewed the A Thames’s silver expanse, & the springy bosom of the surrounding fields. I then went up to the top of the Monument. This is a most amazing Building. It is a Pillar two hundred feet high. In the inside, a turnpike stair runs up all the way. When I was about halfway up I grew much frighten’d. I would have come down again. But thought I would despise myself for my timidity. Thus does the spirit of Pride get the better of fear. I mounted to the top & got upon the balcony. It was horrid to find myself so monstrous a way up in the air, so far above London & ­ ere is no real danger, as t­ here is a all it’s spires. I durst not look round me. Th strong rail both on the stair & balcony. But I shuddered, & as ­every heavy waggon past down Gracechurch street, dreaded that the shaking of the earth would make the tremendous pile tumble to the foundation. (London Journal, 188)

In some brief remarks on this journal entry, Cynthia Wall has astutely connected the episode to the ideological work of eighteenth-­century “cultural navigation” (of the kind found in such t­ hings as con­temporary tour guidebooks, maps, and booksellers’ advertisements), which allows Boswell, she says, a kind of masculine mastery of the urban space, a mastery unavailable, for example, to Frances Burney’s female fictional protagonists Evelina and Cecilia, whose distresses in London’s urban complexities the novels named for them report. Wall notes: “Boswell’s solution to this perspectival horror is to plunge back down into the topographical and sexual labyrinths of the city.” Th ­ ese observations rightly mine the diary account for the urgency of Boswell’s need for what Wall terms “urban conquest,” a feeling of ascendancy over the emotional, po­liti­cal, and psycho-­spatial complexities of this intimidating city.20 But some particularities need to be added, to do with a specifically Scottish and specifically theatrically inflected anxiety over which the young Boswell is in need h ­ ere of psychological mastery—­what might be termed his “anxiety of provincialism.” This specifically London ascent stands in stark contrast to the joys Boswell reports of his Edinburgh boyhood conquests of Arthur Seat, “that lofty romantic Mountain on which I have so often strayed in my days of youth” (15 November 1762, London Journal, 9). Boswell seeks to jettison his l­ imited, innocent Edinburgh boyhood and replace it with a mature capacity to navigate London’s more complicated social and emotional terrain. “I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very dif­fer­ent from a rattling uncultivated one which for sometime past I had been fond of” (21 November 1762, London Journal, 9). In this (and in other moments soon to be referred to) Boswell’s self-­record embeds, or has a palimpsestic relationship with, ele­ments of the ways in which London had been represented to him as a member of the mid-­Georgian Edinburgh theater audience. His rec­ord of his experience on the Monument closely resembles, far too closely for it to be coincidental, that of the young rustic booby Richard

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Wronghead from The Provoked Husband, or, A Journey to London (1728), Colley Cibber’s revision and completion of an ­earlier fragment, A Journey to London, by Sir John Vanbrugh—­a play that was a staple of the Canongate’s repertoire and in which the part of the very admirable, wholly worthy, and thoroughly un-­ Macheath-­l ike Lord Townly was regularly played by West Digges.21 The Provoked Husband had indeed become something of a fixture in both the Edinburgh and London stage repertoires and, as his journal shows, in Boswell’s consciousness since he encountered it on the Edinburgh stage in the summer of 1759. He possibly encountered it again, in the city to which t­hese and other plays like it had drawn him, when it ran at Covent Garden in May 1760.22 Boswell had in that year run away to London from Glasgow. His disapproving ­father had removed him from Edinburgh to that city, one of his reasons prob­ably being that Glasgow did not have a theater.23 The Provoked Husband was also in theatrical circulation at the time of his second visit beginning in late 1762, playing at Covent Garden on 16 November and 28 December. It had proved popu­lar with a wide range of audiences. Boswell’s admired friend Hugh Blair wrote that Cibber’s The Provoked Husband was “perhaps, on the w ­ hole, the best Comedy in the En­glish language.”24 In this play, Richard Wronghead, very much like Boswell in this London journal, laments his lack of in­de­pen­dent means and the fact that he is in London on an allowance from his f­ ather. He wishes that “I had means in my own hands,” since “feyther allows me but hawlf-­a-­crown a week.”25 Richard is the son of a dimwitted landowning baronet, Sir Francis Wronghead of Bumper Hall, a “new parliament man for the Borough of Guzzledown” (apparently in Yorkshire), and is described in the play by the London sharper, Count Basset, as “an unlicked whelp, about sixteen, just taken from school” (2.66–67). Young Wronghead recounts his dispiriting London sightseeing experiences to Myrtilla, Basset’s former mistress, and a sophisticated and intelligent Londoner: Myrtilla: Well, and pray what have you seen, sir? Squire Richard: Flesh, I cawn’t tell, not I—­seen every­thing, I think. First ­t here we went o’ top o’ the what-­d ’ye-­call-it ­t here, the ­great huge stone post, up the rawnd and rawnd stairs that twine and twine about, just an’ as thof it ­were a corkscrew. Myrtilla: Oh, the Monument! Well, and was it not a fine sight, from the top of it? Squire Richard: Sight, miss? I know no’—­I saw nowght but smoke and brick ­housen, and steeple tops. Then ­there was such a mortal ting-­tang of bells, and rumbling of carts and coaches, and then the folks ­under one looked so small, and made such a hum and a buzz, . . . Myrtilla: I think, master, you give a very good account of it. Squire Richard: Aye, but I did no’ like it; for my head, my head, begun to turn—so I trundled me dawn stairs agen, like a round trencher. (4:77–95)

Young Wronghead is defeated by the Monument. Boswell does not allow himself to be, and what he ­here defeats in par­tic­u­lar is the fear of himself as a timid

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and provincial Richard Wronghead. His more psychological “perspectival horror,” to reinvoke Wall’s wording, stemmed from seeing in young Wronghead on the Edinburgh stage a version of what he feared he (and by implication, Edinburgh) might be. The general historical context of Boswell’s 1762–1763 diary is a London alive with renewed Anglo-­Scottish social and po­liti­cal hostilities during the time of the prime ministership of the unpop­u­lar Scottish-­born John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute. This was the month (April 1763) when the now most notorious of the anti-­ Scottish essays by Charles Churchill and John Wilkes, the North Briton No. 45 (the one that led to charges of seditious libel) made its appearance. The weeks before and at the time of Boswell’s private conquest of the London Monument saw a particularly significant sequence of issues of the consistently Scotophobic North Briton, which, as Boswell reports in his journal, he bought regularly each Saturday, its day of publication, fresh from the press, and read avidly (9 February, 26 March 1763, London Journal, 137, 183). The issue for March 12, no. 41, in par­tic­u­lar, in what purported to be a letter from a London correspondent, featured a lengthy and nastily satiric account of a tour of the sights of London given to a Scottish youth “who appeared to be about eigh­teen,” characterized as “a raw chield” who “seemed entirely ignorant of ­every ­t hing on this side of the Tweed” (and inevitably seeking some kind of place in London through the Bute administration). Boswell’s very next act, ­after confronting and conquering his fear in the Monument is again to brave the anti-­Scottish barbs of Churchill and Wilkes: “I then got the North-­Briton & read it at Child’s [coffee ­house]” (London Journal, 188). In witnessing the execution of the real criminal Lewis (thereby attempting, with ultimately only incomplete success, a kind of purgation of his own Macheath-­esque fantasies), in addressing his timidity on the Monument, and in confronting the ridicule of his country and of his countrymen in the Wilkes/Churchill North Briton essays, Boswell seeks cathartically to address his own deepest anx­i­eties, with a view to conquering them and releasing himself from the constrictions of timidity and to a greater “freedom of thought.” In 1759, Boswell had written (or possibly co-­w ritten with the Irish actor Francis Gentleman) A View of the Edinburgh Theatre during the Summer Season, 1759, which appeared in February 1760, and in which one of the reviews treated the June 27 Canongate per­for­mance of The Provoked Husband. The review was on the ­whole laudatory, but it took a revealing exception to the way the London actor James Love, in the part of Sir Francis Wronghead, had represented En­glish provincialism to the Edinburgh audience—by speaking Sir Francis’s stage-­Yorkshire En­glish in a broad stage-­Scottish accent. Love’s per­for­mance is praised, but “We would, however, (with all due Deference) let Mr. Love know, that he frequently confounds the County dialect with the Scots Pronunciation; which, although it may afford him an Opportunity of gaping wider, and delighting the astonished Galleries, with a higher Degree of Vociferation, is yet an impropriety, which ­ought to be corrected.”26 The young Scot Boswell is ­here the voice of cultural authority, rightly convicting the Londoner James Love of what he fears in himself, an ignorant regionalist gaucherie.

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To his Edinburgh companion and youthful literary collaborator, Andrew Erskine, the Londonophilic Boswell wrote on 4 May 1762 to express his vision of London as a locus of characterological release and freedom from censorious restraint: “I must inform you, that ­t here is a city called London, for which I have as violent an affection, as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress. . . . ​ ­Every agreeable whim may be freely indulged without censure.”27 Boswell’s reports of his amatory activities in the 1762–1763 London visit, especially his brief affair with an actress he names as “Louisa,” have of course attracted much popu­lar notice (this attention being part of what has fueled the Boswell-­as-­Macheath line of analy­sis), but in fact Boswell had, like other Scots during the brief and embattled prime ministership of the Third Earl of Bute, come south seeking professional advancement—an officer’s commission in the Foot Guards—as much as sexual adventure. En­glish perceptions of Scottish place-­seeking migration account for the brusqueness in Johnson’s riposte to Boswell, made famous by Boswell’s ­later expanded report of it in the Life of Johnson, in their very first meeting: “Mr Johnson, said I[,] indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it. ‘Sir’ replied he[,] ‘That I find is what a g­ reat many of your countrymen cannot help’ ” (16 May 1763, London Journal, 220). In an ­earlier reference in the journal, this time overt, to Cibber’s The Provoked Husband, Boswell confronts, this time by pleasantly parodying, his own situation, as he addresses the Duke of Queensberry, whose influence he has been seeking in his pursuit of an elite officer’s commission, but who has written to him discouragingly and suggesting that he follow a “civil” rather than a military profession: “My Lord[,] said I, I got Your Grace’s letter, and was sorry for the contents. Your Grace was pleased to mention my following a civil life. I should be glad to know what. The law I am not able for. If indeed I could be put upon the civil list, for about a thousand a year, as Sir Francis Wronghead says, I should like it very well.—­At this he laughed.” (20 January 1763, London Journal, 109). ­Under George III, a­ fter the Civil List Act of 1762, the funds appropriated annually by Parliament to cover the expenses of the sovereign’s ­house­hold and state duties became a source of reward for supporters in Parliament, with pensions and other payments. In Cibber’s play, Sir Francis Wronghead of Bumper Hall, the new Parliament-­man for the borough of Guzzledown, naively travels to London to “court to some of the ­great men” (4.204–205). He reports of himself, artlessly, that he “went straight forward, to one ­great man I had never seen in my life before” (4.207–208), and told him directly that “as I desire to serve my King, as well as my country, I ­shall be very willing to accept of a place at court” (4.237–239). Asked by the ­great man what sort of place he had in mind, he replies, in the speech to which Boswell self-­parodically alludes, that any place “about a thousand a year, ­will be well enough to be ­doing with till something better falls in” (4.250–252). The ­great man responds to this provincial artlessness with empty politeness, but no more, just as the Duke of Queensberry does h ­ ere with young Boswell himself. In act 4 of Cibber’s play, as the Wronghead f­ amily is about to pack up and leave London to go home, Sir Francis Wronghead is about to discover the extent and the cost of his wife Lady Wronghead’s style of living in London:

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Sir Francis: (turning over the bills): Let’s see, let’s see! What the devil have we got ­here? . . . ​Od’s life, Madam, ­here’s nothing but toys, and trinkets, and fans, and clock-­stockings, by ­wholesale! Lady Wronghead: Th ­ ere’s nothing but what’s proper, and for your credit Sir Francis. Nay, you see I am so good that in necessaries for myself I have scarce laid out a shilling. (4.411, 420–424)

Three or four exchanges of marital bickering follow, with Sir Francis blustering about the cost of his wife’s London shopping, and Lady Wronghead stoutly defending herself. Boswell’s journal for 14 March 1763 gives an account of a similar scene of departure for Edinburgh from London, where the Macfarlane ­family have been staying for several weeks. The laird of Macfarlane, the antiquarian Walter Macfarlane, now discovers the cost of the style of London living of his attractive and much younger wife, Elizabeth, to whom Boswell and her other friends refer familiarly as “Lady Betty.” In Cibber’s play, Lady Wronghead is much younger than her husband. In Mr. Manly’s words, Sir Francis “married a profuse young hussy, for love, without ever a penny of money” (1.403–404). According to Boswell’s flamboyantly comical journal account, “This forenoon was quite a scene of confusion at Lady Betty’s. We had a good breakfast tho’ & made as merry as we could. The Bills ­were now coming in upon her Ladyship; They fell arround her like flakes of Snow. They lighted upon the Laird. They rendered him frigid, & their whiteness was by reflection transferred to his honour’s face. The black lines upon them, ­were indeed a black sight to him.” Boswell himself steps in as a benign comic agency, like the plot of Cibber’s play itself, of the restitution of marital harmony, to appease the dis­plea­sure of Lady Betty’s clearly provoked husband: “I thought a ­little jocularity would be usefull. I made the Sun of good humour to smile, & to warm & cheer the Chieftain. I declared that t­ hese confounded bills ­were Satires upon Marriage, Lampoons upon Conjugal felicity. The Laird did not chuse that the holy state should be censured; He therefore with no small keenness embraced the cause of the Lady. . . . ​He asserted that Men spent their money more foolishly, which a­ fter a ­little opposition I acquiesced in. About four they set out” (London Journal, 171). Back, that is, to Edinburgh, but now with the old-­world Scottish laird, Walter Macfarlane, having been brought by a Cibberian plot, with Boswell as its comic maestro and agency, to a more harmonious relationship within his marital ­union. In his report of his conversation a­ fter their departure with his friend Andrew Erskine, Lady Betty’s ­brother, Boswell continues to express a sympathy for the position of ­women who are from elsewhere, and thus strangers in the metropolis: “For to Ladies, London can never be agreable till they have been ­t here a long time, & have a numerous circle of Acquaintances. They have not the same advantages of indulging Passion & whim & curiosity that Men have. Besides, W ­ omen who have been in the habit of living in a place where they are well known and being the Earl of Kelly’s s­ isters are just as good as anybody, must be hurt to find themselves just poor Lasses, whose names are hardly known” (London Journal, 171–172). Boswell ­here plainly departs from the rakehell and buckish male-­centered misogynistic

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plots of Restoration comedies of manners, and from the figure of the polyamorous bandit Macheath, into a role of a restorer of politico-­domestic harmony, the signature Cibberian theme. Cibber, by the time he adapted and completed Vanbrugh’s fragment, had a track rec­ord of such plots, “a ­whole series of reconciliation scenes ­behind him—in Love’s Last Shift, The Careless Husband, The Lady’s Last Stake; the formula was well-­tried and successful.”28 By contrast, in Vanbrugh’s own far nastier and much more hard-­edged The Provoked Wife, the abusive Sir John Brute and the much put-­upon Lady Brute end the play exactly where they began it, at daggers drawn, with no marital amelioration.29 When Boswell invokes this less amiable play and another role (Sir John Brute) that Digges frequently undertook on the Edinburgh stage and Garrick often played in London, it is in the context of his own self-­displeasure at his own Brute-­like be­hav­ior. “As I was coming home this night I felt carnal inclinations raging thro’ my frame. I determined to gratify them. I went to St. James’s Park & like Sir John Brute, picked up a Whore.” This encounter, revealing in its unflattering choice of theatrical self-­parallel, leads Boswell into some self-­recrimination in the form of a rec­ord of care and sympathy (of the kind Vanbrugh’s unpleasant Brute does not show) for the w ­ oman in question. “She who submitted to my lusty embraces was a young shropshire Girl only seventeen, very well-­looked[,] her name Elizabeth Parker. Poor being[.] She has a sad time of it” (25 March 1763, London Journal, 182). Boswell in Cibberian mode began his journal account of the Macfarlanes’ departure from London with what only seems a satire upon marriage, then laughed his Lady Betty and her husband back together again into a marital harmony that is also by implication a mini-­Union, of the old-­world laird, Walter Macfarlane, born in 1705, and thus thirty or more years older than his (now sartorially En­glish) wife, a Scotswoman of Boswell’s own generation. This pleasant iteration of Scottish/ En­glish harmony offers a vision completely at odds with the disharmony fueled by opportunist Scottophobic provocateurs such as Churchill and Wilkes in their North Briton essays. Walter Macfarlane had e­ arlier in the journal been recorded as an anti-­Union voice. Boswell “waited . . . ​on the Laird of Macfarlane, with whom I was a good deal diverted. He was keenly interested in the reigning contests between Scots & En­glish. He talked much against the Union. He said we ­were perfect Underlings[;] that our riches w ­ ere carried out of the country[;] that no town but Glasgow had any advantage of trade by it; and that many ­others ­were hurt by it” (21 November 1762, London Journal, 9). Boswell’s account of himself in the episode of the Macfarlanes’ departure (replicating what he had seen on the stage in Cibber’s plots) affords him a fulfilled fantasy vision in London of connubial and generational reconciliation not pos­si­ble for himself in his own f­ amily—­which, as noted above, in the attitudes of his disapproving ­mother and ­father, served as a continuation of Presbyterian antitheatrical authority. Lady Betty Macfarlane emerges in Boswell’s journal account as a redeemed Lady Wronghead. Her London shopping expeditions reverse the common En­glish complaint during Bute’s administration, especially as grotesquely caricatured by Churchill and Wilkes in the North Briton papers, of greedy and needy Scots descending on the metropolis

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to take En­glish money away. More particularly, Boswell’s account addresses the gendered issue of a w ­ oman’s theatrical social/sartorial assimilation from Presbyterian Scotland (the Scotland of Boswell’s piously Calvinistic ­mother) into a glamorous London urbanity. When Boswell himself steps in as Cibberian agency of the relaxation of marital tension and achievement of good-­humored reconciliation, he repeats the functions of Cibber’s London-­set comedies on the Edinburgh stage, which offered, among the actresses with whom Boswell consorted, a non-­Calvinist rendering of womanhood—­sartorially playful and unafraid of self-­theatricalization, capable of escaping characterological fixity and accepting (as Boswell does) the fluidity of self. The young Scotswoman’s name is Lady Elizabeth Macfarlane, but, as noted, Boswell regularly refers to her as Lady Betty, which also calls to mind another of Cibber’s appealing comic female characters in this kind of context, Lady Betty Modish from The Careless Husband.30 On 29 December 1762, Boswell reported, “We had a warm dispute about Lady Betty’s stile of living h ­ ere. It was alledged that she had laid down a plan of living very private, which she had broke thro’; and that therefore she was unhappy, as she aimed at a way of life that she could not afford. She was ­really fretted at this” (London Journal, 68–69). It is this fretfulness about the costs and the bills that Boswell comically appeases in the ­later scene of departure. Boswell’s Lady Betty blends the best of the nonmetropolitan origins of Cibber’s Lady Wronghead (who seeks to relish the pleasures of the capital city) and the sartorial wit of Cibber’s Lady Betty Modish with the more responsible and urbane grace of Cibber’s aptly named Lady Grace from The Provoked Husband. In this play, the vari­ous plot prob­lems of provincialism and metropolitanism, mirroring Boswell’s psychological ones, are brought to a pos­si­ble resolution in Lady Grace’s proposed “comfortable scheme of life” (3.511)—­six months in London (the season) and six in “the country”: Lady Townly: And ­won’t you live in town? Lady Grace: Half the year, I should like it very well. Lady Townly: My stars! And you would ­really live in London half the year, to be sober in it? Lady Grace: Why not? Lady Townly: Why ­can’t you as well go and be sober in the country? Lady Grace: So I would—­t’other half year. (3.504–510)

This “comfortable scheme” of living accords closely with the ambitions of much of Lowland Scotland’s landed, mercantilist, professional, and l­egal elites (i.e., the source of most of Edinburgh’s theatergoing audience) and eventually of Boswell himself, to live in Anglo-­Scottish Persephone-­like arrangements: part of the time in the metropolis and part on their country estates, participating physically, eco­ nom­ically, culturally, and intellectually in the possibilities of a harmonious Anglo-­ Scottish ­union. However much Boswell found the polyamorous bandit with a Scottish-­sounding name, Macheath, intermittently attractive as a fantasy identity for himself as a glamorous masculine defier of oppressive rule and law, he knew that ­actual Macheath-­like be­hav­ior (as in the case of Paul Lewis) leads but to the

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grave. The journals disclose his participation in a wider set of cultural navigations made available to him in fictional form on stage. The “freedom of thought” by which theater expanded his “scanty share of ideas” opened his mind to Cibberian possibilities of harmonious politico-­domestic arrangements that released him, at least in imagination, from the severity of Calvinist constriction without leading him to the gallows.

notes 1. ​Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The E ­ arlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1985), 38. 2. ​See, for example, the account by Erin Mackie in Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the bibliography of cited secondary sources. Mackie specifically examines Boswell’s relation in the London Journal 1762–1763, to two “of the most divergent ideals he emulates: the rakish highwayman, Macheath, and the arbiter of taste . . . ​Mr Spectator” (84–85). Mackie is careful to note the selective nature of t­ hese two “culturally iconic fictional characters” and to point out that “they are only two among a number of roles that Boswell continuously tries out” (87). Michael D. Friedman, in “ ‘He Was Just a Macheath’: Boswell and The Beggar’s Opera,” Age of Johnson 4 (1991): 97–114, ranges beyond the youthful 1762– 1763 journal in London (from which his title’s reference to Macheath is quoted) and assesses Boswell’s continuing engagements with The Beggar’s Opera in ­later diaries, in selected letters, in the “Hypochondriack” essay series, and in appearances it makes as a topic of discussion in the Life of Johnson. See also Donald Kay and Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Face in the Mirror in Boswell’s ‘London Journal [1762–1763],’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83, no. 2 (1982): 201, where it is suggested that “Boswell [in his account of himself in this journal] seeks mirrors or reflectors from a­ ctual experience who are strangers (Mr. Jeffrys), acquaintances and friends (Lord Eglinton), lovers (Louisa), impor­tant public figures (John Wilkes), and literary lions (Samuel Johnson) as well as mirrors from the world of imagination (Tom Jones, Mr. Spectator, Macheath, Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Aeneas).” See also A. J. Tillinghast, “Boswell Playing a Part,” Culture, Theory and Critique 9, no. 1 (1965): 86–97. 3. ​James C. Dibdin, The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage, with an Account of the Rise and Pro­ gress of Dramatic Writing in Scotland (Edinburgh: Richard Cameron, 1888), 33. 4. ​Alasdair Cameron, “Theatre in Scotland 1660–1800,” in The History of Scottish Lit­er­a­ ture, vol. 2, 1660–1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 191. 5. ​William Tytler, “On the Fash­ion­able Amusements and Entertainments in Edinburgh in the Last ­Century,” Archaeologia Scotica: or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1792), 1:499–500. William Tytler of Wood­house­lee (1711–1792), Writer to the Signet, was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 6. ​Dibdin, Annals of the Edinburgh Stage, 34. 7. ​James Somerville (1698–1765), 12th Lord Somerville. For Pottle’s account of his role in Boswell’s early authorial aspirations, see Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 36–37, 44. Boswell l­ater paid public tribute to Somerville in a footnote in the Life of Johnson, where he recorded his “grateful remembrance of Lord Somerville’s kindness to me, at a very early period. He was the first person of high rank that took par­tic­u ­lar notice of me in the way most flattering to a young man, fondly ambitious of being distinguished for his literary talents; and by the honour of his encouragement made me think well of myself, and aspire to deserve it better” (Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 4:50n2) 8. ​Cameron, “Theatre in Scotland,” 191. 9. ​Cameron, 191. 10. ​Original in Boswell’s imperfect French: “Ma mere etoit extremement pieuse. Elle m’inspiroit de la devotion. [M]ais malheureusement elle m’enseignoit le Calvinisme. Mon

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Catechisme en renfermoit les doctrines les plus noires. L’eternité de Punition etoit ma premierre grande idée. . . . ​Pourtant de huit a douze Je me portois assez bien. J’avois un Gouverneur qui ne manquoit pas du Sentiment et de la sensibilité. Il commençoit de me former l’Esprit d’une maniêrre qui m’enchantoit. Il me fit lire le Spectateur et c’etoit alors que Je recu mes premiêrres idees du gout pour les beaux arts, et du plaisir qu’il y avoit de considerer la varieté de la vie humaine. Je lisois les Poetes Romains et Je sentis un enthousiasme classique dans les ombres romanesques de notre Campagne. Mon Gouverneur me parloit quelquefois de la Religion mais d’une manierre s­ imple et agreable” (James Boswell: The Journal of his Swiss and German Travels, 1764, ed. Marlies K. Danziger [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008], Appendix 2, “Rousseau,” 355–356). The “Ébauche” is rendered in En­glish by Pottle as Chapter 1 of ­Earlier Years, 1–6. 11. ​Boswell wrote in this draft that his ­mother was “une Demoiselle tres delicate qui etoit fort Hypocondre et qui avoit eté elevé tout à fait hors du monde avec des notions pieuses visionnaires et scrupuleuses. Elle pleuroit quand on la forçoit d’aller une fois au Theatre et elle n’y retourna jamais” (Swiss and German Travels, 362). 12. ​James Boswell, London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (New York: Penguin, 2014), 191; henceforth cited in the text. Blair preached in the Canongate church from 1743 ­until 1754, when Boswell was aged thirteen. 13. ​“At Mr. Tytler’s [i.e., the Edinburgh home of William Tytler,] I happened to tell that one eve­ning, a ­great many years ago, when Dr. Blair and I ­were sitting together in the pit of Drury-­ lane play-­house, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance, I entertained the audience prodigiously, by imitating the lowing of a cow. A l­ittle while a­ fter I had told this story, I differed from Dr. Johnson, I suppose too confidently, upon some point, which I now forget. He did not spare me. ‘Nay, sir, (said he,), if you cannot talk better as a man, I’d have you bellow like a cow.’ ” Boswell footnoted this passage: “As I have been scrupulously exact in relating anecdotes concerning other persons, I ­shall not withhold any part of this story, however ludicrous. I was so successful in this boyish frolick, that the universal cry of the galleries was, ‘Encore the cow! Encore the cow!’ In the pride of my heart, I attempted imitations of some other animals, but with very inferior effect. My reverend friend, anxious for my fame, with an air of the utmost gravity and earnestness, addressed me thus: ‘My dear sir, I would confine myself to the cow!’ ” (Boswell’s Life, 5:396 and n4). 14. ​Boswell on the ­Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), 240. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill; 15. ​ 1950), 252n7. Both Friedman (“ ‘He Was Just a Macheath,’ ” 97) and Mackie (Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates, 85) cite this note as authoritative warrant. 16. ​Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 38. 17. ​“Account of Paul Lewis, Lately Executed,” Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1763, xxiii, 210. 18. ​In this context, see, for further details, Andrea Mc­Ken­zie, “The Real Macheath: Social Satire, Appropriation, and Eighteenth-­C entury Criminal Biography,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69, no. 4, (2006): 581–605. Lewis “scandalized the Ordinary, or prison chaplain, by ‘strutting and rattling his irons’ in chapel, ‘boasting of his heroic spirit and genius for the highway.’ . . . ​Lewis ‘affected to be a real McHeath [sic]’—­literally—­claiming that ‘he could, like that hero, buy off the Old Baily [sic],’ and ‘merrily [singing] if gold from the law can take out the sting,’ one of the most famous, and satirically charged, of all the airs in The Beggar’s Opera. But despite the Ordinary’s insistence that ‘his behaviour and conversation was such as shocked ­every one who ­were witnesses of it,’ Lewis was clearly performing to an appreciative—­a nd not exclusively captive—­audience. For the ‘prophane ribaldry’ that so dismayed the prison chaplain seems to have diverted the ‘croud of curious spectators’ that flocked to see him, and turnkeys and prisoners alike, who (the Ordinary complained) ‘daily tickled [his ears] with the title of captain,’ and ‘soothed and bolstered [him] up’ with assurances that ‘you have always behaved like a gentleman, as you are’ ” (581). Mc­Ken­zie is h ­ ere quoting for the main part The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account of the Behaviour, Confession and ­D ying Words of the Malefactors Hanged at Tyburn, May 4, 1763, 32, 35–36.

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19. ​Gordon Turnbull, “Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763 and Frances Sheridan’s The Discovery: Imagining the Maternal,” in Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed. Rivka Swenson and Elise Lauterbach (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 191–206. 20. ​Cynthia Wall, “ ‘At Shakespear’s-­Head, Over-­Against Catherine-­Street in the Strand’: Forms of Address in London Streets,” in The Streets of London: From the G ­ reat Fire to the G ­ reat Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Stone, chap. 1 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), 24. 21. ​The play, hugely popu­lar with both London and Edinburgh audiences, had been in the New Concert Hall’s repertoire from well before, as well as during, the time of Boswell’s theater attendance, with per­for­mances on February 22 and October 2, 1749, April 3 1754, January 23, 1758 (Lord Townly played by Digges); March 3, 1755, January 7 and March 6, 1756 (Lord Townly played by Digges,); May 8, September 4 (Lord Townly played by Digges now using the surname Bellamy), and November 24, 1762. See Norma Armstrong, “The Edinburgh Stage 1715–1820: A Bibliography,” Fellowship Thesis presented to the Library Association, 1968, 191. 22. ​George Winchester Stone Jr., ed., The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 4: 1747–1776, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 791, 798, 963, 969. 23. ​Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 42. 24. ​Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres (London, 1783), 2:545, cited in Sir John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber, The Provoked Husband, ed. Peter Dixon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), “Introduction,” xxv. 25. ​Cibber, The Provoked Husband, 4.142–143; references to act and line appear in the text hereafter. 26. ​ A View Of The Edinburgh Theatre During The Summer Season, 1759. Containing, An Exact List of the several Pieces represented, and impartial Observations on each Per­for­mance. By a Society of Gentlemen (Printed for A. Morley, at Gay’s Head, near Beaufort’s-­buildings, in the Strand, 1760), 15. Boswell, in his surviving writings, makes no acknowledgment of authorship of this fifty-­page pamphlet, but most modern scholarship concurs in accepting it. In Pottle’s account: “It appears pretty certain that this is Boswell’s first book, published when he was four months past his nineteenth birthday. The View collects and continues a series of reviews which had appeared in an Edinburgh newspaper (The Edinburgh Chronicle) during late June and early July 1759. . . . ​I have always suspected that Lord Somerville encouraged the writing of the original series and perhaps even found Boswell a publisher” (­Earlier Years, 44). 27. ​ The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 237. 28. ​Dixon, “Introduction,” The Provoked Husband, xxiii. 29. ​Armstrong, “The Edinburgh Stage,” lists per­for­mances of The Provoked Wife on February 18 and 21, April 10, and July 7, 1756; January 22, July 1, and December 3, 1757; March 15 and April 22, 1758; January 2, 1760; and January 16 and May 11, 1762. Digges is named in the part of Sir John Brute in almost all of ­t hese per­for­mances. Sir John Brute was also one of Garrick’s most noted roles. The play ran at Drury Lane with Garrick in the part during Boswell’s first London visit, on May 20, 1760, and during his second visit on January 12 and April 18, 1763. Henry Woodward played the part at Covent Garden on January 28 and February 7, 1763. See Stone, The London Stage, 798, 972, 975, 977, and 989. For an extended and insightful analy­ sis of Boswell’s invocation of Sir John Brute in this moment, see Daniel Gustafson, Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-­Running Restoration, 1700–1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020), 120–130. 30. ​The July 2, 1759 per­for­mance of The Careless Husband at the Canongate makes an appearance in the View (1759), which notes Sir Charles Easy’s “genteel Raillery with Lady Betty” and that “Mrs. Cowper’s Lady Betty Modish was extremely lively and spirited” (18–19). Armstrong, “The Edinburgh Stage,” notes another per­for­mance at the Canongate on January 4, 1762.

PA RT I I

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Essays on E ­ ighteenth-­Century ­Lit­er­a­ture and Culture

En­glish Historiography, the Development of Secular Autobiography, and the Memoir Martine Brownley

In one of the first studies of early modern En­glish autobiography, Paul Delaney wrote that by 1700, “a native tradition (or traditions) of religious autobiography had been established.”1 ­After devoting four chapters to t­ hese spiritual autobiographies, he allotted only one to secular autobiography, in which he found “a bewildering multiplicity of themes and literary forms.”2 Delany was correct about the formal variety of t­ hese works, but he overstated their literary complexity. Structurally, the majority of En­glish secular autobiographies written in the Restoration and early eigh­teenth c­ entury ­were forms of the memoir. During this period it was the most popu­lar historically inflected genre in ­England. Writing of memoirs in 1677, Gilbert Burnet claimed that “this way of Writing takes now more in the World than any sort of History ever did.”3 In 1711 Shaftesbury wrote in disgust that “the w ­ hole writing of this age is become indeed a sort of memoir-­writing.” 4 In the interim the memoir had developed into a genre that reveals some of the shifting subjective par­ ameters of the historical and autobiographical fields between the mid-­seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries. Despite the memoir’s predominance during this period, commentators have seldom paid much attention to it. Both theoretical and critical treatments of autobiography have emphasized the memoir’s lack of status. James M. Cox accuses critics of avoiding the memoir and situates it “in a category of autobiography that needs attention,” while Lee Quinby sees it as “marginalized . . . ​in relation to autobiography.”5 Laura Marcus agrees that it is “consistently belittled in autobiographical criticism,” noting the implication that memoir writers are “inadequate to the profundities of introspective autobiography.” 6 Julie Rak sums it up: “For a long time, memoir has been treated by most critics of autobiography as a poor relative of autobiography discourse, a secondary form of life writing.”7 Even in the last twenty 121

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years, as the memoir became the hottest genre in US publishing and critics sought to explain this literary hegemony, few both­ered to look very far back into its past. Most En­glish memoirs written or published during the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century ­were accounts of public affairs from personal perspectives. Memoirs flourished at the time for some of the same reasons that spiritual autobiography was developing, including the spread of multiple forms of po­liti­cal, religious, and philosophical individualism, the expansion of print culture, the focus on empirical approaches, and the growing concern with private spheres of activity. In addition, ­because from Classical times memoirists had been closely associated with historians, a major impetus for the production of memoirs came from changes over the period in the way history was being written. As an inscription of the times through an individual, the memoir combines public and private ele­ments in a volatile amalgam of autobiography and history. Throughout this period vari­ous subjective ele­ments ­were becoming more prominent in histories. Critics have analyzed the effects of historiographical developments on the novel, and to a lesser extent on biography. But not as much has been done on the impact of the ongoing reconfigurations of the early modern historical field on autobiography, which, mainly via memoirs, was one of the principal beneficiaries of the changes.

In the early seventeenth c­ entury, ­those who sought to write history had two main generic options, the chronicle and the politic history.8 By that time, the chronicle was rapidly becoming an unsustainable form, in decline b ­ ecause of both its methodology and its content. Most chronicles tended to be straightforward cut-­and-­ paste historical writing, constructed by compilers who strung together e­arlier accounts. Temporal order was the chief concern; scant attention was paid to style, and even less to accuracy. Henry James’s famous description of nineteenth-­century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters” would work equally well for chronicles. They had always been capacious forms, containing a variety of traditional materials as well as numerous fictive components. What­ever historical facts happened to make it into chronicles ­were intermingled with a plethora of colorful features, ranging from folklore, fables, and won­ders to anecdotes and details about ­humble ­people and everyday life. By the beginning of the 1600s, the vast amount of material available was making chronicles unwieldy. Methods for culling its contents ­were needed. The more rigorous standards for what historical writing should include that came out of the works of Baconian and antiquarian writers during the period provided criteria for exclusion, but they also disqualified many traditional chronicle materials. Chronicles remained popu­lar with readers, but historians increasingly shunned them. As the chronicle was proving unsatisfactory for historical use, the other major model was politic history, a humanist form with Continental roots in Machiavelli, Davila, and ­others, and Classical influences from Tacitus and Thucydides. It focused on advice to princes and to ­those who served them as po­liti­cal counselors. Although

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the En­glish originally found it a useful genre, by midcentury it was in effect a good form gone bad, b ­ ecause of its dual tendencies to mutate. With practical po­liti­cal lessons and guidance integral to this kind of history, it could sometimes leave past events ­behind and morph into treatises on po­liti­cal theory or statecraft. Thomas Hobbes was the principal figure who leaned in the theoretical direction. More dangerous was the tendency of politic history to slide easily into partisanship and then directly into propaganda. Most writers, u ­ nder the pressure of the controversies of the late 1630s and the civil wars and upheavals that followed, turned their histories into propaganda vehicles. The major characteristic of En­glish historiography from the civil wars through the early eigh­teenth was the overt politicization of almost all forms of historical writing. E ­ arlier En­glish historians from Bede to the Tudor chroniclers had obviously incorporated their own ideological agendas. But in no previous period had con­temporary po­liti­cal concerns saturated historiography as blatantly and thoroughly as they did during the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century. What­ever period of the En­glish past was the ostensible subject, historiography was a major weapon in the ongoing ideological conflicts. Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s discussion of what he terms “domains” of history offers a useful way of understanding the mid-­seventeenth-­century generic situation of En­g lish historiography. Lévi-­Strauss places biographical and anecdotal history, focused on individuals and rich in information and detail, at the bottom of his scale. He calls t­hese works “low-­powered history,” ­because of their minimal explanatory capacity.9 Histories of what Lévi-­Strauss terms “progressively greater ‘power’ ” increasingly obliterate specific historical details in order to produce more comprehensive explanations; for this reason, “the historian loses in information what he gains in comprehension or vice versa.”10 Lévi-­Strauss sees historians as always having to choose between “history which teaches us more and explains less, and history which explains more and teaches less.” He observes that writers can avoid this dilemma only by getting outside history: ­either by the bottom, if the pursuit of information leads him from the consideration of groups to that of individuals and then to their motivations which depend on their personal history and temperament, that is to say to an infra-­historical domain in the realms of psy­chol­ogy and physiology; or by the top, if the need to understand incites him to put history back into prehistory and the latter into the general evolution of or­ga­nized beings, which is itself explicable only in terms of biology, geology and fi­nally cosmology. (262)

Aside from t­ hose who w ­ ere still writing providential history, most En­glish historians during the l­ater seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries chose the first option. In Lévi-­Strauss’s terms, in mid-­seventeenth-­century ­England the chronicle was a low-­powered form, while the politic model represented higher-­powered history. With the chronicle almost defunct and the politic model losing historical ground to theoretical and polemical discourse, En­g lish historians lacked low-­powered forms focused on specifics of events and individuals. In their search for such forms, they set to work with energy, enthusiasm, and a good deal of literary ingenuity.

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The result was a rich period of experimentation for historical writers. Some resurrected and reinterpreted older historical forms, such as commentaries or memorials. In their quest for effective forms of lower-­powered history, they particularly favored biographical and autobiographical genres that returned subjective ele­ments to history. Vari­ous hybrids reflected the active experimentation underway: “memoirs of the life”; the “life and times”; “a complete history of the life.” Among the subjective genres historians of the time explored, the memoir was a particularly attractive alternative b ­ ecause of its very full development before most En­glish writers turned to it. In France, the memoir was a long-­established historical genre, dating back to the late medieval period. Since the turn of the fifteenth ­century, vari­ous French military officers and politicians had employed the form; Burnet wrote that “the Memoires written in that Nation and Language since the days of Henry the 3d, would almost make up a Library.”11 Most of the earliest En­glish writers of memoirs had connections with France or knowledge of the French works. In 1596, the memoirs of Philippe de Commines, which became one of the most impor­tant models, w ­ ere translated into En­glish, and a­ fter the Restoration French memoirs of all kinds w ­ ere increasingly available. Sir Francis Osborne in his Advice to a Son emphasized that for ­t hose interested in statecraft, “French Authors are best,” b ­ ecause they w ­ ere “most fruitfull in Negotiations and Memoires, left by publick Ministers, and by their Secretaries published ­after their deaths.”12 By 1677 Burnet noted that “­every year we get over new Memoires of some one G ­ reat Person or another.”13 At that point a number of French court memoirists had joined the generals and the statesmen. Along with the French memoirs, the other influence most often cited on the trend ­toward memoir writing in ­England is the po­liti­cal upheavals of the ­middle and late seventeenth ­century. The same kinds of dissensions that had stimulated so many French soldiers and statesmen to write memoirs a c­ entury ­earlier now stirred the En­glish. Memoirs tend to emerge during times of turmoil and disruption,14 and in the period between the Bishops’ Wars and the death of Queen Anne, religious, po­liti­cal, social, and military conflicts repeatedly gripped the nation. The ideological rifts created by the civil wars continued in vari­ous forms throughout the period; two generations had failed to come to terms with the events of the 1640s when 1688 exacerbated the ongoing crisis. From regicide to plague, from strife between Cavalier and Roundhead to clashes between Whig and Tory and Country and Court, from Ranters to occasional conformists and Deists, from real and ­imagined covert conspiracy to ­actual armed invasion, constant agitation kept the po­liti­cal temperature high. The civil wars led to vari­ous military memoirs, as did ­later Eu­ro­pean wars ­under William and Anne. Heated po­liti­cal ­battles in a bitterly divided nation left statesmen ­eager to justify their be­hav­ior. But not only leaders felt impelled to rec­ord their roles. Early writers characteristically turn to memoir when con­temporary events take on enough magnitude to give individuals the sense that their experiences are reflecting the vicissitudes not simply of their own personal lives, but of history itself. Such a sense was widespread in ­England during this period, and many who would not ordinarily have turned

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to historical writing—­women such as Anne, Lady Halkett, for one—­did so through the memoir. Periodic disruptions of governmental control over the press throughout the period further encouraged the publication of vari­ous kinds of memoirs. Thus not ­until the mid-­seventeenth ­century did a combination of external literary influences and internal po­liti­cal circumstances begin to create conditions that turned the En­glish ­toward memoir writing. Both the French memoirs and the state of public affairs ­were vital forces in encouraging the genre, but equally impor­tant ­were developments in En­glish historical discourse.

Within the genre of the memoir, itself subjectively inflected, changes in historical writing during the period brought other subjective ele­ments to the fore that influenced both content and form. Among the most impor­tant of ­t hese w ­ ere the changing positions of the historian within and beyond the text, particularly in connection with authorial discourse and with the writer’s relationship to the events represented. During the ­later seventeenth ­century, the role of commentary and other forms of authorial discourse in historical texts was in flux. Since Classical times the historian’s role had been to judge the past he or she depicted. In the sixteenth ­century, however, Jean Bodin made clear, in an extended and influential discussion of historians’ offering praise, blame, or any other kind of judgments in their works, his own preference for “bare history” and his opposition to historians’ “acting like rhetoricians or phi­los­o­phers.”15 By the early seventeenth c­ entury both historians and commentators on historical writing w ­ ere moving t­ oward Bodin’s position. Sir Francis Bacon claimed that historians should be concerned with “simply narrating the fact historically, with but slight intermixture of private judgment.”16 William Camden concurred: “I have rather sifted out the Sense and Opinion of o ­ thers; and scarcely have I any-­where interposed mine own, no not by the Bye, since it is a Question ­whether an Historian may lawfully doe it.”17 Edmund Bolton’s comment that historical writers should be stripped of their “Commentations, Conjectures, Notes, Passions, and Censures” in order to be read without danger summed up the consensus of the first half of the seventeenth ­century.18 In the l­ ater part of the c­ entury, a reaction to the disappearance of authorial discourse from texts began to set in. Although some ­later writers continued to leave their material to the reader’s judgment, they ­were increasingly in the minority. Commentators on historical writing during the period strongly supported direct authorial discourse. In 1683 John Dryden was differentiating “history properly so called” from annals partly on the grounds of the “counsels, guesses, politic observations, sentences, and orations” that annals, which he described as “naked history,” lacked.19 Pierre Le Moyne at the end of the ­century viewed instruction, precepts, and sentences as part of “the office of an Historian” and considered judgments, reflections, and even conjectures “so Essential to History, she ceases to be when they are taken from her.”20 All commentators recognized the potential dangers of authorial commentary and urged discretion in employing it—­Le Moyne

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was typical in opposing “a Preaching Historian” (125)—­but during the late seventeenth c­ entury a consensus about the need for authorial discourse in historical writing gradually emerged. Such discourse obviously enlarged the space for personal ele­ments in t­ hese works. But their subjective textual impact went beyond the specific discursive instances themselves. Gérard Genette long ago noted certain prob­lems that resulted when narrative and discourse w ­ ere combined, indicating that “narrative inserted into discourse is transformed into an ele­ment of discourse,” while “discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse.”21 This predominance of discourse meant that as discourse assumed a larger role in historical writing during the period, the resulting texts not only directly but also indirectly became more autobiographical. Accompanying the historian’s mutation from compiler to commentator was a resurgence of the role of the historian as eyewitness, with textual focalizations altering accordingly. The Classical period had considered the historian primarily a con­temporary recorder rather than a collector of information, and traditionally commentators had emphasized that the chief qualification for writing history was participation in the events transcribed. Despite uninterrupted lip-­service to this axiom, in practice early seventeenth-­century historians w ­ ere seldom eyewitnesses. When Bacon, a­ fter his impeachment and with an eye to regaining royal ­favor, turned first to historical writing to occupy his retirement, he focused on the reign of Henry VII rather than his own times as a subject—­not a surprising choice for a man who had written that “in ancient transactions the truth is difficult to ascertain, and in modern it is dangerous to tell.”22 Governmental sensitivity to the possibilities of seditious content in histories and occasional prosecutions of historians led other eyewitnesses to retreat to the safer ground of e­ arlier history. Sir Walter Ralegh, anticipating objections that he should have written con­temporary history since he had “been permitted to draw w ­ ater as neare the well-­head as another,” wryly commented that if anyone “in writing a moderne Historie, ­shall follow truth too neare the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.”23 Along with the government, the antiquarian movement, which emphasized historians as scholars, influenced the general shift to ­earlier history even as it became the chief beneficiary of the altered focus. By the mid-­seventeenth ­century, both writers and readers of history ­were beginning to reassert the importance of the eyewitness. Even as the period of the civil wars was impelling many individuals to write about their own experiences as history, antiquarians and ­others researching the En­glish past had become painfully aware of the impossibility of reconstructing many parts of it b ­ ecause of gaps in existing rec­ ords. Sir William ­Temple complained that evidence about the Saxon kings was “like so many antique, broken, or defaced Pictures”; John Milton observed that a­ fter Bede, the reliable material available in chronicles was “lean as a plain Journal.”24 Facing parts of their past irrevocably lost, seventeenth-­century En­glish historians began to consider documentary rec­ords alone inadequate for their works. The belief spread that contemporaries should write their own history. David Lloyd in his Memoires of Royalists sought to preserve information gathered from “the

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perishing and scattered Pamphlets and Discourses of ­these times.”25 Francis Osborne’s Historical Memoires boldly asserted the claims of con­temporary detail against “that huge Trade Antiquity and Custom drive”: Neither can I apprehend it a greater folly in me to register the yellowness of Queen Anns hair, with other levities (which may seem pertinent to posterity though trivial now, yet of as high concernment as Caesar’s Nose) than for the Earl of Arundel to give so many hundred Crowns for an Urn a Mason would not have valued at a penny.26

As the increasing dissatisfaction with documentation in seventeenth-­century historical writing contributed to the countermovement at midcentury reaffirming the traditional authority of eyewitnesses, the accompanying shifts in narrative focalization offered more opportunities for subjective ele­ments to enter historical writing. With historians of the time beginning to worry about the interstices of history, the traditional focus on history as a unified ­whole diminished significantly. When recognition of the value even of fragmentary accounts spread, ­t hose writing history became experts at literary modes of historical deferral. Writers avoided the title “history” or carefully qualified it. They instead chose shorter, less demanding forms with diminished scopes and often with a more subjective focus, such as “collections,” “journals,” “memorials,” and “epitomes.” Their titles reflected their ­limited claims: An Essay T ­ owards the History of the Last Ministry; An Introduction to the History of ­England; A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of ­England. Many, like Edward Stillingfleet in his Origines Britannicae, deliberately lowered their sights: “­Because I look on a General Church-­History, as too heavy a Burthen to be under­gone by any Man, when he is fit for it by Age and Consideration, I have therefore thought it the better way to undertake such par­tic­u ­lar Parts of it which may be most usefull.”27 O ­ thers settled for providing materials for f­ uture historians. Thomas Fuller wrote his History of the Worthies of ­England in hopes that “abler Pens ­w ill improve ­t hese Short Memoires into a large History.”28 The moves to historical discourse, to focalization through eyewitnesses, to con­ temporary events, and to the ac­cep­tance of more fragmentary histories successfully introduced or enhanced ele­ments of Lévi-­Strauss’s lower-­powered history in the historiography of the period. Some of ­t hese changes provided narrative techniques that would eventually serve other nonhistorical genres well. But ­t hese subjectively oriented developments did ­little to solve the era’s historiographical prob­lems, and during this transitional period En­glish histories became even more deeply saturated with po­liti­cal propaganda. All of ­these changes, however, encouraged the writing of autobiographically inflected texts, particularly memoirs.

As ­these developments subjectively opened historical discourse by encouraging authorial opinions (discourse and commentary) and experiences (the move to the pre­sent as subject and to eyewitnesses as historians), the recognition of the importance of even fragmentary accounts made historical writing more accessible to a

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variety of authors. The focus on writers’ own experiences rather than on larger historical concerns demarcated more easily manageable bodies of material for potential memoirists. The memoir was not an intimidating genre. Burnet explained that memoirs are much easier to write than histories, ­because historians are obliged “to be well informed of all that passed on both sides.”29 James Wellwood’s assertion that “it is not to be expected that I should have observ’d the Rules of a Regular History” is typical.30 Memoirists’ claims are always modest. Wellwood writes that his purpose is “only to give a Short Idea of the Thread of Affairs.”31 Sir Philip Warwick describes his work in one place as “immethodical reflections” and in another as his “compendium,” while a “Preface” to the Memoires of the ­Family of the Stuarts refers to it as “­these few Remarks or Historical Observations.”32 The memoir as a genre is marked by omissions and gaps. The basic characteristic of the memoir is a claim to some kind of privileged knowledge about the past to which the writer has special access. This information can derive ­either from personal experiences as a participant or eyewitness or, less frequently, from documentary sources. Thus memoirs during the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century range from mainly autobiographical pieces—­t hose of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, for example—to more impersonal and thoroughly documented accounts such as Burnet’s treatment of the Hamiltons, which was very close to a history. In general, the smaller the scope of the given memoir, the more self-­revelation it includes. Memoirists such as Warwick and especially Wellwood, who cover longer periods of time, show less of themselves than writers such as Sir John Berkeley, whose narrative covers only the immediate circumstances surrounding Charles I’s disastrous escape to the Isle of Wight. The dominant form of autobiography, dating back to Augustine and with major secular reconfigurations by Rousseau, has traditionally been the confession. But from the beginning an alternative autobiographical mode has been available, the apologia. Described as perhaps the “most enduring of rhetorical genres,”33 the apologia is a genre of defense. M. M. Bakhtin identifies the first autobiography as an oration in which Isocrates offers a public account of his life.34 The distinction between the two forms of autobiography has never been absolute; as Robert Folkenflik points out, confessions often entail “a good deal of defense and special pleading.”35 However, defense functions more centrally in structuring apologias. Displacing personally based justification into quasi-­historical discourse, the memoir has been the preeminent form of the apologia in autobiography. It tends to express more overtly the often repressed personal and ideological concerns involved in any act of writing history. With the constant changes of po­liti­cal allegiance involved in the ongoing turmoil from the civil wars to the early eigh­teenth ­century, many ­people in ­England found themselves in the position of needing to explain their actions. Writers who wanted to defend their personal conduct often turned to the memoir, where they could claim the respectability of historical writing as a public platform for what ­were actually private concerns. Published defenses of public conduct ­were ubiquitous during the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century. The first Earl of Shaftesbury, in the beginning of a

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fragmentary memoir, openly expressed the kinds of motivations ubiquitous among memoirists: Whoever considers the number and the power of the adversaries I have met with, and how studiously they have, u ­ nder the authority of both Church and State, dispersed the most villainous slanders of me, ­w ill think it necessary that I in this follow the French fashion, and write my own memoirs, that it may appear to the world on what ground or motives they came to be my enemies, and with what truth and justice they have prosecuted their quarrel.36

Even on the bound­aries of the genre, in ­family memorials and in the documented surveys of longer periods that approach history itself, the justificatory ele­ment is clear. William Wollaston indicated that one purpose in the memoirs he “intended only for private use” of his ­children is “to rectify some misrepre­sen­ta­tions, that owe their original only to ill-­natured divinations concerning a ­family that never much appeared to vindicate itself.”37 Some living writers published their memoirs, but since as Samuel Johnson l­ ater observed, the truthful con­temporary historian “­w ill write that which his own times ­will not easily endure,”38 many memoirs appeared posthumously. In addition to memoirs written for public audiences, some ­were composed for the writers’ families, while o ­ thers seem to have been passed around to colleagues. In other cases memoirists wrote specifically in response to questions from other historians, as Philippe de Commines, the influential French model, had done. Almost all of ­these memoirs w ­ ere in one way or another preemptive strikes against f­uture histories. ­Because the memoir is primarily a genre of reaction, partiality and defensiveness are fundamental characteristics. Although some memoirs, particularly t­ hose closest to autobiography, are self-­generated, memoirists usually write in response to external stimuli, ­either direct or anticipated. Some, such as the Memoirs of the Irish Wars by James Tuchet, the Earl of Castlehaven, ­were conceived in terms of both. In his text, Castlehaven pre­sents the work as a reaction to con­temporary “Authors of Slanders and Lyes” about his part in the rebellion, written “to obviate the false and Malicious Calumnies of ­these forging Scriblers.” But at the time Castlehaven had already been asked to contribute information to Arthur Annesley, the Earl of Anglesey, who was working on a general history of Ireland. A ­ fter collecting materials for almost twenty years, Anglesey was fi­nally beginning to write, and Castlehaven suspected—­correctly, if Anglesey’s surviving notes for the proj­ ect are an adequate indication—­t hat the history would be strongly biased against the Irish Catholics.39 Like many memoirists, Castlehaven de­cided to try to preempt other historical accounts by presenting his own version of events. As with a number of forms of defensive be­hav­ior, memoirs typically created further dissension rather than settling issues. Sometimes the appearance of one memoir led directly to other such works. Sir Thomas Fairfax’s relatives de­cided to release the Memorials he intended only for his ­family ­after a preface to Denzil Holles’s recently published memoirs (“wherein his Lordship [Fairfax] is scarce ever

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Nam’d but with Reproache”) promised a forthcoming edition of Fairfax.40 What­ever the justificatory intentions of the original authors, ­earlier memoirs w ­ ere frequently recycled as con­temporary propaganda. Sir John Reresby’s Memoirs (1734) ­were reworked and published for the po­liti­cal campaign against Walpole as a Tory c­ ounter to the long-­awaited second volume of Burnet’s Whig history.41 Blair Worden has brilliantly analyzed how John Toland secularized the style and content of Edmund Ludlow’s rambling and radical A Voyce from the Watchtower to refurbish him as a Country Whig in Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698), published during the controversy over a standing army.42 The po­liti­cal volatility of memoirs occasionally involved official as well as individual responses. The Privy Council in 1682 condemned both Castlehaven’s Memoirs and Anglesey’s Letter about them, while Sheffield’s Works, which included memoirs, w ­ ere suppressed by the government three days a­ fter their publication in 1723.43 The partiality characteristic of the memoir thus dictated varied ideological contexts in which ­these works could function effectively.

­ ecause of the early modern memoir’s roots in apologia, its defensiveness, and its B reactive status, the autobiographical ele­ments in ­these texts can often be difficult to evaluate—or even to recognize—­without a fairly thorough knowledge of their textual and historical backgrounds. Most of them function within a thick intertextual matrix, which itself requires explication in order to analyze t­ hese works accurately. Criticism of early memoirs for their impersonality and superficiality as autobiographies often results from failures to take into account both the historical and the literary contexts necessary for analyzing their subjective ele­ments. Such prob­lems are made worse by treatments that evaluate memoirs as confessions rather than as apologias. One of the ironies of critical views of memoirs as bare res gestae is that many, if not most, of ­these works ­were never intended to be straightforward factual accounts—­a lthough they ­were constructed so that readers would think that they ­were. One traditional view has been that writers of memoirs create “passive” repre­ sen­ta­tions ­because they are only observers; autobiographers, in contrast, are historical actors whose texts are therefore more dynamic.44 This assessment has been contested by recent critics,45 and evidence from early En­glish memoirists supports them. Many of ­these memoirists, what­ever their ­actual historical roles, ­were extremely active within their texts, manipulating them to construct power­ful defenses by creating ostensibly historical structures that could embody the pasts that they desired. So far, this discussion has focused on general characteristics of the memoir during the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century, but it is also impor­tant to see how the genre functions at the textual level. An excellent example is Sir Thomas Herbert’s Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of Charles I,46 which shows how in skilled hands the memoir could be used to successfully misrepresent or distort uncomfortable facts about the writer’s past.

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During the years ­after the Restoration Herbert was an enthusiastic antiquarian who assembled an extensive personal collection of manuscripts and also assisted Sir William Dugdale with his Monasticon.47 In his Memoirs several genealogies tracing the ­owners of ­houses reflect ­these interests, but it was Herbert’s literary abilities rather than his antiquarian leanings that served his historiographical as well as personal purposes in the work. With a keen sense of place, Herbert firmly anchors his narrative with details of physical surroundings. More impor­tant, conditions of place function throughout the memoir as correlatives of the changing historical situation of Charles I. As Herbert traces Charles’s journeys from Newcastle to the scaffold and fi­nally to the grave, he uses architectural, geo­graph­i­cal, and climatological information to reflect the gradual decline of the royal fortunes. When the king travels with the army from Holmby House to Hampton Court, Herbert’s description of the succession of “noble,” “fair,” “large,” and “beautiful” dwellings in which the king stays mirrors the optimistic view of Charles’s situation that initially prevailed and generated a false sense of security. Herbert renders the journey as a minor triumphal pro­cession of sorts, culminating at Hampton Court, the most impressive of all, a “most large and Imperial House,” where the king and his attendants pass “Halcyon Days.” ­After Charles’s attempted escape to the Isle of Wight, his confinement begins at Carisbrooke C ­ astle, which nevertheless offers a “delightful Prospect both to Sea and Land” (42, 37, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 60). Appropriately, Herbert’s emphasis on the king’s deteriorating external surroundings begins at Newport, presaging the failure of the upcoming negotiations. ­There Charles finds only a “Gentleman’s House,” although it is at least “accommodated to his business so well as that small place would afford, albeit disproportionate, and of small receipt for a Court” (47, 49, 101). Fi­nally, the king is moved to Hurst C ­ astle, and Herbert’s description vividly conveys the “deplorable Condition” of Charles’s historical circumstances at that point. A “dismal” and “dolorous” place, with fogs, “noxious” and “insalubrious” air, and “unwholsome Vapours,” the isolated ­castle “(or Block-­House rather)” with its thick stone walls is so dark that noon meals require candlelight. Herbert even portrays its captain as a h ­ uman extension of the surroundings, a “Rhodomont” with a “stern” look, black and bushy hair, a large beard, and “a ­great Basket-­hilt Sword by his side”: “hardly could one see a Man of a more grim Aspect, and no less robust and rude was his be­hav­ior.” That the commander “quickly became mild and calm” suggests Herbert’s ability to highlight the details most suitable for producing what­ever effects he requires (131, 121–123, 127). In the fateful trip from Hurst ­Castle to London, Charles’s accommodations mirror his diminishing prospects. With Herbert’s adroit shading, at the end even Windsor C ­ astle and St. James’s Palace emerge as ominous settings. His account culminates during the trial in a private home near Westminster Hall and fi­nally in the narrow passage broken through the wall of the Banqueting House to the scaffold. Herbert’s ability to fuse action, background, and theme is nowhere better shown than in his description of the last stage of the king’s protracted journey,

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as his body is conveyed to its final resting place in the Chapel at Windsor ­Castle. He writes that when the coffin was carried out from St. George’s Hall into the courtyard, the Sky was serene and clear, but presently it began to snow, and fell so fast, as by that time they came to the West-­end of the Royal Chapel, the black Velvet-­ pall was all white (the colour of Innocency) being thick covered over with snow. So went the white King to his Grave. (143, 152, 158, 161, 205–206).

Throughout the narrative, Herbert skillfully parallels the deteriorating living conditions of Charles I with the king’s increasing personal isolation, as he emphasizes the royal’s patience, dignity, and piety. In addition, his Memoirs equally highlight the faithful attendance and devoted care of Herbert himself. He p ­ eoples his scenes as carefully as he develops their backgrounds, distancing ­others from the king so that his own loyal ser­v ice emerges through contrasts. Herbert in effect delineates a dual pilgrimage, a rec­ord of the king’s nobility and rectitude amid adversity that both enhances and is enhanced by the constancy of a faithful follower. For well over two centuries, Herbert’s memoir stood as a definitive historical account, unquestioned in its touchingly convincing depictions of both master and servant. His nineteenth-­century editor praised the Memoirs as “unparalleled in any period” for their “truth, simplicity, and virtuous feeling. What actually should have been praised is the literary skill that produces t­ hese effects. In 1956, Norman H. Mackenzie published an account of Herbert’s activities during and a­ fter the years covered in the Memoirs that revealed the considerable historical deficiencies of the work, along with the personal deficiencies of its author. Far from being the courageous advocate and devoted servant of Charles I depicted in the Memoirs, Herbert while attending the king actually functioned as a spy, dispatching reports to members of Parliament, particularly the committee at Derby House, and also to army leaders. Mackenzie finds no evidence that Herbert ever swerved in his anti-­Royalist sentiments throughout the civil wars and Interregnum. ­After the king’s execution he married his ­daughter to a regicide and continued to serve the government. He ­rose to impor­tant positions in Ireland that led to a knighthood from Henry ­Cromwell in 1658.48 ­After 1660, Herbert was understandably ­eager to conceal ­t hese aspects of his past. In a manuscript autobiography, he entirely omitted the period from 1649 to 1660. In the Memoirs he purposely transposed events chronologically, omitted key circumstances, mislocated other p ­ eople, overstated his own role, and misrepresented Charles I’s opinions of him in order to disguise his ­actual sympathies and situation at the time. Mackenzie ultimately finds the errors in historical detail in the Memoirs less serious than the misleading contexts in which they appear49—an indirect tribute to Herbert’s considerable literary abilities. Herbert was unusual among historical memoirists in so thoroughly exploiting the artistic potential of the genre. But his achievement shows the possibilities it offered for a skillful literary craftsman, ­whether that craftsman wanted to convey fact or fiction.

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Herbert’s literary misrepre­sen­ta­tions ­were not the final irony of his Memoirs. By the ­later seventeenth ­century, the historical shortcomings of the genre ­were widely acknowledged. The publisher of Holles’s Memoirs, for example, explained that the work should be compared to such as appear’d before, or ­will be publish’d hereafter relating to the same times, [so that] they may afford mutual Light to each other; and, ­after distinguishing the personal resentments or privat biasses of e­ very one of ’em, the Truth wherein they are all found to agree (tho drest by them in dif­fer­ent Garbs) may by som impartial and skilful hand be related with more candor, clearness, and uniformity.50

From another perspective, the En­g lish translation of the preface to Claude Perrault’s Memoires for the Natu­ral History of Animals pointed out that “Certainty and Truth, which are the most recommendable Qualities of History, cannot be wanting” in the memoir form, “provided the Writer be exact and sincere.” The writer then added that paradoxically, the historian “oftentimes cannot be true, how desirous soever he be a­ fter the Truth, and what care soever he imploys to discover it; ­because he is allwayes in danger of being deceived by the Memoires on which he builds.”51 In the clash of competing versions of the past out of which history is constructed, sometimes a lucky memoirist ended up offering the only evidence available about certain events. Herbert was among them; his preemptive strike against history worked. Even though modern historians recognize the self-­serving distortions of his Memoirs, ­because of the paucity of con­temporary information about the end of Charles I’s life, they are still forced to rely on him as a major source.

The En­glish memoir of the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century began as a predominantly historical genre, with the first published example, the Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, and King James by Francis Osborne, in 1658. The form continued developing in historical as well as other directions during the Restoration period. Overtones of scandal ­were already connected with the French memoire before En­glish authors took up the form, and the memoir became a natu­ral vehicle for secret histories. Many of them w ­ ere published as “memoirs.” During the de­cade of the 1690s increasingly loose titular employments reflected the popularity of the form. Miscellaneous ­earlier texts began to be published as “memoirs,” what­ever their ­actual provenance. For example, Toland, who had recast a manuscript by Edmund Ludlow into Memoirs, did the same with the so-­called Memoirs of Denzil Holles. Both of ­these ­were among the numerous civil war memoirs that marked the 1690s. Holles’s piece was actually a colorful and fiery po­liti­cal invective—­a rhetorical howl of outrage—­written in the late 1640s. Neither Ludlow nor Holles had used the term “memoirs,” and in the latter case, even the publisher felt obliged to warn readers that “in substance” the work was actually an “Apology” for Holles’s party.52

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J. Paul Hunter, Robert Mayer, Michael McKeon, and many o ­ thers since have written about the changing par­ameters and particularly the porous borders of historical writing during this period. The memoir is among the genres that contributed to that porousness. As the title became arbitrarily bestowed for market reasons on writings like t­ hose of Ludlow and Holles, its integrity as a genre began to dissolve. The frequent discrepancies between titles and contents at that time reflect its formal flexibility and adaptability. As an unstable combination of objective and subjective ele­ments, the memoir gradually migrated away from public concerns ­toward private ones. J. C. Major’s treatment of the genre indicates that in the early eigh­teenth ­century its historical credibility was fading as it came to have an “increasingly personal connotation.”53 Its basic generic trajectory from the mid-­ seventeenth ­century through the early eigh­teenth was t­owards autobiography. Alistair Fowler points out that in vari­ous genres, ­later developments frequently “interiorize the ­earlier kind,54 which was the path followed by the Restoration and early eighteenth-­century memoir. As the memoir mutated rapidly in autobiographical directions, it also shifted in fictional ones. The popularity of memoirs about the French court, with their scandalous connections, strongly influenced the development of the En­glish memoir away from history ­toward fiction. But as a genre of defense and reaction, the memoir was in any case particularly susceptible in form, content, and perspective to fiction. With the subjective ele­ments inherent in the form, the memoir provided an excellent genre of transition for a culture still uneasy with acknowledged fiction. In 1705, Daniel Defoe published The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, which was his first titular deployment of the term “memoirs.” Four years ­later, in connection with French memoirs, Tatler 84 asserted that “the Word ‘Memoir’ is French for a Novel.”55 The same was becoming true of En­glish memoirs. Some historical memoirs w ­ ere still composed, and older memoirs ­were unearthed and published posthumously. But ­after the early eigh­ teenth ­century, most of the memoirs that appeared in ­England ­were fiction. For non-­novelistic memoirs, the next major generic shift occurred in the ­later eigh­teenth ­century. During that period, most memoirists changed their mode, turning from apologia to confession. Since then, confessional texts have continued to dominate the genre, in yet another reflection of Michel Foucault’s well-­ known description of “Western man” as “a confessing animal.”56 ­Today, aside from famous p ­ eople who write their memoirs in temporary or permanent retirement, memoirs are almost entirely confessional. They pour from the presses; Sven Birkerts notes the “bottomless societal appetite for self-­exposing disclosure.”57 For Ben Yagoda, memoir is “the central form of the culture,” while G. Thomas Couser writes that it “now rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency.”58 As this avalanche of personal memoirs of all kinds continues, critics have noted that the terms “autobiography” and “memoir” are currently being deployed interchangeably. They also indicate that in some cases “memoir”—­a lways in reference to confessional texts—is beginning to displace “autobiography.”59

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The example of the early modern En­glish memoir suggests that such generic elisions may not be wise critical moves. Felicity A. Nussbaum points out that “writing the history of any set of conventions that we identify as a genre is a dialogue between the pre­sent and the past.” 60 Merging or replacing “autobiography” with “memoirs” truncates that dialogue, valorizing current practices at the expense of a very dif­fer­ent generic past that is still misunderstood in impor­tant ways. For example, if the early En­glish memoir had been taken into account, a genre that began in ­England with regicides, added whores to the mix, and continued with fictional and nonfictional rogues would prob­ably not be described as one of personal narrative’s “most conventional genres” and a “traditionally conservative” one.61 If evidence from early memoirs is included, the generalization that “the essence of memoir is to make identity claims” would need substantial qualification.62 Eliding genres hinders both critical and theoretical work at a time when writers, as Couser points out, are tending “to fuse once distinct genres into hybrids.” He writes that understanding what happens in the resulting texts “depends on naming and identifying the vari­ous subgenres in play.” 63 Similarly, Nancy Miller claims that the con­temporary memoir as a genre is “fashionably postmodern, since it hesitates to define the boundary between private and public.” 64 Yet with its autobiographical trajectory, the early modern En­glish memoir was already blurring that boundary well over three hundred years ago. Con­temporary commentators on autobiography have also connected fragmentary forms of life-­writing as well as relational types with w ­ omen writers.65 However, the public and historical foci of early modern En­glish memoirs naturally slanted them ­toward the relational, and b ­ ecause fragmentary texts w ­ ere an accepted historical practice of the time, men as well as ­women composed them. Analyses of Restoration and early eighteenth-­century memoirs can offer salutary perspectives on some current critical approaches in the scholarship on autobiography, ranging from the monomaniacal focus on confession to lingering tendencies to ignore autobiography’s deep roots in history. Critics generally agree that valorizations of autos and of graphē over bios, along with the accompanying work on the discursive construction of subjects and their ideological implications, ­were impor­tant in the academic establishment of autobiography as a literary genre.66 However, as Laura Marcus indicates, one of the results was that North American criticism of autobiography in the ­later twentieth ­century was “dominated by the proj­ect of ‘rescuing’ autobiography from incorporation into history and history-­writing.” 67 Paul John Eakin is among a number of theoreticians who have urged a reversal of “the dissociation of autobiography from history” in order to “expand our sense of the modes of historical reference in autobiography.” 68 Eakin and Marcus wrote in the early and mid-1990s. Twenty years ­later, Robert F. Sayer was still pointing out that “Recent studies of autobiography have shied away from the subject of autobiography and history.” 69 If this kind of work is undertaken, the early modern En­glish memoir would be an excellent place to anchor it. Over the course of the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century in ­England, the memoir developed in ways that made it a paradigmatic example of Lévi-­Strauss’s

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“low-­powered” history. It provided an influential example for a culture that was experiencing serious difficulties in writing history and was struggling with forms of fiction. The movements ­toward more subjective ele­ments in historiography ultimately produced texts that that proved unsuitable as history, but t­ hese works, and particularly the memoir, proved vital in the development of secular self-­ representations in fiction and in autobiography.

notes 1. ​Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth C ­ entury (London: Routledge, 1969), 107. 2. ​Delany, British Autobiography, 107. 3. ​Gilbert Burnet, “The Preface,” in The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (London, 1677), av. 4. ​Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Lawrence  E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 90. 5. ​James M. Cox, Recovering Lit­er­a­ture’s Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 34; Lee Quinby, “The Subject of Memoirs: The W ­ oman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in ­Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 299. 6. ​Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 151, 21. 7. ​Julie Rak, “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity,” Genre 37 (Fall/Winter 2004): 484. 8. ​Both of ­t hese forms are covered in more detail in my “Secret History and Seventeenth-­ Century Historiography,” in The Secret History in Lit­er­a­ture, 1660–1820, ed. Rebecca Bullard and Rachell Carnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 35–37, from which parts of this discussion derive. 9. ​Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld, 1966), 261. 10. ​Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind, 261–262. 11. ​Burnet, “The Preface,” av. 12. ​Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1656), 12. 13. ​Burnet, “The Preface,” av. 14. ​See Barbara Caine, Biography and History (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 77; Marcus Billson, “The Memoir: New Perspectives on a Forgotten Genre,” Genre 10 (1977): 261; Francis Russell Hart, “History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir,” New Literary History 11 (1979): 195, 204. 15. ​Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1583), trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 54. 16. ​Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, vol. 4 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denton Heath (London: Longman, 1875), 301. 17. ​William Camden, “The Author to the Reader,” in The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of ­England: Selected Chapters, ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 6. 18. ​Edmund Bolton, “Hypercritica, or a Rule of Judgment for Writing or Reading Our History’s” (1618?), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth ­Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1:94. 19. ​John Dryden, “The Life of Plutarch,” in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), 2:5. 20. ​Pierre Le Moyne, Of the Art Both of Writing and Judging of History (London, 1695), 172. 21. ​Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 141. As I have noted, although structuralist divisions between

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story and discourse can be problematic for some literary texts, they can be useful in analyzing early En­glish historical writings, where distinctions between the two ele­ments are more obvious (“Secret History,” 35). 22. ​Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, 302. 23. ​Walter Ralegh, History of the World (London, 1614), n.p. 24. ​William ­Temple, An Introduction to the History of E ­ ngland [1695], vol. 2 of The Works of Sir William ­Temple, ed. Jonathan Swift (London, 1740), 585; John Milton, History of Britain, ed. French Fogle, vol. 5, pt. 1 of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 230. 25. ​David Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of Th ­ ose Noble, Reverend, and Excellent Personages . . . ​In Our Late Intestine Wars (London, 1668), Br–­Bv. 26. ​Francis Osborne, Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Q. Elisabeth, and King James, in The Works of Francis Osborne (London, 1673), 497. 27. ​Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, or, The Antiquities of the British Churches (London, 1685), lxxii–­l xxiii. 28. ​Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of ­England (London, 1662), 260. 29. ​Burnet, “The Preface,” ar. 30. ​James Wellwood, “To the Reader,” in Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in ­England, for the Last Hundred Years, Preceding the Revolution in 1688 (London, 1700), n.p. 31. ​Wellwood, “To the Reader,” n.p. 32. ​Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles the First (Edinburgh, 1813), 248, 170; “The Preface,” Memoires of the ­Family of the Stuarts (London, 1683), (b)2v. 33. ​Sharon D. Downey, “The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 42. 34. ​M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 136. 35. ​Robert Folkenflik, “Gender, Genre, and Theatricality in the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke,” in Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Self from the Re­nais­sance to Romanticism, eds. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104. 36. ​A nthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, “Fragment of Autobiography, 1621–39,” in Memoirs, Letters and Speeches, ed. William Dougal Christie (London: Murray, 1859), 1. 37. ​William Wollaston, “Memoirs Compiled by William Wollaston, Esq. in 1709, Relating to Himself and ­Family,” in Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eigh­teenth ­C entury, ed. John Nichols (London: Nicholas, 1817), 1:169. 38. ​Samuel Johnson, Idler 65, in The Idler and The Adventurer, eds. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, gen. ed. Robert DeMaria, 23 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 2:204. 39. ​James Tuchet, Earl of Castlehaven, The Earl of Castlehaven’s Memoirs of the Irish Wars (1684). With the Earl of Anglesey’s Letter from a Person of Honour in the Countrey, intro. Douglas G. Greene (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1974), 4, 5; Greene, “Introduction,” vi. 40. ​Sir Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (London, 1699), iii; Denzil Holles, Memoirs of Denzil Lord Holles (London, 1699), xi–­x ii. 41. ​John Reresby, Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning (Glasgow: Jackson, 1936), ix–­x. 42. ​See Blair Worden, “Introduction,” in Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower; Part Five: 1660–1662, Camden 4th ser. (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 21:1–80. 43. ​Greene, “Introduction,” in Tuchet, Earl of Castlehaven’s Memoirs, vii; George Sherburn, Early C ­ areer of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 224. 44. ​The active/passive distinction originated in Georg Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907), trans. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1950). 45. ​See Rak, “Are Memoirs Autobiography?,” 487–88; Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 149–151; Bart Moore-­Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-­Representation (London: Routledge, 2009), 77.

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46. ​Thomas Herbert, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of King Charles I (London, 1815). Hereafter page citations for the Memoirs are given in text. 47. ​“Herbert, Sir Thomas, First Baronet,” Ronald H. Fritze, 23 September 2004, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, Oxford University Press, http://­www​.­oxforddnb​.­com​.­proxy​ .­library​.e­ mory​.­edu​/­view​/1­ 0​.1­ 093​/­ref:odnb​/9­ 780198614128​.0 ­ 01​.0 ­ 001​/o ­ dnb​-9­ 780198614128​-­e​-1­ 3049​ ?­rskey​=­WA1YBk&result​=­1. 48. ​Norman H. Mackenzie, “Sir Thomas Herbert of Tintern: A Parliamentary ‘Royalist,’ ” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 29 (1956): 32–86. 49. ​Mackenzie, “Sir Thomas Herbert.” 77, 63, 72, 86, 49, 51–53, 48, 56, 74, 53. 50. ​Holles, Memoirs, x. 51. ​Charles Perrault, Memoir’s for a Natu­ral History of Animals, trans. Alexander Pitfeild (London, 1688), ar. 52. ​Holles, Memoirs, xii. Holles’s own manuscript title was “Some Observations of the Designes and Proceedings of the In­de­pen­dents in, by and upon the Parliament of the Kingdome, since the beginning of our unnaturall Warr in the yeare 1642, unto this pre­sent Time, the ending of the yeare 1647” (Worden, “Introduction,” 28n127). On vari­ous contexts for the editions of Holles, Ludlow, and ­others, see Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 96–100. 53. ​John Campbell Major, The Role of Personal Memoirs in En­glish Biography and Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), 94, 107. 54. ​Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Lit­er­a­ture: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 164. 55. ​Addison and Steele, Tatler 84, in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:36. 56. ​Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:59. 57. ​Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008), 7. 58. ​Ben Yagoda, Memoir (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 28; G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. See also Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popu­lar Market (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), for an excellent analy­sis of the status of the memoir and its marketing and distribution. 59. ​For example, see Helen  M. Buss, Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Con­ temporary ­Women (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 7; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Reading Autobiography, 2nd  ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 274; Yagoda, Memoir, 1; Quinby, “Subject of Memoirs,” 299. Couser writes that “memoir is the term of art, the prestige term,” and also notes that “­today, confusingly, we use the adjective ‘confessional’ for any memoir that is especially intimate in its revelations” (Memoir, 18, 39). 60. ​Felicity A. Nussbaum, “­Toward Conceptualizing Diary,” in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128–129. 61. ​Cynthia G. Franklin, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University T ­ oday (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 17, 16. 62. ​Couser, Memoir, 13. 63. ​Couser, Memoir, 51. It is for this reason that I do not use the term “auto/biography,” despite its current critical prevalence. I agree with Couser that generic distinctions have become blurred in treatments of life writing, and while recognizing the critical work that “auto/biography” does, I think that more terminological clarity and precision would be useful. 64. ​Nancy K. Miller, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2. 65. ​Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction,” in W ­ omen, Autobiography, Theory, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 3–52, offers an overview, although slanted ­toward their own work. See also their Reading Autobiography, 278–79.

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66. ​For example, see James Olney, “Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1980), 19–27; Robert Folkenflik, “Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography,” in The Culture of Autobiography, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 8–12; Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992), 90–93; Julia Watson, “­Toward an Anti-­Metaphysics of Autobiography,” in The Culture of Autobiography, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 69–73; Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 180–83. 67. ​Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 181. 68. ​Paul John Eakin, Touching the Word: Reference in Autobiography (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1992), 143, 145. Eakin also writes that “the consequences of the shift from a documentary view of autobiography as a rec­ord of referential fact to a performative view of autobiography centered on the action of composition” w ­ ere that “the real­ity of the past seemed quite simply to vaporize” (143). See also Cox, Recovering Lit­er­at­ ure’s Lost Ground, 1–4, 34–35; Stanley, Auto/Biographical I, 89–104; Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 179–81, 233, 239 46. 69. ​Robert F. Sayer, “American Autobiography and History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 102.

What Else Did Pope Borrow from Dryden? Cedric D. Reverand II

We are all accustomed to regarding Pope as Dryden’s heir, the next ­great satirist, master of the mock-­heroic mode. We know he adored Dryden and even claimed to have visited ­Will’s Coffee House in Covent Garden as a child to see the old poet holding court. In teaching survey courses, most of us include Mac Flecknoe, followed by Absalom and Achitophel, to demonstrate Dryden’s satiric mode and then to set up Pope, generally by linking Mac Flecknoe to The Dunciad, which not only demonstrates Pope’s indebtedness to Dryden, but also his penchant for expanding, validating Johnson’s noteworthy remark, in comparing the two poets, that “if the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant.”1 While Dryden came up with the original idea, a 217-­line poem “celebrating” a bad poet by having him crowned the next king of bad poetry, Pope extended that mock-­ heroic gem into a full-­fledged mock-­epic poem, three books, then fi­nally, four books long. His indebtedness to his idol Dryden, whom Maynard Mack describes as “Pope’s man of men,” could not be clearer.2 But if that is the primary way we link Pope to Dryden, I think we may be missing something, in part b ­ ecause we have a skewed idea of what the Dryden canon was in the eigh­teenth ­century. When ­people thought of Dryden’s poetry, I doubt that ­either Mac Flecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel w ­ ere what first came to mind. They are, if anything, aty­pi­cal Dryden poems. How many mock-­heroic poems did he write? One: Mac Flecknoe. How many po­l iti­cal satires, inspired by a specific po­liti­cal event, framed as an episode from the Bible? One: Absalom and Achitophel. Dryden wrote far more occasional poems, poems in memory of p ­ eople who had just died, in honor of ­people who ­were still living, and many, many translations— of Juvenal, Persius, Lucretius, Theocritus, Horace, Ovid, Boccaccio, Virgil—­a ll of Virgil—­Homer, Chaucer. In fact, the “Dryden” who was known and admired in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries was the Dryden of occasional poems and translations. 140

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Especially the translations, which are virtually never anthologized, since u ­ ntil rather recently scholars have simply ignored them, u ­ nder the assumption that only original poems can be, well, original.3 Dryden’s first foray into published translations was the three he contributed to Tonson’s edition of Ovid’s Epistles, along with the well-­k nown preface on translation, in 1680, which was in its ninth edition in 1761, more Ovid for Tonson’s Miscellany Poems in 1684 (which also includes some of Dryden’s satires), which kept expanding to further editions, and even more Dryden translations; it was in its fifth edition in 1727.4 Dryden translated about a third of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; ­after his death, his friend Samuel Garth, working with Tonson, cobbled together a complete Metamorphoses, with Dryden’s translations fleshed out by many hands (including Pope’s); it was published in 1717, appeared in its fifth edition in 1751, and remained in print through 1795.5 Dryden also completed a translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, which Tonson published posthumously in 1709 and which ran through what appears to be at least eight editions by 1764. Dryden’s Virgil, first published in 1697, was in its eleventh London edition in 1792, having also appeared in numerous editions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Perth. This is the sort of ­t hing we lose sight of when we are simply working from anthologies that have already selected “representative” samples of Dryden for us. But this is a significant barrage of translations, over an extended period. In short, although we take it for granted that Dryden, like Pope, was a satirist, thanks in good part to the canon w ­ e’ve inherited, in the eigh­teenth ­century, Dryden was prob­ably considered primarily as a translator. And of Dryden’s works, the one that was, arguably, the best known in the eigh­ teenth and nineteenth centuries was Fables Ancient and Modern, a collection of twenty-­one tales, sixteen of them translations: from Ovid (eight), Chaucer (four), Boccaccio (three), and Homer (one). First published in 1700, the year in which Dryden died, Fables remained in print throughout the ­century—­I have been able to find thirteen eighteenth-­century editions, beginning in 1713, r­ unning through 1797—­and it consistently garnered praise as Dryden’s best work. Joseph Warton remarked that “it is to his fables, though wrote in his old age, that Dryden ­will owe his immortality. . . . ​The warmth and melody of t­ hese pieces, has never been excelled in our language.” 6 William Congreve, who was not only a Dryden protégée, but also, in his retirement years, befriended by Pope—­Congreve was one of the subscribers to Pope’s translation of the Iliad—­commented that Dryden’s “parts did not decline with his years: . . . ​he was an improving Writer to the last, even to near seventy Years of Age; improving in Fire and imagination, as well as Judgement. Witness his Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day, and his Fables, his latest Per­for­mances.”7 Both Sheridan, and ­later, Byron, had ­whole passages of Fables by heart and ­were fond of rattling them off in com­pany. Walter Scott, Dryden’s first major editor, had high praise for the individual poems in Fables, singling out lines from “Theodore and Honoria” in his Life of Dryden as memorable—­t he same lines that Henry Hallam, in his review of Scott’s edition of Dryden, cited as being especially popu­lar, the same lines that Leigh Hunt cited to illustrate what he regarded as Dryden’s admirable variety. Words­worth, no fan of Dryden, begrudgingly admitted this Fables

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was Dryden at his “most poetical,” although Words­worth flinched at the sexy bits (this from a man who took his ­sister Dorothy along with him on his honeymoon). And Pope, in dismissing Dryden’s critics, remarked that “­t hose Scriblers who attack’d him in his latter times, ­were only like Gnats in a Summer’s eve­ning, which are never very troublesome but in the finest and most glorious Season: (for his fire, like the Sun’s, shin’d clearest ­towards its setting).” 8 When poets and commentators referred to “Dryden,” that was the Dryden they meant, not the Dryden of Mac Flecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel.

Forming the Canon What happened? Basically, Ian Jack’s classic Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in En­glish Poetry, 1660–1750 (1952), which pretty much established the Dryden and Pope canon on both sides of the Atlantic for half a ­century. ­After an introductory chapter, Jack devotes a chapter each to Hudibras, Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, The Rape of the Lock, then Pope’s Horatian imitations, a chapter on The Dunciad, and so on. In consulting virtually any survey covering the period—­the Norton seems to be the one most frequently used—­one ­will generally find excerpts of Hudibras (a ­couple of hundred lines is enough to get the flavor), followed by Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, then a few other Dryden poems (perhaps Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day, or “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,” or Alexander’s Feast), and then, of course, The Rape of the Lock, along with, typically, “passages” from The Dunciad. Admittedly, it would be mean spirited to take Professor Jack to task for writing an excellent book; his sharp insights into the satire of the period remain central, all ­t hese years ­later, to any discussion of satire. But scholars of the 1950s and 1960s who ­were constructing the literary history of this period had no choice but to use the texts available to them, which ­were not necessarily representative, nor necessarily the texts most frequently published and read in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Modern scholars, especially feminists, are now reworking that canon, and with the availability of databases such as Early En­g lish Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online (ECCO), many of us now have access to an im­mense number of period works, no farther away than our desktop computers, making it pos­si­ble to rethink the canon. Scholars of the 1950s and 1960s are not to be belittled; they ­were ­doing an excellent job with the materials they had at hand. I think, however, it is fair to criticize anthologists, who, as far as Dryden and Pope are concerned, have stuck by the 1950s canon even though well over half a ­century has gone by and scholarship has moved on.9 In effect, ­we’ve been teaching the wrong Dryden, not the one admired in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries and not the one Pope would have admired.

Dryden’s Distressed W ­ omen So, when Pope praises Dryden’s poetry written when his sun was “clearest ­towards its setting,” it is perhaps a good idea to ask what Pope may have had in mind. What

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was t­ here in Fables, Dryden’s sunset work, as it w ­ ere, that might have worked its way into Pope’s poetry? Fables is long and complex—­longer than the Iliad, longer than the Odyssey, longer than the Aeneid, longer than Paradise Lost—­which means ­there are many possibilities. One of the possibilities, which also pervades many of the Ovidian poems Dryden translated throughout his ­career, would entail Dryden’s treatment of love, which ranges from studies of marriage, to chastity (marriage to Christ), to passion, fulfilled as well as thwarted, to eros. Fables opens, for instance, with a study of marital fidelity and devotion, a dedicatory poem to Mary Butler, the Duchess of Ormond, which might seem somewhat unusual, since it was her husband, James Butler, the second duke, not the duchess, who was a lifelong patron of Dryden (although, in return for the poem, she gave Dryden a stipend of £500, so clearly, he knew what he was d ­ oing).10 That opening poem, “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond,” celebrates the duchess as a wife, a “chast Penelope” (l. 158) awaiting her husband’s return from Ireland, and praises her as a ­mother, caring for her ­children, “The Three fair Pledges of Your Happy Love” (l. 164). Contrasted against that is the penultimate poem, “The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady,” an expanded epitaph based on an inscription in Bath Abbey, celebrating a pure, “All white” “Virgin-­Saint” (l. 19). ­These are both original poems, which, in a way, act as bookends, contrasting ­t hese portraits to the many other ­women characters, mostly from the translations, that appear throughout Fables. Dryden seems to be interested in depicting love in its many va­ri­e­ties (as in his posthumously published translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria). In Fables, Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s “Baucis and Philemon” pre­sents us with a ­humble, rustic, aged ­couple: she loves her husband, as he loves her, and a­ fter they demonstrate their hospitality to a disguised Jupiter and Mercury, they are rewarded for their generosity by being a given a wish: they wish not to outlive each other. When they “die,” the gods, accordingly, turn them into ancient trees whose roots intertwine forever. While Baucis and Philemon are of low estate, Ceyx and Alcyone (also from Ovid) are royalty, but they, too, have an enduring marital love. When Prince Ceyx has to leave Thessaly to consult the gods, his wife, Alcyone, tries to dissuade him, ­because of the dangers of the trip, and then insists on g­ oing with him. Not to be outdone by concern for a spouse, Ceyx “wou’d not to the Seas expose his Wife” (l. 57). He leaves by himself, a tempest tears his ship apart, and he drowns with Alcyone’s name on his lips. ­A fter the gods create a dream vision, wherein Ceyx seems to appear to announce his own death, Alcyone goes to the shore to be on “that very Spot of Ground, . . . ​W here last he stood” (ll. 440–441). A body washes up “at her Feet” (l. 462), his body (of course), and in despair, she climbs “the neighb’ring Mole” (l. 470), and plunges to her death, but instead of falling, she is magically turned into a bird, as is Ceyx: “Their conjugal Affection still is ty’d, / And still the mournful Race is multiply’d” (ll. 492–493). Since they are now nesting kingfishers, they ­w ill achieve a kind of immortality, ­because their race ­w ill live on, and their nesting ­w ill be blessed with, you guessed it, halcyon weather. But t­ here is one kind of w ­ oman character in par­tic­u­lar, prominent in Fables and prominent throughout Metamorphoses and Heroides, that to my mind, stands out

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as something of a favorite with Dryden: the ­woman who is trapped by uncontrollable passions. One example is Myrrha from “Cinyras and Myrrha” (Ovid), who lusts a­ fter her own ­father; she knows full well this is wrong, as she explains at length, but still, she cannot control her feelings: But no Repose cou’d wretched Myrrha find, Her Body rouling, as she roul’d her Mind: Mad with Desire, she ruminates her Sin, And wishes all her Wishes ­o’er again: Now she despairs, and now resolves to try; Wou’d not, and wou’d again, she knows not why; Stops and returns, makes and retracts the Vow; Fain wou’d begin, but understands not how. (ll. 126–133)

Struggling, “Lab’ring in Pangs of Death” (l. 136), she decides to commit suicide, but is interrupted by her nurse, who, less troubled by the notion of incest, manages to sneak Myrrha into her ­father’s room at night when she ­can’t be recognized, saying to Cinyras, Receive thy own: Thus saying, she deliver’d Kind to Kind, Accurs’d, and their devoted Bodies join’d. (ll. 292–294)

Inevitably, Myrrha is discovered, Cinyras, in a rage, draws his sword, Myrrha flees, now haunted by guilt: “loathing Life, and yet of Death afraid” (l. 324), she longs for penitence and asks that the powers above, “Nor let her Wholly die, nor wholly live” (l. 335). Employing the handy deus ex machina Ovid cleverly provided himself throughout Metamorphoses, Dryden turns her into a tree, which is not wholly dead, but which, since it ­w ill weep forever for Myrrha’s crime, is partially alive. Or consider Sigismonda, from Boccaccio’s “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” another ­woman madly in love. She finds Guiscardo, a lowly member of her f­ ather’s court, irresistibly attractive. She arranges a secret tryst where they hastily get married—­ the priest has to perform the ceremony quickly, “For fear committed Sin should get before” (l. 166)—­after which they have loud and vigorous sex. Unfortunately, her ­father, Tancred, napping in an adjoining room—­not the smartest domestic arrangement—­overhears. He violently opposes the match, supposedly ­because of Guiscardo’s lowly status (but, in part, ­because of his own incestuous interest in his ­daughter), and, as prince, claims he has the right “To punish an Offence of this degenerate Kind” (l. 353). Sigismonda, however, rises to the occasion, defends herself and her right to choose Guiscardo, and, in so d ­ oing, gains strength and character. As she begins to answer her ­father, which takes up nearly two hundred lines of poetry, we learn that in-­born Worth, that Fortune can control, New strung, and stiffer bent her softer Soul; The Heroine assum’d the ­Womans Place, Confirm’d her Mind, and fortifi’d her Face. (ll. 374–377)

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And when she finishes, “Nor did her F ­ ather fail to find, / In all she spoke, the Greatness of her Mind” (ll. 582–583). Nonetheless, Tancred has Guiscardo murdered—­ apparently, greatness of mind does not run in the f­ amily—­and then has the young man’s heart delivered to his ­daughter, “to cheer thy Breast, / And glad thy Sight with what thou lov’st the best” (ll. 615–616). At this point, instead of collapsing, Sigismonda becomes positively noble, telling Tancred off, and fi­nally weeping, but ­t hese are not the tears of a weak ­woman. Rather, they are ceremonial tears, “­free from Female Noise, / Such as the Majesty of Grief destroys” (ll. 685–686). Sigismonda takes poison, and, ­a fter kissing Guiscardo’s heart, a downright Gothic touch, dies, but not before giving Tancred one last speech, asking “with my ­dying Breath” that he “Seek not, I beg thee, to disjoin our Death” (ll. 738–739). I review this at some length to emphasize that the outcome varies: w ­ omen trapped by passion can, like Myrrha, be defeated by it, or, like Sigismonda, be strengthened—­rather than beg for mercy, she willingly, and rather theatrically, becomes a martyr for love. And it is not only in Fables that we encounter this kind of character. Dryden seems to have had something similar to Sigismonda in mind when he rewrote Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra, too, is guided by her passion, for Antony, and throughout the play, she stands by him, while he tends to worry about being “unmanned.” One of the difficulties of the play, I think, is the character of Antony, who mopes, whines, and vacillates—­ “Oh, Dollabella, which way ­shall I turn?” (3.1.336). ­Here he is, giving up, and, as the stage directions indicate, a­ fter throwing himself on the ground in despair, he proclaims: Caesar ­w ill weep, the crocodile ­w ill weep, To see his Rival of the Universe Lie still and peaceful t­ here. I’ll think no more on’t. Give me some Musick; look that it be sad: I’ll soothe my Melancholy, till I swell, And burst myself with sighing. (1.1.225–230)

I find it difficult to believe that such a wishy-­washy character could actually be a Roman general, once part of the Second Triumvirate, ruling over Rome ­a fter Caesar’s death. He even bungles his own suicide attempt, falling on his sword, but, whoops, “I’ve mist my heart. O unperforming hand!” (5.1.347). But just as Dryden darkens Tancred into a mean-­spirited, tyrannical, vengeful figure to set off the nobility of Sigismonda, so does he diminish Caesar to make Cleopatra’s dedication and constancy seem all the stronger. She does not doubt her feelings: my Love’s a noble madness, Which shows the cause deserved it. Moderate sorrow First vulgar Love, and for a vulgar Man: But I have lov’d with such transcendent passion, I soared, at first, quite out of Reasons view, And now am lost above it. (2.1.18–22)

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She never deserts Antony, while he keeps ­going away and coming back, and when, rather than making peace with conquering Caesar, she kills herself, as was the case with Sigismonda, ­t here are no tears, no “Female noise,” involved: Now seat me by my Lord [who has fi­nally died]. I claim this place; For I must conquer Caesar too, like him, And win my share o ­ ’th’ World. Hail, you dear Relicks Of my Immortal Love! (5.1. 405–408)

For Cleopatra, love is not only steady but “transcendent,” “Immortal.” By not acquiescing to Caesar, she, in her own mind at least, conquers him, achieving a perverse kind of victory. Each of ­t hese pathetic ­women is a victim of love, and part of the pathos is that all of them, Alcyone, Myrrha, Sigismonda, and Cleopatra, die (think Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady). Or we can take a look at Dido in Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, who spends most of book 4 suffering, “fetter’d in the Chains of Love” (4:130), b ­ ecause Aeneas has been called away by the gods to pursue his destiny and search for Italy: this time we have a study of a ­woman passionately devoted to a man and frustrated that she has been abandoned, which is also a recurrent Ovidian motif. Dryden had noted in his preface to the 1680 edition, “most of the Epistles [­were] . . . ​written from Ladies who ­were forsaken by their lovers.”11 Dido, of course, is one such w ­ oman, but Ovid’s Dido is even more pathetic than Vigil’s—­with more impassioned expressions of love, fewer angry tirades—­which Dryden introduced by reminding readers of the circumstances: But Mercury admonishing Aeneas to go in search of Italy, (a Kingdom promised to him by the Gods,) he readily prepared to Obey him. Dido soon perceived it, and having in vain try’d all other means to engage him to stay [see book 4], at last, in Despair, writes to him as follows. (The Argument)

And then we get Dido’s letter, and we might note this is an abandoned ­woman writing a letter in the first person to a former lover who w ­ ill not respond (think Eloisa to Abelard): For, oh, I burn, like fires with incense bright; Not holy Tapers flame with purer light; Æneas is my thoughts perpetual Theme: Their daily longing, and their nightly dream. (ll. 25–28)

Pope’s Distressed ­Women As I have suggested, it seems to me that Pope also has a penchant for writing about trapped ­women, most conspicuously in two of his e­ arlier poems, Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, both first published in his

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1717 Works. Consider Eloisa’s plight, longing for a former lover who cannot respond, which sounds rather like Dido’s situation: Yet he ungrateful and obdurate still: Fool that I am to place my heart so ill! My self I cannot to my self restore: Still I complain, and still I love him more. Come! with thy looks, thy words, relieve my woe; ­Those still at least are left thee to bestow. Still on that breast enamoured let me lie, Still drink delicious poison from thy eye.

Which is which? The first is Dido (ll. 25–32), the second Eloisa (ll.119–122). ­Here is Eloisa trying to embrace Abelard, or, rather, her dream vision of Abelard: Provoking Daemons all restraint remove, And stir within me ev’ry source of love. I hear thee, view thee, gaze ­o’er all thy charms, And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms. I wake—no more I hear, no more I view, The phantom flies me, as unkind as you. I call aloud; it hears not what I say; I stretch my empty arms; it glides away. To dream once more I close my willing eyes; Ye soft illusions, dear deceits arise. (ll. 231–240)

­Here is Dryden’s Alcyone, when Morpheus, imitating Ceyx, appears to her in a dream: Thus said the Player-­God; and adding Art Of Voice and Gesture, so perform’d his part, She thought (so like her Love the Shade appears) That Ceyx spake the Words, and Ceyx shed the Tears: She groan’d, her inward Soul with Grief opprest, She sigh’d, she wept; and sleeping beat her Breast: Then stretch’d her Arms t’embrace his Body bare, Her clasping Arms inclose but empty Air: At this not yet awake she cry’d, O stay, One is our Fate, and common is our way! So dreadful was the Dream, so loud she spoke, That starting sudden up, the Slumber broke: Then cast her Eyes around in hope to view Her vanish’d Lord, and find the Vision true. (ll. 375–388)

And ­here is the young Pope, circa 1707, translating Ovid’s “Sappho and Phaon” for the eighth edition of Tonson’s ever expanding Ovid’s Epistles (1712), the same

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anthology that included Dryden’s translation of “Dido to Aeneas.” Sappho is longing for her former love, Phaon: O Night more pleasing than the brightest Day, When Fancy gives what Absence takes away, And drest in all it visionary Charms, Restores my fair Deserter to my Arms! Then round your Neck in wanton Wreaths I twine, Then you methinks, as fondly circle mine: .................................. But when with Day the sweet Delusions fly, And all ­t hings wake to Life and Joy, but I, As if once more forsaken, I complain, And close my Eyes, to dream of you again. (ll. 145–150, 155–158).

This scene of an impassioned ­woman embracing a phantom, and then awakening from the illusion, seemed to be something Pope ­couldn’t resist. I do not see close parallel passages between Dryden’s forlorn ­women and the subject of Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, but that is, in part, b ­ ecause Dryden’s ­women, like Eloisa, are making their plights clear in first-­person narratives, while the Elegy is in the third-­person, and the ­woman’s plight is over before the poem begins. Still, like some of Dryden’s heroines, she too has died for love, and we open with the “beck’ning ghost” (l. 1) ­after her suicide: Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well? To bear too tender, or too firm a heart, To act a Lover’s or a Roman’s part? Is ­t here no bright reversion in the sky, For ­t hose who greatly think, or gravely die? (ll. 6–10)

As the narrator ponders w ­ hether this is a crime, suggesting that suicide (playing “a Roman’s part”) might be offset by some sort of compensation, some “bright reversion,” we might detect a parallel to Cleopatra’s situation, who also loves too well, who plays both a lover’s and a Roman’s part, and who thinks in terms of a “transcendent passion” and “Immortal love,” which would turn the loss, into a gain (hence, the subtitle of the play: or the World Well Lost). Students coming to Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady for the first time are often taken aback by the contrast between Pope’s more famous poems, which tend to be detached reflections on life and culture, sometimes in a light satiric vein, as in The Rape of the Lock, sometimes in a heavier philosophical or didactic mode, as in the Moral Essays or the Essay on Man, and ­t hese two apparently Romantic extravaganzas, which Maynard Mack describes as “haunting,” partly “­because they represent an indulgence of sentiment uncommon in Pope’s longer works.”12 This is not Pope the satirist we all know, who is more often found satirizing ­women, as he does in the numerous character sketches that constitute the portrait gallery in To a Lady or the many slashes at Lady Mary

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during his ­middle years. Scholars have, generally, found themselves explaining ­t hese poems as anomalies, usually lumping the two together. As Rebecca Ferguson explains, “Both the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard . . . ​are unique among Pope’s works in presenting a direct and sustained engagement in emotion, forging an empathy between the reader and the “narrator” of each poem which is not qualified by any dimension of irony; in this re­spect, they should be seen as complementary works.”13 And Eloisa is often noted for being stylistically unique; Christa Knellwolf accurately describes it as “the only one of Pope’s major poems that is written from the first-­person point of view and it is a ­woman’s narrative. Apart from “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” it is the only instance in which a female persona is explic­itly represented in a positive light.”14 ­These two poems are all the more surprising ­because Pope is no enlightened proto-­feminist; he shared his age’s belief in ­women as subordinate, secondary. They w ­ ere the “softer sex,” subject to the vagaries of the marriage market, as Pope makes clear, for instance, in Cla­ris­sa’s speech, added to the final version of Rape of the Lock, where she tells Belinda that “she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid” (5:28). Then, in a tone that drives most modern-­day feminists up the wall, Cla­ris­sa condescendingly recommends Belinda keep her “good Humour,” ­because “trust me, Dear! Good Humour can prevail / When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail” (5:30–32). And in his tribute to his lifelong friend Martha “Patty” Blount at the end of To a Lady, speaking in his own voice this time, Pope recommends submission, and, again, good humor: he blesses her ­because she Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, Yet has her humour most, when she obeys. (ll. 263–264)

For Pope and his contemporaries, of course, the young ladies of the world ­were not g­ oing to become doctors, ­lawyers, business entrepreneurs, hedge-­f und man­ ag­ers, tele­v i­sion hosts, or celebrity chefs.15 Then why this obsession with “distressed w ­ omen”? Scholars and teachers, a­ fter acknowledging the oddity of ­t hese two poems, manage to get around the prob­lem by explaining that this was the age of the Gothic, of Nicholas Rowe’s “she tragedies,” of Cla­ris­sa, and, a­ fter all, this supposed age-­of-­reason poet did spend an inordinate amount of time working on his grotto, with its mysterious burbling stream, its shells, reflecting minerals, statuary fragments, which would not have been out of place in The C ­ astle of Otranto. Also, it has been customary to point out that Ovid’s epistles, which often depicted “pathetic females,” ­were highly popu­lar, as Tonson’s continued publication of Ovid confirms.16 But is it fair to regard t­ hese poems as anomalies? Reviewing the examples mentioned, one cannot help noticing that male authors depicting distressed w ­ omen in first-­person narratives is not at all unusual. Without denying that the Gothic was part of Pope’s culture, I would add that, as far as pathetically distressed ­women are concerned, t­ here might be a more proximate inspiration than just a general Gothic influence. What might seem out of character in Pope, inconsistent with the Augustan satiric mode, is, perhaps, simply part of the legacy he inherited from Dryden.

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A Dif­fer­ent Pope If this is the case, then it would prob­ably not be appropriate to consider poems like the Elegy and Eloisa as anomalies, strange turns he took before becoming the satirist he primarily was. Instead, they are ­every bit as much a part of Pope, and, in fact, one could argue that during much of his ­career, he worked with the motif of the trapped ­woman. Although Belinda is a glittering figure, treated with a certain amount of affection, she is also trapped, both by her vanity and, ultimately, by the constraints society imposes upon her, which Cla­ris­sa tries to enforce, in insisting on good humor, as I mentioned, and in reminding Belinda that “she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid” (5:28). Belinda is not doomed to expire tragically, nor, as far as we can tell, destined to suffer miserably—­perhaps we should wait and see what happens when she fi­nally gets married and t­ hose locks turn to gray—­but still. And even when Pope is in his familiar satirical mode, we can occasionally catch glimpses of w ­ omen who, for all their faults, might deserve our pity. To a Lady (1735), the second of Pope’s Moral Epistles, is Pope at his most satirical, producing a gallery of caustic portraits of w ­ omen. One of the longest portraits, some thirty-­six lines, is that of Atossa, which has always struck me as pushing beyond satire and bordering on the tragic, ­because, unlike the other ­women in the poem, who are fickle, unsteady, intemperate, frigid, Atossa has potential for real achievement: She “Shines, in exposing Knaves, and painting Fools” (l. 119), which, oddly enough, is exactly what satirists do. Based on Catherine Darnley, the Duchess of Buckinghamshire, Pope’s Atossa is also a victim of circumstances beyond her control. She was abused by her first husband, forced to get a divorce by Act of Parliament, fared better with her second husband, John Sheffield, the Duke of Buckingham, but outlived all of her five c­ hildren, and a­ fter the duke died, she found herself engaged in protracted lawsuits against the duke’s natu­ral c­ hildren; she ended up being disinherited. Pope describes some of “­great Atossa’s” (l. 115) prob­lems. She is Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind! Who, with herself, or ­others, from her birth Finds all her life one warfare upon earth: Shines, in exposing Knaves, and painting Fools, Yet is, whate’er she hates and ridicules. No Thought advances, but her Eddy Brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the World has been her Trade, The wisest Fool much Time has ever made. From loveless youth to unrespected age, No Passion gratify’d except her Rage. So much the Fury still out-­ran the Wit. (ll. 115–127)

She is “robb’d of Pow’r,” also “of Friends” (l. 144), and she “Finds all her life one warfare upon earth” (l. 118), which comes perilously close to how Pope, in his Epistle to Dr.  Arbuthnot (also 1735), describes how he has been treated during “this

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long Disease, my Life” (l. 132). Atossa has glaring faults, to be sure, faults that make every­t hing worse for her, but she, too, is a pathetic figure, trapped, undone by a dif­fer­ent kind of passion: rage. As with any kind of influence, this is not a ­matter of Pope just replicating Dryden’s portraits of pathetic w ­ omen; instead, in Pope’s hands, the motif has expanded, with what might be called “variations on a theme” appearing throughout his poetry. When I argue that we may have been missing an aspect of Pope ­because of the per­sis­tence of seeing him as Dryden’s successor as satirist, I do not mean to replace one influence with another. He is still the poet who expanded Mac Flecknoe into a four-­book mock epic. Rather, I would like to enlarge our view of what Pope may have inherited from Dryden: ­those trapped ­women appear not just in a few supposedly odd poems, but also, in modified form, when Pope is in his full satiric mode.

notes 1. ​Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope,” from The Lives of the Most Eminent Poets (1779–1781), ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), https://­w ww​.­oxford​ scholarlyeditions​.­com​/­v iew​/­10​.­1093​/­actrade​/­9780199284825​.­book​.­1​/­actrade​-­9780199284825​ -­div1​-­1​?r­ -​ ­1​= ­1​.­000&wm​-­1​= ­1&t​-­1​= ­search​-t­ ab&p1​-­1​= ­1&w1​-­1​= ­1​.­000&p2​-­1​= ­1&w2​-­1​= ­0​.­400. 2. ​Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 92. 3. ​In assessing Ian Jack’s impact on anthologies, I am following the lead of Brooke Allen’s account, in “Augustan Satire Reconsidered,” Hudson Review 66 (2013): 595–599, a review of Ashley Marshall’s The Practice of Satire in ­England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), a book that, by reviewing over 3,000 satires published during the period, available to Marshall thanks to EEBO and ECCO, has greatly expanded our notion of the satirical canon. For another well-­received example of a scholar employing EEBO and ECCO to take a fresh look at the canon, this time the canon of “the En­glish Novel,” see Leah Orr, Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in ­England, 1690–1730 (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2017). 4. ​As Harriet Andreadis explains, in “The Early Modern Afterlife of Ovidian Erotics: Dryden’s Heroides,” Re­nais­sance Studies 22 (2008): 401–413, “It was clear that Tonson’s Epistles was enormously popu­lar and pop­u ­lar­ized not only the work of its circle of o ­ thers, but also its versions of Ovid’s ventriloquized voices” (405). Andreadis traces the volume, through its publication by Tonson’s heirs and successor, to 1795. By my count, ­t here are fourteen editions spanning the ­century. 5. ​For a fine account of Dryden’s Ovidian translations, see Garth Tissol’s introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Garth Tissol (Hertfordshire: Words­worth Editions, 1998), xi–­x xix, a modern text of Jacob Tonson’s 1717 edition. 6. ​Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1782), 2:12. Volume 1 was first published in 1756, volume 2 in 1782. 7. ​William Congreve, preface to The Dramatic Works of John Dryden (1717–1718), ed. William Congreve, 6 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1735), sig.Ar8. The ode to St. Cecilia’s Day to which Congreve refers is not Dryden’s “Song for St Cecilia’s Day” (1687), but rather, “Alexander’s Feast” (1697), which is reprinted in Fables. 8. ​­These responses, and more, are all con­ve­niently gathered in the first chapter of Cedric Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The “Fables” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 2–3. 9. ​ The Norton Anthology of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. [(New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), billed as “read by millions of students over 50 years,” keeps on expanding—­volume 1 of the ninth edition runs to over 3,000 pages—­but the added material has primarily been lit­er­a­ture by w ­ omen (the tenth edition is available in separate volumes,

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i.e., one for the M ­ iddle Ages, one for the Restoration and eigh­teenth ­century, and so forth). Its Dryden and Pope se­lections remain the same as they ­were in the 1960s, except ­t here are fewer Dryden poems than ­t here ­were in the ­earlier editions. And ­t here are no Dryden translations. The competing Broadview Anthology of British Lit­er­a­ture, gen. ed. Joseph Black, vol. 3: The Restoration and the Eigh­teenth ­Century, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006), contains the same Dryden-­Pope “canon” as the Norton, except it also includes one translation from Fables, “Cymon and Iphigenia” from Boccaccio. 10. ​All allusions to Dryden’s texts use the following volumes of The Works of John Dryden (henceforth referred to as Dryden), ed. by Edward Niles Hooker et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000); vol. 1: Poems 1649–1680, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (1956) vols. 5–6; Poems: The Works of Virgil in En­glish 1697, ed. William Frost, Vinton Dearing, and Alan Roper (1988); vol 7: Poems 1697–1700, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (2002); and vol. 13: Plays: All for Love, Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Maximillian  E. Novak and George G. Guffey (1985). All quotations from Pope use the con­ve­nient one-­volume version of the authoritative Twickenham texts: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). The information about Dryden’s stipend is from Dryden, vol. 7:573. 11. ​Dryden’s preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), cited from Dryden, 1:114. 12. ​Mack, Alexander Pope, 312. Similarly, Howard Weinbrot, in “Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,’ ” Modern Language Quarterly 32 (1971): 255–267, describes this poem as a mysterious episode in Pope’s young life. 13. ​Rebecca Ferguson, The Un­balanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). Similarly, Maynard Mack remarks that “readers familiar with Pope’s poems generally w ­ ill need no reminder that Eloisa to Abelard consorts somewhat oddly with the rest of them” (Alexander Pope, 323). Mack thinks Eloisa is odder than the Elegy, since “in many re­spects,” the Elegy “is simply an expanded epigraph” (Alexander Pope, 323). Nonetheless, Mack groups both poems together, perhaps as representing dif­fer­ent degrees of oddity. 14. ​Christa Knellwolf, A Contradiction Still: Repre­sen­ta­tions of ­Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), 109. 15. ​For the most thorough account of Pope’s attitude ­toward w ­ omen in general, see Valerie Rumbold, W ­ omen’s Place in Pope’s World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 16. ​One of the earliest to make this association was Reuben Brower, in Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), who refers to ­t hese works as part of Pope’s “Ovidian phase” (64). See also Gillian Beer, “ ‘Our Unnatural No-­Voice’: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and W ­ omen’s Gothic,” Yearbook of En­glish Studies 12 (1982): 125–151; Hoyt Trowbridge, “Pope’s Eloisa and the Heroides of Ovid,” in Racism in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury, ed. Harold E. Pagliano and James L. Clifford (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1983), 11–34; and David Fairer, The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1989), 70ff. As Rumbold points out, in ­Women’s Place in Pope’s World, Ovid’s Heroides are “for the most part letters from abandoned heroines,” which “­were then assumed to have as their primary aim the dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion of passion” (90).

Poetic Per­for­mances pope’s an essay on man and swift’s “verses on the death of dr. swift” John Richetti

In The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell remembers that he heard Johnson say something extraordinary about Pope: “Sir, a thousand years may elapse before t­here ­shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.”1 Boswell notes that Johnson’s “Life of Pope” in his Lives of the Poets was written “con amore” and partly in response to recent “attempts to lessen his poetical fame.”2 However, in that same “Life of Pope” Johnson calls An Essay on Man (1733–1734) a “work of g­ reat l­abour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope’s per­for­mances.”3 Johnson’s sarcasm about Pope’s intellectual efforts in the poem is very funny: “He tells us much that ­every man knows, and much that he does not know himself” (“Life of Pope,” 1218). His summarizing comment is worth quoting for his critique of the poem’s ideas and his praise of Pope’s unequalled poetical powers: This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never ­were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing. . . . ​W hen ­t hese wonder-­working sounds sink into sense, and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what s­ hall we discover? That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant . . . ​t hat our true honour is not to have a ­great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power. Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before; but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishment, or such sweetness of melody. The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of ­others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the

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softness of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgement by overpowering plea­sure. (“Life of Pope,” 1219–1220)

An Essay on Man (written 1730–1732, published 1733–1734) is a “per­for­mance,” and thereby for Johnson Pope’s unparalleled command of poetic techniques compensates for what he considered the insulting banality of its sentiments. Indeed, for Johnson the brilliance of Pope’s poem is highlighted by the philosophical incoherence that it seeks to articulate. Judgment (“philosophy”) is enchained or suspended by aesthetic plea­sure. Or to quote Pope’s own definition of “true wit” in the e­ arlier poem, An Essay on Criticism (1711): True Wit is Nature, to Advantage drest, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That give us back the Image of our Mind. 4

­ ese couplets describe a pro­cess that poetry at its best can trigger—­delighted recTh ognition of familiar if neglected knowledge—­and produce a sharper realization of ­those truths that reside in common experience. But can pure poetic per­for­mance (if it can be said that such an entity exists) sufficiently distract readers from banal subject ­matter? Is subject ­matter in a poem clearly separable from poetic per­for­ mance? Pope’s couplets can be taken to mean that poetry can be a memorable reformulation (“to advantage drest”) of what readers already know (“Nature”). This is surely not quite what Pope meant. Can poetry be merely a kind of highlighted decoration of what we all know, so that what we possess in a somewhat confused or unfocused state in our minds is brought into sharp focus by the best poetry? An Essay on Man proves that poetry is more than decorative expression of what all readers know, since Pope’s poem offers paradoxical refinements of what passes for common knowledge. Moreover, Pope articulates philosophical and theological ideas that most readers, especially t­ hese days, w ­ ill not be familiar with. It is no won­der, then, that one worthy critical tradition has set itself the task of explaining for modern readers just what t­ hose ideas are. In his critical biography of Pope, for one example, Maynard Mack did precisely that, contextualizing the poem within the philosophical debates of the day: Hobbesian materialism and moral cynicism versus Shaftesburyian benevolence. As Mack puts it, “Is the high-­powered egoism so vis­i­ble in an expanding market society to be thought one of the corruptions accruing from the Fall.”5 Pope stages through his par­tic­u­lar style of couplet verse how truth can be dramatized and memorably realized and encapsulated for his readers. Simply to extract propositions from An Essay on Man in a prose paraphrase, however, tends (necessarily and inevitably) to occlude its dynamic per­for­mance and articulation in unforgettable Popeian verse. For one example among many from Mack’s exegesis, consider his summary of the implications of a famous passage from Epistle I: Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

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His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk, or milky way; Yet ­simple Nature to his hope has giv’n, Beyond the cloud-­topt hill, an humbler heav’n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d, Some happier island in the wat’ry waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold! To be, contents his natu­ral desire, He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire; But thinks, admitted that equal sky, His faithful dog ­shall bear him com­pany. (1:99–112)

Mack’s gloss on this passage and its further elaboration in Epistle I is that Pope is showing how the Indian’s confidence in his centrality in the universe is just like the views of “con­temporary theologies, ­whether based on the notion that the universe was created to plea­sure man . . . ​or on an excess of confidence that what God is and does must fall within bounds established by the ­human mind” (528). Mack quotes Pope’s rendering in verse of ­these ideas, and the difference between his prose and the sharply witty poetic renderings of them makes the case that the poetry as such is far superior (and concisely memorable) as well as hardly in need of prose paraphrase. Indeed, in the same year that Mack’s biography was published, Claude Rawson argued that Pope’s poem deserves to be read not for its rehearsal of philosophical and theological issues but for the pleasures of poetic articulation that it offers readers. “Its central poetic excitement resides in Pope’s delight in the creation or staging” of systems and not in “any active literal belief in ­Great Chains of Being or other such articles of pseudo-­faith.” 6 For readers nowadays, “per­for­mance” in An Essay on Man conjures up something rather distinct from the notion whereby any poem is by definition a “per­ for­mance,” although one might add that poems can still be regarded usefully and coherently as “per­for­mances,” even if the word tends nowadays to indicate vari­ ous negative perceptions of verbal/poetic pre­sen­ta­tion: a lack of sincerity or deep authenticity or genuine insight and truthfulness. An actor performs; a poet for con­ temporary readers does something rather dif­fer­ent; he or she articulates personal insights or visions, social or moral or psychological truths, and per­for­mance is understood as secondary to ­those high ends. Johnson’s jaundiced view of An Essay on Man is thus surprisingly like the connotations of “per­for­mance” that most readers ­today have, something flashy and attractive but manipulative and to that extent superficial. Pope’s poem pre­sents its four long “Epistles” as ostensibly forming a theodicy, a vindication of God’s natu­ral order, but it is ­really a set of musings about the world as ­humans experience it, a long “Moral Essay” as Pope labeled a ­later series of verse epistles that he was working on during the early 1730s. As in An Essay on Man, which is addressed to his close friend, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in ­t hose poems Pope explores moral and social issues as he

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addresses individuals such as John Arbuthnot (“An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”), Martha Blount (“To a Lady. Of the Characters of ­Women”), Allen Lord Bathurst (“Of the Use of Riches”), Richard T ­ emple, Viscount Cobham (“Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men”), and Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (“Of the Use of Riches”). Like ­t hose poems, An Essay on Man is truly “essayistic”—­t hat is to say, an attempt, essentially informal rather than rigorously systematic, to articulate a set of philosophical, social, and moral observations, to explore a series of moral, philosophical, and theological issues presented part of the time in dialogue form, with Bolingbroke as his chief interlocutor and philosophical tutor. Pope is talking to a friend, albeit in heroic couplets. In this regard, consider the opening sixteen lines of the Essay on Man as it evokes a per­for­mance that is the occasion and raison d’être of the poem, a conversation with a friend that serves as a prologue to the discussion about our experience of the world. Pope’s poem is not only as a verbal artifact a per­for­mance; the contemplative activity it proposes to deliver is contained within a set of activities that are self-­consciously and actively performed, that is to say acted upon, by the poet and his friend as the opening lines of Epistle I declare. Awake, my ST. JOHN! leave all meaner t­ hings To low ambition, and the pride of Kings. Let us (since Life can ­little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate ­free ­o’er all this scene of MAN; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot, Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies, And catch the Manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to Man.

Pope invites Viscount Bolingbroke, his friend and philosophical mentor (and former prominent En­glish politician), to bestir himself (“Awake”) and together with Pope to set out to explore the world, the “scene of MAN,” which is imaged or evoked as an “ample field” that they overlook and w ­ ill “beat,” that is to say actively traverse, stir up and provoke the creatures in it, some vis­i­ble, some lurking in the underbrush. Their object is to flush out the game (“the Manners”) that w ­ ill rise up (“living”) before them. The dramatic image that sets the scene for the poem is of two gentlemen-­hunters, at their philosophical ease and in implicit and unforced dialogue, ready to be amused (“laugh where we must”) but also if appropriate to censure (“be candid”), and in the pro­cess to understand and even to justify the

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divine order of ­t hings (the Miltonic echo in “vindicate the ways of God to Man” establishes their theological bona fides—­ignoring Bolingbroke’s unbelief and well-­ known libertinism). Their activity exposes for a moment the scene as meta­phorical and not literal. Is the “ample field” a “Wild” or is it a “Garden”? Perhaps it can serve as both, since Pope’s couplet art thrives on balanced opposites and paradoxical tensions. As they make their appearance in this shifting scene, Pope and Bolingbroke have open minds, their feet standing firmly on the ground as observer-­participants. Unlike ­those who “blindly creep, or sightless soar,” they are alert, keen-­eyed, curious and purposeful, upright and vigilant, ready for what­ever turns up, full of enlightened curiosity and enthusiasm for the varied scene. This rendition of per­for­mance as leisurely exploration and contemplation of the natu­ral and ­human order of a rural landscape that stands in for the social and moral universe sets the scene and the tone and introduces the discussion, but as an active organ­izing meta­phor it tends to drop away and become more or less (mostly less) implicit in the four long epistles of the poem. Nonetheless, the opening images and the two personalities, as they are evoked, Pope and Bolingbroke, are guideposts for the long poem that follows, although the informed and high-­ minded curiosity they are set to enact in ­t hese opening lines is quickly countered by the thoughtless and prideful opposite positions that the poem invokes very quickly: “Presumptuous Man!” (1:35). Indeed, in Epistle I, Pope’s and Bolingbroke’s contemplative serenity invoked in the opening lines is challenged by the confident finality and compelling intensity of Popeian epigrammatic summaries of ­human experience such as the following, in which activist examination takes a back seat to passive hope and confident rest: Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the ­great teacher Death, and God adore! What ­f uture bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that Hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the ­human breast: Man never Is, but always to be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. (1:91–98)

Lines like t­ hese are the beginning of (what can fairly if perhaps too negatively) be called a hectoring tirade that runs through the w ­ hole poem against t­ hose who think they know better than ­simple souls like “the poor Indian” described in the lines that follow the above passage, who, in his simplicity, hopes for a heaven just like his earthly life: He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog ­shall bear him com­pany. (1:110–112)

Next to the ­simple desires of the Indian is another “wiser” person who thinks he knows better than Providence and maintains that “If Man’s unhappy, God’s

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unjust” (1:118). The predictable source of such questioning of providential order is “Pride” and the ­human solipsism it encourages. This traditional charge against erring and thoughtless h ­ uman kind leads to some of Pope’s most memorable lines in which he returns to a dynamically precise evocation of the teeming natu­ral order and its va­ri­e­ties of sensitive perception by sight, smell, hearing, and touch, as the created world by degrees “mounts to Man’s imperial race”: Far as Creation’s ample range extends, The scale of sensual, ­mental powers ascends Mark how it mounts to Man’s imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass: What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, To that which warbles thro’ the vernal wood: The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From pois’nous herbs extracts the healing dew: (1:207–220)

Note the instructions to “mark” (1:209) and some lines ­later in section eight of this first epistle another, one of many such imperatives in the poem: “See, thro’ this air, this ocean, and this earth, / All m ­ atter quick, and bursting into birth” (1:233–234). Let me note further how the initial—­and quite modest—­opening of the poem in that “ample field” has expanded, turned away from the meta­phorical scene of observation and evaluation in a symbolic space to a speculative and overarching totality, nothing less than the universe, to events and arrangements that cannot be seen but can be poetically i­ magined by synthetic reasoning and exact observation of natu­ral phenomena, with each noun enforced by its proper adjective (“peopled grass,” “hound sagacious,” “the mole’s dim curtain,” “the spider’s touch”) such as Pope keeps articulating with concise brilliance. But the most familiar and profound lines in the poem, the first eigh­teen lines of Epistle II, mark a U-­turn from the observation of Nature to similar observation of the observer, to humanity itself, which turns out to be more complicated than the natu­ral order: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a ­middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely g­ reat. ............................... Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall;

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­ reat lord of all ­t hings, yet a prey to all; G Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world. (2:1–4, 13–18)

This passage marks a shift in emphasis in An Essay on Man, as its formulations implicitly undercut or even abandon the opening gambit in the poem. The subversive proposition that Epistle II begins with is that Man is a paradoxical being who embodies contradictions and unresolvable ironies (“Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d”). This description of the paradoxical h ­ uman essence fits the Popeian couplet perfectly, with its satisfying balancing (or comic or contradictory tension) of opposites. And as such, this definition of ­human beings offers a startling transition from the ordered and exquisitely calibrated natu­ral world, where each creature as in the previous passage has a defining identity and activity, that field in which Pope and Bolingbroke purposefully observe and categorize what they see, which the poem has evoked and elaborated throughout Epistle I, with prideful man the unthinking and ignorant villain of the drama opposed to the judicious poet and his philosophical friend and mentor. But if this opening evocation of Man as an oxymoronic mystery means anything, it requires a revision of a reader’s trust in the wisdom, the intellectual and moral superiority, of its two protagonists. Why (one may well ask) should Pope and Bolingbroke not only qualify as glories (to be sure) but also as jests, and riddles of the world, in “endless Error hurl’d,” like the rest of ­human kind? Popeian playfulness ­here in Epistle II can imagine “Superior beings,” perhaps angels, looking down and admiring Newton, a mortal who unfolded “all Nature’s law”—­“And shew’d a NEWTON as we shew an Ape” (2:34). And just before this witty aside, Pope addresses MAN sarcastically: Go, wond’rous creature, mount where Science guides, Go mea­sure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun; Go, soar with Plato to the empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his follow’rs trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the Sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule— Then drop into thyself, and be a fool. (2.9–30)

In his inventive brilliance, we may say, Pope cannot help himself. This comic anecdote and its dismissive final couplet recall other eighteenth-­century satires of science and vain philosophy. Pope and his philosophical friend are not immune to the warning at the end of this passage: “Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—­/ Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” Indirectly, such a passage negates or severely modifies the self-­assured intellectual proj­ect sketched in the opening

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lines of the poem or puts its modest aims of observation of the natu­ral order in tension with this potentially hubristic philosophical endeavor. I think it is this aspect of An Essay on Man, especially clear h ­ ere in ­t hese moments of playful joking and clever epigrammatic turns, that constitutes a per­for­mance in a richly dramatic sense, that at times undercuts rather than promotes or furthers the argument, that rescues the poem for readers nowadays from the over-­elaborated and smug didacticism that makes it for readers as David  B. Morris remarks “a forlorn classic of ratiocination.”7 To some extent, as Johnson’s comments make clear, ­t hose same poetic flights offered similar relief from the poem’s moral and theological hectoring for discerning eighteenth-­century readers. To echo Johnson again and to stress how insightful he was about An Essay on Man, such moments in their specifically poetic per­for­mance disarm “philosophy.” Among the most attractive of Pope’s ideas, the one that best fits his characteristic style and introduces another aspect of performativity, is his notion in Epistle II that each person has a “ruling passion,” since it is from the negative or destructive energy of that passion that corresponding virtues are encouraged or even produced. Pope’s development of this relationship in Epistle II is one of the most overtly “performative” sequences in the poem. His specifically poetic energies in this section of Epistle II are worth tracing and perhaps speculating that Johnson, an intensely observant moralist, would very likely have been drawn especially to this part of the poem. As fruits ungrateful to the planter’s care On savage stocks inserted learn to bear; The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot, Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root. What crops of wit and honesty appear From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear! See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; Ev’n av’rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy; Lust, thro’ some certain strainers well refin’d, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind: .................................. Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride) The virtue nearest to our vice ally’d; Reason the byass turns to good from ill, And Nero reigns a Titus, if he ­w ill. (2:181–198)

Pope adds a caveat, however, in the lines that follow, as he offers an analogy from painting: As, in some well-­w rought picture, light and shade, And oft so mix, the difference is too nice Where ends the Virtue, or begins the Vice.” (2:208–210).

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And ­there is further retreat from the attractive but morally dangerous idea that each vice or virtue is balanced by its opposite: “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As to be hated, needs but to be seen” (2:217–218). The last ninety or so lines of Epistle II try to complicate this retreat from a subversive paradox, with Pope positing self-­satisfaction as the universal condition: “Whate’er the Passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf, / Not one w ­ ill change his neighbor with himself” (2:261–262). Th ­ ere follows a short cata­logue of ­those who are happy with what they are and do, culminating in six exemplars of such contradictory bliss in mindless self-­absorption, the last of which hits reflexively home for Pope, who is ­after all the only poet in sight: See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing. The sot a hero, lunatic a king; The starving chemist in his golden views Supremely blest, the poet in his muse. (2:267–270)

­ ese recurring moments of heightened poetic per­for­mance in the four long episTh tles of An Essay on Man rehearse precisely and effectively a subversive irony that spares no one, not even himself (“the poet in his muse” is rather like the “starving” alchemist hoping to turn base metal into gold, and the juxtaposition provides the ironic equivalence). One is tempted to say that the trio of epithets that outline his idea of the paradoxical essence of “Man” from the opening of Epistle I—­glory, jest, and riddle—­sum up t­ hese moments in the rest of the poem, three separate roles and defining, contradictory qualities that humanity performs over and over again, although the latter two predominate. An Essay on Man is very much a per­for­ mance as it dramatizes the vari­ous roles and identities that constitute humanity. Epistle IV examines the nature of “Happiness” and is distinct from the first three in offering in effect concise summaries of the first three and exhorting readers to remember key maxims from them. For example, Remember, Man, “the Universal Cause Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws;” And makes what Happiness we justly call Subsist not in the good of one, but all. (4:35–38)

As ­these lines may indicate, this epistle features more dialogue than the ­others and is overall less didactic, less preachy, more willing to confront objections to its vari­ ous positions. For another example of such dialogue, Pope’s interlocutor, the somewhat scandalous Bolingbroke, speaks as someone an early eighteenth-­century En­glish reader might realize has prospered by being rather less than virtuous, and Pope replies, “But sometimes Virtue starves, while Vice is fed.” What then? Is the reward of Virtue bread? That, Vice may merit; ’tis the price of toil; The knave deserves it when he tills the soil” (4:149–153).

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Pope’s poetic speaker is to some extent harried in the lines that follow in which his antagonist won­ders (sensibly and coherently) why God does not grant the good man health and power? Pope’s full response is worth quoting: What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy, The soul’s calm sun-­shine, and the heart-­felt joy, Is Virtue’s prize: A better would you fix? Then give Humility a coach and six, Justice a Conq’ror’s sword, or Truth a gown, Or Public Spirit its ­great cure, a Crown. (4:167–172)

To say that virtue, as we all know, must be its own reward, or it is not ­really virtue, is certainly self-­evident enough, although the compact satire in the last two lines, especially ll. 71–72, turns in a witty flash from the morally obvious to a comment on the po­liti­cal sphere and to an unexpected satiric jab, a reprise of a satiric moment in the opening eigh­teen lines of Epistle IV, which ask where happiness is located: ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where; ’Tis never to be bought, but always ­free, And fled from Monarchs, ST. JOHN! dwells with thee. (4:16–18)

Con­temporary readers would have known that “fled from Monarchs” refers to the Hanoverian dynasty in power in Britain and of course to its current occupant of the throne, George II, this being one of several satiric swipes in the poem at the ruling ­family. And ­t hose con­temporary readers would not have needed a footnote to grasp why Bolingbroke is an oddly subversive character to act as Pope’s inspiration: a brilliant young politician who fell out of ­favor and indeed was condemned to death for treason, forced into exile in France, and stripped of his peerage ­after his conviction in 1715 for participating in a Jacobite plot to restore the Stuart Pretender to the British throne. He was also a notorious libertine in his personal life, a ­free thinker in m ­ atters of religion, and exceedingly liberal in his po­liti­cal ideas. By the time Pope was composing An Essay on Man, Bolingbroke had managed to return to ­England, hoping to be restored to his peerage and his estates. But he was at this point a marginal figure in En­glish politics as an opponent of the prime minister, Robert Walpole, who made sure that Bolingbroke continued to be deprived of his aristocratic privileges. And in Epistle IV Bolingbroke clearly appears near the end of the discussion of “Happiness”: “In Parts superior what advantage lies? / Tell (for You can) what is it to be wise?” (4:259–260). That is to say, what good did all of Bolingbroke’s brilliant talents do him? They led to his downfall, in fact. And in a similar vein a bit l­ ater in this epistle on happiness, “If Parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin’d, / The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind” (4:281–282). The following lines make the satiric point that history’s heroes, “the rich, the honor’d, fam’d and ­great” (4:287, 544), are in fact all negative exemplars: “From ancient story learn to scorn them all” (4:286). And yet t­ here is one exception to this rule, one positive exemplar from the ranks of the famous, and that turns out to be in the last verse paragraph of the poem

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Bolingbroke himself, “master of the poet, and the song” (4:374). This conclusion is touching in its exaggerated but affectionate praise of St. John: Teach me, like thee, in vari­ous nature wise, To fall with dignity, with temper rise; Form’d by thy converse, happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe; .................................. Oh! while along the stream of Time thy name Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame, Say, ­shall my ­little bark attendant sail, Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale? .................................. ­Shall then this verse to f­ uture age pretend Thou wert my guide, phi­los­o­pher, and friend? (4:377–380, 383–386, 389–390)

Pope’s graceful modesty, as if somehow his “­little bark” (an enormous and ambitious poem in four epistles!) w ­ ill be dependent upon Bolingbroke’s gathering fame for its success, must strike readers now and perhaps even then as disingenuous. But this gratitude (and flattery) to his friend in ­t hese closing lines takes readers back to the first verse paragraph in the poem, although the meta­phor of the exploratory field has gone. And yet ­t hese lines dramatize how what ­matters most is not the didactic sequences and sentences of the poem but the per­for­mance in it all, the graceful variations of tone that Bolingbroke, his friend and philosophic mentor, may be said to have taught him, in Pope’s compliment, the exaggerated aristocratic politesse in which the most famous En­glish poet of his day defers h ­ ere to a disgraced politician. Pope’s eighteenth-­century readers ­were surely aware that such deference was very much a daring per­for­mance, a sign of the poet’s management of his friendship as a theme that anchors the poem in the face of the instability and variability of ­human striving that it dramatizes. To turn to Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (composed 1731, when in fact Pope was working on the Essay on Man) is to study marked contrasts in poetic fashioning and in effect, as well as differences between t­ hese poems in their target audience, moral and po­liti­cal purpose, and satiric ambitions. Like all of Swift’s verses, this poem features a direct colloquial manner, as far from Pope’s intricate couplet paragraphs and generalizing explanatory ambitions as one can imagine. Indeed, Dr. Johnson in his brief “Life of Swift” in Lives of the Poets concluded that “in the poetical works of Dr. Swift ­t here is not much upon which the critick can exercise his powers,” although he praises the poems for their “easiness and gaiety,” their “correct” diction, “smooth” numbers (i.e., metrics) and “exact” rhymes.8 Through ­t hese very qualities, Swift offers readers another kind of per­for­mance in which he self-­consciously and of course playfully rejects normal poetic decorum and complex poetic form, as well as intellectual rigor or high seriousness, in ­favor of personalized satiric observations and comic anecdotes that are designed to feel spontaneous, and often subversively paradoxical and morally disturbing.

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As Nora Crow Jaffe correctly pointed out in The Poet Swift (1977), to look for “formal density in Swift obscures his real merits. His poems create a density of another kind, making up in power what they lack in technical interest.”9 In “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” such power­f ul disturbance begins with the epigraph, a quotation from the French cynical moralist, La Rochefoucauld: “In the adversity of our best friends, we find something that doth not displease us.” Of course, Swift knows just what he is ­doing, and his anecdotes are designed in their conversational easiness and colloquial raciness to illustrate and expand La Rochefoucauld’s assertion. The persona Swift proj­ects is brutally honest about his own feelings as well as ­t hose of his “friends.” To all my foes, dear fortune, send Thy gifts, but never to my friend: I tamely can endure the first, But, this with envy makes me burst.10

Swift startles readers with hilarious but often painful honesty that spares no one. Swift is the poet of Schadenfreude, which he both satirizes in o ­ thers and admits its inevitability in every­one, including most of all himself. Dear honest Ned is in the gout, Lies racked with pain, and you without: How patiently you hear him groan! How glad the case is not your own. What poet would not grieve to see, His brethren write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He’d wish his rivals all in hell. (ll. 27–34)

The funniest (and also the most subversive) part of the poem is Swift’s narrative of the reactions by his friends, first to his i­ magined final illness and then to his death, summed up in one pungent, shockingly truthful maxim: “No e­ nemy can match a friend” (l.120). Throughout the poem, and especially in the illness and death passages, Swift’s diction is colloquial but not slangy, and his fa­cil­i­t y for inspired mimicry of the cruel banalities of e­ very day speech and its self-­serving insincerities and fake self-­righteousness never fails to hit the mark. “For poetry, he’s past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme: His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I’d have him throw away his pen; But t­ here’s no talking to some men.” And then their tenderness appears, By adding largely to my years:

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“He’s older than he would be reckoned, And well remembers Charles the Second.” .................................. Then hug themselves, and reason thus; “It is not yet so bad with us.” (ll. 99–108, 115–116)

The deluded (and frightened) self-­satisfaction in ­these last two lines is disturbingly real, completely accurate (as some of us may want to admit). This is comedy with the darkest of edges, funny but terrible, unsparing in its insights. And yet, despite the comic fa­cil­i­t y of more than half of Swift’s poem, ­t here is a shift to a darker emphasis in the longest part of the narrative, beginning with line 147 when “the fatal” day arrives and by the second half of line 150 the stark message is “The Dean is dead.” Swift imagines how he ­w ill be attacked and ridiculed by vari­ous of his enemies: “Some paragraphs in e­ very paper, / To curse the Dean, or bless the Drapier” (ll. 68–69). Swift is by any standard a comic writer possessed of perfect and hilarious pitch as he rec­ords what his “female friends” w ­ ill say as they hear of his death while they play at cards: My female friends, whose tender hearts Have better learned to act their parts, Receive the news in doleful dumps, “The Dean is dead, (and what is trumps?) Then Lord have mercy on his soul. (Ladies, I’ll venture for the vole.) Six deans they say must bear the pall. (I wish I knew which king to call) (ll. 225–232)

But the most honestly painful lines come as Swift imagines How t­ hose I love, my death lament. Poor Pope ­w ill grieve a month; and Gay A week; and Arbuthnot a day. ((ll. 206–208)

Lines 209–218, which follow ­t hese predictions of brief and distracted mourning among his intimates, are the most profound in the poem, a serious, morally pointed interlude among the social comedy and satire: St. John himself ­w ill scarce forbear, To bite his pen, and drop a tear. The rest ­w ill give a shrug and cry “I’m sorry but we all must die.” Indifference clad in wisdom’s guise, All fortitude of mind supplies: For how can stony bowels melt, In ­t hose who never pity felt; When we are lashed, they kiss the rod; Resigning to the ­w ill of God.

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The couplet in the m ­ iddle of this passage—­“Indifference clad in wisdom’s guise, / All fortitude of mind supplies:”—is quietly devastating as a piece of moral and psychological analy­sis. More subtle in its way than anything in An Essay on Man, it is grounded in and guided by Swift’s characteristically unsparing (and of course bracingly cynical) observation of ­human nature. ­There is a balance in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” between his ­imagined personal history and subversively satiric generalizations about ­human failings drawn from that history, although the tone of ­t hose generalizations is rueful, amused rather than angry. The poem becomes in its conclusion an apologia pro vita sua for Swift in the nearly two hundred lines in which it ends, presented as a separate per­for­mance, an overtly dramatic insertion, in which an anonymous speaker among a group at a tavern discuss the late Dean Swift. The speaker is introduced as “one quite indifferent [i.e. objective] in the cause, / My character impartial draws” (ll. 305–306). And to some extent, this speaker is impartial, conceding that Perhaps I may allow the Dean Had too much satire in his vein; And seemed determined not to starve it, ­Because no age could more deserve it. (ll. 459–462)

­ ere the last line cancels the preceding three—­t he age deserves all the satire Swift H gave it. To some extent, this speaker indulges in commonplaces about satire that ­don’t ­really fit Swift’s brand of the genre, as much of his satire is aimed directly and overtly at par­tic­u­lar individuals.11 For one conventional example of what satirists always claim, He lashed the vice but spared the name. No individual could resent When thousands equally ­were meant. (ll. 464–466)

The rest of the speaker’s narrative of the life of Swift is what one would expect, a panegyric about his heroic virtue and unfailing integrity: Fair LIBERTY was all his cry; For her he stood prepared to die; For her he boldly stood alone; For her he oft exposed his own. (ll. 351–354)

But ­t here is a curious and significant inconsistency in this speaker’s portion of the poem, a long speech in which Swift himself is obviously d ­ oing the talking, bitterly reminiscing, suddenly resentful and deeply personal: And, oh! how short are ­human schemes! ­Here ended all our golden dreams. What St. John’s skill in state affairs, What Ormonde’s valour, Oxford’s cares, To save their sinking country lent,

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Was all destroyed by one event. Too soon that precious life was ended, On which alone our weal depended. When up a dangerous faction starts, With wrath and vengeance in their hearts: ................................... To sacrifice old ­England’s glory, And make her infamous in story. When such a tempest shook the land, How could unguarded virtue stand? (ll. 375–384, 391–394)

Suddenly and dramatically an inappropriate pronoun, “Our golden dreams” (perhaps a slip of the pen but most likely deliberate) startles or puzzles the alert reader, but I think at last it helps readers to distance themselves from the unconvincing device of the impartial narrator of Swift’s life. Swift may be said to drop the mask and in direct address vehemently recount the defeat of his friends and fellow Tories when Queen Anne died in 1714 and a new royal dynasty hostile to them, the German Hanoverians, was installed, allowing the Whigs to take po­liti­cal power. This small and as it turns out deliberate but expressive flaw in Swift’s design in effect heightens the performative intensity of the poem as comedy departs and deep regret, sorrow, and in fact rage take the stage along with ferocious contempt as the speaker rec­ords Swift’s exile to Ireland, that land of slaves and fens; A servile race in folly nursed, Who truckle most, when treated worst. (ll. 400–402)

Indeed, the last hundred lines or so of the poem rec­ord with rage and regret Swift’s life in Ireland: In exile with a steady heart, He spent his life’s declining part; Where folly, pride, and faction sway Remote from St. John, Pope, and Gay. (ll. 435–439)

To compare this summary of his life in Ireland with Pope’s farewell to one of t­ hese men is to be struck by the genuine, unforced pathos in Swift’s lines about his Irish exile and also the flattery and disingenuous modesty of Pope’s tribute to Bolingbroke at the end of An Essay on Man. Both endings are certainly per­for­mances of a very high order, two distinct forms of self-­expression, just as we know that ­t here are vastly dif­fer­ent styles of acting. But Swift’s per­for­mance manages in its forthright simplicity to move and convince me, whereas Pope’s is manifestly artificial, artfully contrived like Pope’s verses and to that extent charming and indeed memorable if not moving. Th ­ ese endings represent distinct approaches to performing in verse. I think I prefer Swift’s.

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notes 1. ​James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1. 2. ​Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1099. 3. ​Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, vol. 23 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1217. All further page references in the text to “The Life of Pope” are to this edition. 4. ​The Poems of Alexander Pope, A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), ll. 297–300. All further line references to Pope’s poems in the text are to this edition. 5. ​Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 530. All further page references in the text to this book are to this edition. 6. ​Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 224. 7. ​David Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 152. 8. ​Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, vol. 22 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1022. 9. ​Nora Crow Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 1977), 7. 10. ​Jonathan Swift, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin Books, 1989), ll. 67–70. All further line citations in the text are to this edition. 11. ​For several instances of poems that are clearly directed at individuals: Swift’s attacks on the Hanoverian royal f­ amily ­were savagely par­tic­u ­lar in “Directions for a Birthday Song” and “On Poetry: A Rhapsody”; his unsparing depiction of the dead Duke of Marlborough in “A Satirical Elegy on a Late Famous General” was so uncompromisingly nasty that the poem could not be published during Swift’s lifetime.

Swift Shrinks the Duke of Marlborough public delegitimation through scale Clement Hawes Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. —­Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift famously likes to exploit a quantifying rhe­toric in his satires. Using topics ranging from the population of Ireland to E ­ ngland’s national debt, he often dramatizes the peculiar authority of crunching numbers. By the late seventeenth ­century, the new prestige of quantitative results had produced new satirical targets and techniques, new forms of legitimation and delegitimation. Such was the early British Enlightenment: a moment that registered both a new sort of ­battle for public opinion—­itself constituted by numerical superiority—­and a hypertrophied concentration on the mea­sur­able and calculable. It seemed as if a new grip on real­ity had been achieved, and perhaps, up to a point, it had. From Newton’s laws of orbital motion to Sir William Petty’s attempts to quantify aggregate production and consumption through “po­liti­cal arithmetic,” the constitutive power of numerical relations emerged as a leading vector of efforts to represent the real. Individuals ­were likewise subject to newly quantifying forces. Daniel Defoe’s fictional characters are usually keenly aware both of the funds they already possess and t­ hose they hope to possess in the ­f uture: another crucial instance of how the fabric of everyday life had been permeated by the computable. The economic horizons of the nation and of the individual had come into sharper focus, and po­liti­ cal legitimacy had begun to gesture ­toward a broader public. While this emphasis is sufficiently well known, the extent to which it bears directly on Swift’s frequent proj­ect of satirical delegitimation remains less thoroughly understood. The satire of economic objectification in A Modest Proposal is 169

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familiar enough, but we are less attuned to examples of Swift’s more serious use of quantitative arguments. Indeed, critics of Swift have not sufficiently appreciated that he had a lifelong interest in the phenomena of scale specifically as they relate to the legitimation of power. While numerous images from the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels remain inscribed in global cultural memories—­t he image, for example, of tiny Lilliputians swarming over Gulliver’s prone body—­such images are in fact a culmination of Swift’s longstanding concerns with relations between po­liti­cal entities of unequal and even incommensurable power. They belong, moreover, to a broader satirical scaling-­down: a calculated shrinking of power­f ul and self-­legitimating persons and institutions. A key example: in 1711, Swift achieved a dramatic po­l iti­cal victory over John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722). His ironic interplay of public and private scales served to undercut the po­liti­cal legitimacy of the high-­flying military man and ambitious politico. Swift’s scale-­bending satire went far in redefining the terms in which the general’s relationship to the nation and the public would be i­ magined. He found early on the value of engaging the reading public as a way of effecting po­liti­cal change. Employed as a po­liti­cal columnist by Tory mastermind Robert Harley, Swift demonstrated the efficacy not only of public interventions but of opinion-­making built around issues of public and private scale. The po­liti­cal dynamics of 1710–1711 rewarded such an effort in part due to the apparent smallness, intimacy, and secrecy of court politics, which of course si­mul­ta­ neously involved national and international politics. The Duke and his influential wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, however, had not relied on elite secrecy alone: they had indeed tried to enhance their power by manipulating public opinion as well, opening the door to critique through the new medium of the public sphere. As a supremely power­f ul ­couple, John and Sarah Churchill are con­spic­u­ous for their extraordinary ambitions on both Eu­ro­pean and national scales—­ambitions that also involved a mind-­boggling level of personal greed and accumulated wealth. Their outsize raids on the public purse ­were an affront to decency and common sense, and it was Swift who gave a new voice and a newly sharpened edge to that common sense. The War of the Spanish Succession, following hard upon King William’s War (1688–1697), made clear that the financing of war entailed the channeling of public money to private interests tied to military logistics. War profiteers, Swift argued, ­were tilting national policy ­towards endlessly prolonged war. The examples of Caesar and C ­ romwell, so Swift wrote, illustrate one sort of reason for a general to want to interfere in government: the bald usurpation of civilian power. The other would be “To preserve ­those in Power who are for perpetuating a War, rather than see ­others advanced, who they are sure ­will use all proper means to promote a safe and Honourable Peace.”1 Swift’s ultimate achievement in this conflict during 1710–1711, pitting pen against sword, was to point up the reconstitution of po­liti­cal legitimacy as the power of the public sphere took hold. That the pen could be mightier than the sword demonstrated a new economy of scale in which public opinion went far to legitimate po­liti­cal power. Although Swift’s opinion-­making

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interventions ­were sufficiently remarkable, his more original contribution was to catalyze a language of scalar interplay by which the legitimacy of public actions could be critically repudiated—in short, delegitimated. The story of Swift’s journalistic ­battle with the Duke of Marlborough involves a nimble politics of scale-­ shifting during the years between 1710 and 1712. Although Swift was mainly responsible for toppling the Duke from his government posts, his true achievement was to rescale Churchill himself: to shrink him from a g­ reat Protestant hero to a greedy schemer. The extent to which Marlborough had profited personally from his governmental and military power enabled this downscaling. Although the mock-­heroic attack on “greatness” is a familiar theme, the double thrust of Swift’s delegitimating attack may be less so: Marlborough’s war-­profiteering is brutally exposed as si­mul­ta­neously banal and gargantuan.

Monumental Carnage A master of court intrigue, John Churchill had orchestrated the decisive military defections from James II to William of Orange in 1688. Although the side-­switching Churchill had not been initially trusted by William III, he would eventually receive an earldom for his po­liti­cal and military efforts on the king’s behalf. Each of Marlborough’s early major ­battles during the reign of Queen Anne—­Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenarde (1708)—­was a brilliant, if costly, success.2 Historians of Marlborough’s military strategy generally contrast the duke’s pursuit of decisive b ­ attles with the con­temporary preference for slow-­paced, defensive sieges that, proceeding by attrition, did not always produce victory or defeat.3 The b ­ attle of Malplaquet (1709), however, was the worst of both worlds: an exceedingly ­v iolent stalemate in which the French suffered 9,000 casualties and the allies (including the armies of Britain and the Holy Roman Empire) 24,000.4 As general commander of the allies, the Duke of Marlborough successfully prevented the formation of a Franco-­Spanish and Catholic superpower. Marlborough’s military successes, however, also implied a po­liti­cal strategy of escalating commitment past any point of return. Marlborough indeed dreamt of a last enormous showdown with the French army in Paris.5 His preeminence as a master of strategy and tactics arguably constituted a new sort of heroic greatness—­a ­factor that could overcome larger armies. Even so, ­t here would be a sense in which considerations of number, as a means of legitimacy, came to work against that greatness. His ambitions w ­ ere fi­nally impossible to accommodate in a nation in which ­t here was now some degree of po­liti­cal and financial accountability. The ­Battle of Blenheim in 1704, decisively neutralizing the French, was Marlborough’s strategic masterpiece. Such military accomplishments drew full-­throated praise from poetic flatterers, most doubtless angling for patronage.6 That Marlborough was an exceptionally gifted military thinker t­ here can be no doubt. He was admired both for his abilities at ­g rand strategy and his scrupulous attention to logistics—­his unusual focus, for example, on maintaining unbroken supply lines.7 As an influential maker of national policy, however, his rec­ord is much less clear.

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The self-­serving nature of Marlborough’s policy decisions belies evidence of his rationality in that broader sense. His involvement was arranged so as to pay off personally, on a sensational scale. Even as he pushed for war, the funds designated for intelligence (“secret ser­v ice”) lined his pocket. Marlborough, in 1705, had received from Anne both his upgrade from earl to duke and the grant of Woodstock Manor, more than 15,000 acres. On the latter, he began to construct Blenheim Palace, memorializing by its name the momentous victory that took the lives of some 30,000 men. Marlborough the individual profiteer became the tail wagging the national dog. For much of the first de­cade of the eigh­teenth ­century, ­t here seemed to be only a few public doubters of Marlborough’s greatness. An especially popu­lar theme in the large body of celebratory verse is Marlborough’s march to the Danube, a gambit during which French squadrons fled into the river, floundered catastrophically, and drowned in large numbers. What made such public gloating at least acceptable was the notion that Marlborough had saved Protestant Eu­rope from Roman Catholic domination. Such deeds did not go unrewarded: by 1704, the emoluments granted to the duke and duchess amounted to £65,000 per year.8 Marlborough’s much-­praised military campaign on the Continent crippled not only military enemies but also centers of textile production: a “direct-­action” approach to economic rivals.9 He simply laid waste to Bavaria, burning some 300 villages.10 Charles Spencer, a descendant, informs us that Marlborough’s brutal conduct was “by the standards of the age, a disgrace.”11 In any case, by crushing the Franco-­ Bavarian forces, Marlborough entirely repositioned Britain vis-­à-­v is France, its chief imperial rival. It was Marlborough who made pos­si­ble, in the words of David Chandler, “the expansion of the British Empire during the eigh­teenth c­ entury.”12 Corruption, however, and not vio­lence against civilians, was the Achilles heel of the Whig hero. General Marlborough would spend years building, at government expense, onto Blenheim Palace—­not only an outrageously lavish and expensive example of palatial excess but a triumphalist monument to militarism as such. If public watchdogs could be awakened, nothing could legitimate such a massive private misappropriation of public goods.

Courting Trou­ble: Favorites and Corruption Sarah Churchill, the fiery and brilliant Duchess of Marlborough, had made it the founding princi­ple of her intimacy with Anne never to flatter her. For de­cades, this candor had served both of them well. As queen, however, Anne favored the “Church” or Tory party, whereas Sarah lost no opportunity to push a Whig agenda. This relentless po­liti­cal disagreement eventually grew irksome to the queen, and their falling out was painful and dramatic. In 1707, Sarah was displaced in the queen’s inmost circle by Abigail Masham, a commoner (1670–1734). Masham was a High Tory and a poor relation of Sarah Churchill whom the latter had, as she wrote bitterly, “raised from the dust”—­t hat is, procured a place in court.13 A Tory

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satire from 1710, using the form of a mock-­litany, depicts the Whigs as praying for the good old days when the queen and duchess w ­ ere intimate. Oramus (recte Oremus, Let us pray) begins each stanza, of which the following is an example: That a Dutchess be in the same Grace as before And hold our fast Friend, tho’ we cannot explore, Or ever have heard of one Good in her more.14

This author apparently feels that the Tories have ­little to lose, in comparison with the Whigs, by intimating a sexual affair between the controversial duchess and the queen. The verb hold implies both to embrace and to control: this ironic commingling of the physical and symbolic sought to subvert the duke’s popularity, which, both within and beyond the army, was a mighty force to be reckoned with. Even ­after she had rid herself of Sarah Churchill’s po­liti­cal harangues, the queen would decide to keep the duke on for a while as commander of the allied forces. So long as the duke’s own prestige at court was a f­ actor in Europe-­wide negotiations, both the captain-­general and the queen would try to conceal the fall of the difficult duchess from royal f­ avor. Abigail Masham, the queen’s new favorite, served to push a very dif­fer­ent agenda—­a significant exchange of Tory ministers for the fallen Whig ministry.15 Masham was also a cousin of Swift’s Tory mentor, Robert Harley. This rotation of favorites was a foreshadowing of po­liti­cal developments to come. On 7 January 1709, Marlborough wrote to his wife about his frustration that the queen could not be “made sensible” of the “malice” of Abigail Masham.16 Masham attracted controversy for having vis­i­ble influence over the monarch. Her influence over Queen Anne was in some quarters construed as sexual. At such a historical distance, we cannot easily disentangle the tropes of “influence” from “sexual thraldom.” In any case, Sarah Churchill accused Queen Anne in a jaw-­dropping letter of 26 July 1708 of having “noe inclination for any but of one’s own sex.”17 Frances Harris terms this “one of the most insolent letters ever written by a subject to a sovereign.”18 This insolence is evident in other aspects of the situation. As the tradition of civic republicanism had made clear, a single private person never was to outweigh the public good. How much worse, then, when one single f­ amily, however worthy, seemed to have an unlimited claim on the public purse. The unending cost of Blenheim Palace was a symptom of stupendous corruption. The point is po­liti­cal rather than l­ egal: the grotesque and shameful disproportion between the national interest and one ­family’s return on its mono­poly on major government contracts. Marlborough had in effect been his own paymaster. He had personally accepted, by way of “perquisites,” a share of vari­ous enormous contracts. Th ­ ese included, for example, the contract to pay for foreign auxiliaries on which Britain heavi­ly relied (a 2.5 ­percent kickback, for instance, from all military subsidies to Austria) and the contract for providing bread and transport to Britain’s own troops. He had also appropriated a huge slush fund to be used for gathering intelligence. If this sort of ­t hing was merely standard practice—­par for the course, as some biographers of Marlborough contend—­t he duke seems to have taken it to a new level.

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­ egal technicalities aside, he seems to have set out to ravish Britain almost as L thoroughly as he had ravished Bavaria.

King Midas at Blenheim The politics of the moment precipitated from Jonathan Swift a language of clashing scales. In a poem written and published in 1711, Swift compares Marlborough to King Midas, the figure from Ovidian fable with a golden touch—­a touch he suggests the general has inherited: THis Tale inclines the gentle Reader To think upon a certain Leader, To whom from Midas down, descends That Virtue in the Fin­gers ends: What ­else by Perquisites are meant, By Pensions, Bribes, and three per Cent? By Places and Commissions sold, And turning Dung it self to Gold?19

The power or “Virtue” of transforming national assets into personal “Gold” is of course precisely the opposite of any sort of public-­spirited virtue. “Perquisites” is a name that transmutes “Dung”—­t he horrible detritus of war—to wealth that was vast even on a national scale. Marlborough’s obscene wealth left him po­liti­cally exposed. He had become the richest subject in Britain. At the height of his military success, moreover, he tried to jump scales even further, lobbying Queen Anne to be appointed captain-­general of the army for life20—an initiative that, had it succeeded, would have rendered him all but untouchable and altered in the pro­cess the balance of power between civil and military authority. Indeed, even by the lax standards of the day, the Duke of Marlborough was, in his crude approach to the public trough, arrogant beyond mea­sure. Genius and a colossal sense of entitlement coexisted in his nature. Lord Bolingbroke, as Bryan Bevan tells us, “usually referred to Marlborough as ‘that ­great man,’ ”21 a bitterly ironic gauge both of the sheer dimensions of Marlborough’s exploits against the French and of his own vast sense of entitlement. Writing to Stella in January 1710 (1711 N.S), Swift seems momentarily to relent, recognizing the exceptional military capacities of Marlborough: “I question w ­ hether ever any wise state laid aside a general who had been successful nine years together, whom the ­enemy so much dread; and his own soldiers cannot but believe must always conquer; and you know that in war opinion is nine parts in ten.”22 By March 1710/1711, however, he had reverted to the harder Tory view that Marlborough’s avarice had “ruined us”—­t hat is, the nation.23 In January 1712, when Marlborough’s po­liti­cal fate had been sealed, he writes to Stella of Marlborough: “He is certainly a vile man, and has no sort of merit beside the military.”24 Swift reinforced this judgment with a marginal comment written in a book devoted to describing characters at court

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during the reigns of William III, Anne, and George I. Below a glowing description of Marlborough is Swift’s acerbic annotation, “Detestably Covetous.”25 To challenge so power­ful and iconic a figure was of course extremely risky. Even with the direct sponsorship of the ascendant Tory ministry ­under Queen Anne, Swift was playing for high stakes in 1710, when he became, in The Examiner, the leading propagandist for ­t hose attempting to topple Marlborough. Blenheim had been considered a b ­ attle on which the fate of Eu­rope hinged; and that triumph of 1704 was not only revived by apologists for Marlborough but stretched into the pre­ sent. Eu­rope’s fate continued, it was said, to depend on the skill of Marlborough’s command. In fact, however—as the bloody stalemate at Malplaquet suggested—­ Marlborough’s essential strategy, to force major ­battles,26 had reached a point marked both by horrifying casualties and diminishing military returns. Meanwhile, his personal extravagance at state expense had exceeded all bounds. By insisting on monumentalizing himself on so gargantuan a scale, through such a charmless and heavy pile as Blenheim Palace, Marlborough helped to bring about the subversion of his own myth.

Accounting for Blood and Trea­sure: The Examiner Good breeding supposedly demanded unquestioning adulation of the duke rather than debate. In The Medley, no. 5 (30 October 1710), a Whig party organ, Arthur Mainwaring accused the nation of ingratitude.27 The stingy nation had failed to thank the duke sufficiently. The Examiner, a Tory organ published weekly, was ready with facts and figures. In his famous Examiner, no. 17 (23 November 1710), Swift sought to answer the Whiggish complaint that Marlborough, having lost two ministerial allies, was the victim of an ungrateful nation. “Whence came this wonderful Simpathy,” he asks, “between the Civil and Military Powers? ­Will the Troops in Flanders refuse to Fight, u ­ nless they can have their own Lord Keeper, their own Lord President of the Council, their own chief Governor of Ireland, and their own Parliament?” (Swift vs Mainwaring, 51). By totting up “A Bill of British Ingratitude”—­a list of the staggering official rewards bestowed on Marlborough—­ Swift computes that, allowing for differences, they amount to 500 times the amount granted to the greatest generals of Roman times (Swift vs Mainwaring, 55–56). The same piece insinuates that Lady Marlborough, once Queen Anne’s closest advisor and keeper of the privy purse, had also been guilty of peculation, having “borrowed” some £22,000 ­toward the costs of Blenheim Palace. “By that you may judge,” Swift concludes, “what the Pretensions of Modern Merit are, where it happens to be its own Paymaster” (57). “Discrediting Marlborough,” as David Oakleaf writes, “he was also discrediting the Whigs, accusing them of profiting from a prolonged war that pandered to the moneyed interest they served.”28 Swift achieves a crucial change in registers: the implied reader moves from identifying with Marlborough as a unique and quasi-­magical hero to placing him within a complex calculus of domestic obligations, po­liti­cal and financial. In taking the mea­sure of

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the duke, the rational and quantitative serve public interest: the hopes for accountability are bound up with notions of the public sphere. Numbers told a clear story. The anonymous author of The Speech of the Lord Haversham’s Ghost maintains that Blenheim Palace is a “Public Monument of the British Courage, of the Generosity of the Queen, and an ornament of the Kingdom.”29 That such a monumental edifice remained in private hands of course remained a glaring contradiction. Swift’s interplay of national and individual scales could scarcely be answered in its own audit-­like terms. Meanwhile, Marlborough no longer enjoyed the protective shelter of marriage to the queen’s favorite. His abuse of the public trust was exposed to the daylight of publicity, not without g­ reat controversy. On 13 December 1710 Swift wrote to Stella to report that three generals had been dismissed from the army for “drinking Destruction to the pre­sent ministry.”30 So controversial was the anti-­war, anti-­Marlborough Harley at this point that he was to experience assassination attempts in 1711 and 1712. The fatal blow to Marlborough’s cabinet posting came when Swift published a bombshell of a pamphlet, The Conduct of the Allies (1711), which was timed to appear as a new session of Parliament began. An attack on the spending of blood and trea­ sure for the sole benefit of Dutch allies, the pamphlet builds a devastating case against prolonging the War of the Spanish Succession any further. The pamphlet was, as Christine Gerrard puts it, “above all, propaganda for peace.”31 As his epithet “Dutch-­hearted Whigs” suggests,32 Swift’s enmity t­ oward the Dutch—no mere ethnic prejudice—is po­liti­cal and ideological. Swift opposed what we might term the “Dutchification” of Britain: its transformation, by way of the Financial Revolution, into a trading empire à la the United Provinces but superior to the Dutch East India Com­pany in military and naval power. Though The Conduct of the Allies was not cheap, as Swift notes in the Journal to Stella, it sold at a furious pace, ­going through one edition ­after another. Eventually it sold some 11,000 copies, an extraordinary achievement for the time, and a vast propaganda success that in fact had its desired effect.33 Good publicity had built Marlborough up as an outsized and invincible British conqueror. That which would bring him down was bad publicity—­a close analy­sis of the duke as a drain on public wealth. Personal venality is a supremely unattractive motive for the prolongation of war. Swift’s best-­selling and lethal attack on Marlborough in The Conduct of the Allies focuses on this devastating ­angle: “So that ­whether this War ­were prudently begun or not, it is plain, that the true Spring or Motive of it, was the aggrandizing a par­ tic­u­lar Family, and in short, a War of the General [Marlborough] and the Ministry, and not of the Prince or ­People.”34 That which masquerades as the public good as such is instead—so Swift contends—­a proj­ect for illegitimately advancing the wealth and power of a private individual and his ­family. Such a conflation of two levels—­particular and general interests, individual and national—­could be dislodged only by a concerted and risky strategy of delegitimation. Public debate on the details of Marlborough’s perks would indeed prove to be damning and yet si­mul­ta­neously devoid of glamour. The exposure of ­great pettiness seems to reveal a certain lack of imagination, a hollow banality.

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As Swift knew well, the power­ful are generally expert at legitimating and indemnifying themselves. And indeed, having founded a titled ­family, Marlborough has had no shortage of influential descendants to burnish his image: above all, Sir Winston Churchill, who devoted a lengthy and hagiographic biography to his famous ancestor. Among academic biographers, though all concede that Marlborough wanted to prolong the war with France, few have seen fit to engage directly with Swift’s charge. Such a charge, even granting Marlborough’s rare military genius, would not be easy to answer. Marlborough did deliberately confuse his private and familial interests with ­t hose of the nation; and he did thereby grow stupendously rich. He was, as David Chandler says, “avid throughout his life for wealth, power, and social position.”35 Most damning of all was Swift’s warning about the ultimate ambitions of Marlborough, which ­imagined his aggrandizing himself po­liti­cally at the expense even of Queen Anne: For nothing is so apt to break even the bravest Spirits, as a continual Chain of Oppressions: One Injury is best defended by a second, and this by a third. By ­t hese Steps, the old Masters of the Palace in France became Masters of the Kingdom; and by ­t hese Steps a G—­l during Plea­sure, might have grown into a General for Life, and a G—­l for Life into a King.36

The scenario at which Swift hints h ­ ere, which strikes a major nerve, was not absent from the mind of Marlborough’s supporters. His detractors would certainly not let go of it. ­After Marlborough’s fall, a broadside poem of 1712 described him as a John “who’d be styl’d John the Second.”37 The fear of military encroachment on civilian power was indeed the right weapon to wield against so ambitious and self-­maximizing a general. Before peace could be arranged—­this was the Tory agenda—­Marlborough would have to be toppled. In his Examiner of 3 January 1711, Swift responds to a complaint that a certain “Glorious Edifice” may now stand “unfinished,” now a “monument to instability.” This is his pungent reply: “­W hether it stands or falls, it w ­ ill remain a monument of something ­else besides Instability: But let that pass; if it stands unfinished, it ­will agree so much the better with the Genius of the Architect [Sir John Vanbrugh], who hath a par­tic­u­lar Talent and Fancy for building Ruins.”38 The gargantuan scale of Blenheim had begun to work against the duke. Swift satirically re­scaled the “national monument” to “something else”—to glaring evidence of the singular avarice and sublime egotism of a single individual.

Fables of Insignificance Charged with peculation, Marlborough was fi­nally dismissed in December of 1711—­ the last of the Queen’s Whig ministers to fall. Swift responded with a poetic fable in the vein of Aesop. Fables are constitutively inclusive, appealing to ­children and adults alike with a g­ reat immediacy, and they often feature small worlds and small protagonists. Swift uses ­t hese tendencies ­toward banal domestication and

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miniaturization for ironic purposes. In “A Fable of the ­Widow and Her Cat” (1712), he tells the tale of a ­widow who fi­nally gets rid of a haughty and exploitative cat. The domestic fable concludes with the ­w idow’s rebuking the greedy cat, as follows: Tell me, Perfidious! Was it fit To make my Cream a PERQUISITE, And Steal to mend your Wages? So flagrant is Thy Insolence, So vile Thy Breach of Trust is; That longer with Thee to Dispense, ­Were want of Pow’r, or want of Sense: ­Here, Towzer! Do Him Justice.39

Swift’s figurative domestication reduces affairs at the national level to the literal domesticity of ­house­hold politics. The ousting of a greedy cat is simply no big deal. Swift’s subversive interplay between the two senses of “domestic” animates his satire. Through the disarming miniaturization of Aesopian fable, Swift articulates, with stark clarity, the Duke’s all-­consuming greed. This moral pettiness, even if acted out on the national scale, is presented as transparent. Queen Anne belatedly de­cided in 1712 to quit using state money to pay for the vast compound at Blenheim Palace, still in pro­gress. Furthermore, Swift saw fit in Examiner, no 20 of 14 December 1710, to defend Abigail Masham against t­ hose (including Mainwaring, Marlborough (the duke), and Sunderland) who sought “to impeach an innocent L[a]dy, for no Reason imaginable, but her faithful and diligent Ser­v ice to the Q[ueen]” (Swift vs Mainwaring, 100). One won­ders if anyone believed that Masham, who dined weekly with Harley and Swift, was not a po­liti­cal player. She could be seen as relatively small fry, to be sure; and the paragraph concludes with a witty analogue for ­t hose who ­were preoccupied with her: “I remember likewise the Story of a ­Giant in Rabelais, who us’d to feed upon Wind-­mills, but was unfortunately choak’d with a small lump of fresh Butter, before a warm Oven” (Swift vs Mainwaring, 100). ­Great pettiness again: an oxymoron achieved in satirical terms by the analogical use of clashing scales. This almost Gulliverian trope mocks the pettiness of getting worked up about court favorites—­a line that must have made Swift smile knowingly as he wrote it. Not only had Marlborough been removed from the scene, he was by Swift satirically reduced to one more banal fat-­cat, far from indispensable. ­Here the register chosen by Swift provokes not debate and analy­sis but a wry smile. It is pleasing to imagine Queen Anne’s house-­cleaning, however consequential, in such familiar terms.

Legacies of the ­Great At stake in the fate of Marlborough is the question, in Georg Friedrich Hegel’s formulation, of applying moral strictures to “world-­historical” individuals. ­Because

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even their willingness to shed blood contributes to the inevitable unfolding of the World-­Spirit, Hegel urges us not to be overly critical of such figures40—­t he likes, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the ­Great. “So mighty a form,” Hegel writes of the World-­Spirit incarnate, “must trample down many an innocent flower—­crush to pieces many an object in its path.” 41 Swift’s very dif­fer­ ent view of such figures stems in part from his civic-­humanist refusal to compartmentalize public and private virtue. Indeed, Marlborough’s aggressive profiteering from wars of aggression is arguably of a piece with, and intrinsic to, a war policy designed to destroy rival commercial infrastructure as well as military rivals. Swift is not generous, some have said, but the live issue of imperial aggression forbids us to frame the satire as merely an attack on the helpless dead. Sir Winston Churchill—­himself a dedicated imperialist—­spells out the nature of his ancestor’s legacy to the next generation when he fell from grace in 1715: “Before [Sir Robert] Walpole ­t here spread that long reign of power which consolidated the achievement of Marlborough’s wars, and laid the foundations on which the g­ reat Chatham was afterwards to build the further expansion of E ­ ngland.” 42 The Seven Years War, which Sir Winston plausibly calls the first world war, would begin a mere thirty years a­ fter the publication of Gulliver’s Travels: not evidence of special prescience on Swift’s part, perhaps, but certainly evidence that he could extrapolate from both the conflicts of the seventeenth ­century and the efforts, such as the ­Triple League, to contain them. Like an updated Marlborough, Chatham (William Pitt the Elder) would emerge by 1759 as the new scourge of the French. In Rodondo: or, The State Jugglers (1763), Hugh Dalrymple—no second Swift, to be sure—­would satirize the oratorical demagoguery of Pitt, the so-­called “­Great Commoner,” ascribing to him a blithe disregard for the cost of war in blood: “What tell you me of British Blood? / I buy it just as cheap as mud.” 43 And so the Second Empire, albeit bruised by scandals in India and a stinging defeat in Amer­i­ca, would eventually emerge from the first: a legacy, for better or worse, of Marlborough’s achievements. ­A fter his precipitous fall from po­liti­cal grace, the Duke, along with his wife, found it best to go into exile on the Continent, settling in Frankfurt am Main in 1713. Swift then applied a more direct logic of delegitimation to Marlborough’s legacy, still very much in play. His poetic attack on Marlborough upon his death in 1722, “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General,” has sometimes been taken as a gratuitous overflow of bile t­ oward the helpless corpse of a defunct ­enemy. De mortuis nil nisi bonum / bene, so they say: to do other­wise is uncivil.44 But ­here is Swift on the recently deceased Marlborough: This world he cumber’d long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that’s the reason, some folks think, He left ­behind so g­ reat a s—­k.45

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift most likely glances again at Marlborough by means of the Lilliputian High Admiral Skyresh Bolgolam. Readers w ­ ill recall that Bolgolam,

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Gulliver’s “mortal E ­ nemy,” draws up the articles of impeachment against him, which include his “treasonous” refusal utterly to destroy Blefuscu.46 De mortuis nil nisi bonum / bene: when applied to extremely power­f ul public figures, the polite convention that one ­ought to speak only good ­t hings of the dead becomes fatuous. “Truth,” as Louise K. Barnett writes, “demands holding the dead accountable for their evils.” 47 Indeed, perhaps t­ hose who decide public affairs would make better decisions if they could not assume that a polite amnesia would surround their memories with a fog of positive platitudes. Swift was in any case hardly inclined to assume the dead ­were beyond criticism. “Yet,” as he wrote in response to this very maxim, “although their Memories w ­ ill rot, ­there may be some Benefit for their Survivers [sic], to smell it while it is rotting.” 48 Legacies can be relevant long a­ fter the death of the principal. In The ­Grand Accuser the Greatest of All CRIMINALS (1735),49 an anonymous pamphleteer rehashes, and tries again to refute, Swift’s charges in The Examiner—­a timing that doubtless had had to do with a new and rising clamor for war with Spain. Such is the force of an aggressive legacy, and such is the reason to satirize it even a­ fter the death of the principal. And so Swift recasts the legacy of such world-­beating greatness as no more than a charred and malodorous candlewick, ingloriously snuffed at last. Hence, as well the malicious Skyresh Bolgolam, and hence Gulliver’s recounting an observation made by the king of Brobdingnag: “that [En­glish] Generals must needs be richer than our Kings” (2.4.14). Sarah Churchill, who lived u ­ ntil 1744, would remain the richest w ­ oman in Eu­rope. In 1713, Swift had written, in The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, that it was to her “the Duke is chiefly indebted for his Greatness and his Fall.”50 If the fate of nations hinged on the Duke of Marlborough, the fate of Marlborough was not in­de­pen­dent of his wife’s volatile relations with the queen. A harsher version of this sentiment occurs to Gulliver, ­after his trip to the underworld in book 3 has disillusioned him about history and its ­causes. In the netherworld, Gulliver “discovered the true ­Causes of many ­great Events that have surprized the World: How a Whore can govern the Back-­stairs, the Back-­stairs a Council, and the Council a Senate” (3.8. 6). Triviality and contingency are the significant points at issue. One sort of illegitimacy lurks in the term “whore,” to be sure; but the real point is simply the outrageously trivial c­ auses that often underlie momentous events. We know of Cleopatra’s nose, according to Pascal, as one such contingent motor of history. Perhaps Abigail’s nose, however red, was another. The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen was published only ­after Swift’s death. An angry riposte from 1758 attempted to undo the damage done therein to the legacies of Marlborough, Godolphin, Sunderland, and other Whig luminaries. In 1758, Britain was involved in a new war with France, and this intervention against Swift’s posthumous book seeks to validate the Whig doctrine ­under Queen Anne “that no peace could be secure for Britain, while Spain or the West-­Indies remained in the possession of the Bourbon ­family.”51 The anonymous author calls Swift “the most formidable of Harley’s calumniators,”52 a shrewd attempt to diminish his legacy. Let us concede, however, that Swift was indeed fully engaged as

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Harley’s brilliant and deadly calumniator. Surely t­ hose who for year a­ fter year drive the policy of an aggressive war abroad must risk even scathing public critique; and surely t­ hose who profit personally from such a policy open themselves to po­liti­cal calumny. For this anonymous author, in any case, the most unbearable accusation made by the Harleian party, aimed at the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, was “th[e]ir having delighted in war.”53 That was of course precisely what was in question. One need not understand by this that they literally took perverted plea­sure in patriotic gore, but rather that they rationally used war as an acceptable means to their ends, financial and other­w ise. The pamphlet is dedicated to the second Duke of Marlborough, son of the first. The first Duke of Marlborough’s military reputation is of course very considerable: he is still mentioned in the same breath as Wellington, Nelson, and even Napoleon. The duke’s reputation, however, is unlikely ever to rival the worldwide literary legacy of the satirist who in 1711 was rude enough to add up all his perks. In a recent biography of the duke, J. R. Jones, noting the anti-­Dutch theme in Swift’s attack, names the motives ­behind that attack as “rank xenophobia, masquerading as patriotism . . . ​reinforced by appeals to social envy and resentment.”54 The b ­ attle of legacies goes on. The scope of the condemnation h ­ ere reflects the scales on which the duke and duchess operated: Eu­ro­pean (in terms of military leadership and confessional politics) and national (in terms of po­liti­cal power, ambition, and wealth). That so much was at stake in their joint proj­ect, packed with intrigues as it was, only heightened the ugly scandal of their raids on the public purse. At a certain point, hype about the supposed religious fate of Eu­rope as a ­whole simply failed to trump the common sense of British taxpayers. Queen Anne’s Tory ministry, though it would subsequently fall in 1714, did manage in 1713 to bring the War of the Spanish Succession to an end. Infuriated Whigs believed that the war had been s­ topped just as a wounded France had been brought to its knees. Tories welcomed Bolingbroke’s accomplishment in fi­nally ending a long and useless war. In The Examiner of 3–10 January 1711, Swift took up the theme of the lot of British soldiers. That he mentions the cruelty of the ­Middle Passage for slaves is not the least in­ter­est­ing aspect of this passage: The most Miserable part of all the British ­People, are indisputably the Foot Soldiers abroad; not to mention the Arts made use to draw them into the Ser­v ice, many times against their ­Wills, being coupled together like wretched Slaves, and carried far away to die from amidst all of their Friends and Relations.55

To defraud such suffering soldiers was of course cruel and barbaric: precisely the accusation Swift levels at the recently dismissed Duke. This column ends with Swift’s recommendation that the fallen duke make restitution. That did not happen. De­cades ­later, Sarah Churchill would grow disillusioned with the Whigs and become friendly, in her old age, with Alexander Pope. In 1736, she wrote as follows: “Dean Swift gives the most exact account of kings, ministers, bishops, and the courts of justice, that is pos­si­ble to be writ.”56 She presumably did not intend to

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endorse his description of her in The History of the Four Last Years as driven by “sordid Avarice, disdainful Pride, and ungovernable Rage.”57 Her husband, however—­the avaricious duke—­could not have foreseen her late-­life attempt, through Swift, to disentangle her reputation from his.

notes I am very grateful to Hermann J. Real both for expert editorial assistance with this essay and for help based on the holdings of the Ehrenpreis Centre for the Study of Jonathan Swift. Tony Lee has likewise been an engaged and helpful editor. I am grateful to Greg Clingham for the delights of a long friendship. 1. ​Jonathan Swift and Arthur Mainwaring, Swift vs Mainwaring: “The Examiner” and “The Medley,” ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 115–116 (21 December 1710). All further quotations are from this edition and ­w ill be given in parentheses within the text. 2. ​George Macaulay Trevelyan, ­England u ­ nder Queen Anne, II: Ramillies and the Union with Scotland (London: Longmans, Green, 1932). 3. ​Jamel Ostwald, “The ‘Decisive’ ­Battle of Ramillies, 1706: Prerequisites for Decisiveness in Early Modern Warfare,” Journal of Military History 64, no. 3 (July 2000): 650. 4. ​Ostwald, “The ‘Decisive’ ­Battle of Ramillies, 1706,” 665. 5. ​George Malcolm Thomson, The First Churchill: The Life of John, 1st Duke of Marlborough (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 232. 6. ​See Robert D. Horn, Marlborough: A Survey. Panegyrics, Satires, and Biographical Writings, 1688–1788 (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1975). 7. ​See, in addition to Correlli Barnett, Marlborough (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974); David Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (London: B. T. Batsford, 1973), 61–93. 8. ​Bonamy Dobrée, “Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough,” Three Eighteenth-­Century Figures: Sarah Churchill / John Wesley / Giacomo Casanova (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 29. 9. ​D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 204–205. 10. ​Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 276. 11. ​Charles Spencer, ­Battle for Eu­rope: How the Duke of Marlborough Masterminded the Defeat of France at Blenheim (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2004), 210. 12. ​Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander, 2. 13. ​Sarah Churchill, An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from Her First Coming to Court to the Year 1710 (London: James Bettenham, 1742), 206. 14. ​“The W[hi]g’s Litany,” A Collection of Poems for and against Dr. Sacheverell, the third part (London, 1710), 16. 15. ​This is the point unfortunately obscured in Yorgos Lanthimor’s recent film The Favourite (2018) about the passionate triangle involving Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill (the old favourite), and Abigail Masham (the new favourite). 16. ​Marlborough to the Duchess, in John Churchill, The Marlborough-­Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Henry L. Snyder, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 3: 1189 (Letter 1201). 17. ​Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 275–776. 18. ​Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 147. 19. ​Jonathan Swift, “The Fable of Midas, 1712,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 157. 20. ​Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sword (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958), 36. 21. ​Bryan Bevan, Marlborough the Man: A Biography of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough (London: Robert Hale, 1975), 256. 22. ​Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 1:159.

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23. ​Swift, Journal to Stella, 1:208. 24. ​Swift, Journal to Stella, 2:472. 25. ​John Macky, Memoirs of the Secret Ser­vices of John Macky (London, 1733), 7. In the front ­matter of this copy, now in the British Library, is handwritten the following statement: “The M.S. Notes on the Characters in this Book ­were written by Dr. Swift, or transcribed. Aug. 15, 1753. Tho. Birch.” Birch was the owner of the book. Other transcripts of Swift’s original annotations exist; Dirk F. Passmann and Heinz J. Vienken, The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift, 4 vols (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 2:1150. 26. ​Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander, p. 63. 27. ​Arthur Mainwaring, “The Medley, no 5,” The Medleys for the Year 1711: To which are prefix’d, The Five Whig-­Examiners (London: John Darby, 1712), 57–62. 28. ​David Oakleaf, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Jonathan Swift (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 106. The Speech of the Lord Haversham’s Ghost (London: 1711), p. 4. 29. ​ 30. ​Swift, Journal to Stella, 1:120. 31. ​Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8. 32. ​Jonathan Swift, “Peace and Dunkirk,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1: 69. 33. ​Jonathan Swift, En­glish Po­liti­cal Writings, 1711–1714: The Conduct of the Allies and Other Works, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Ian Gadd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–7. 34. ​Swift, The Conduct of the Allies, 83. 35. ​Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander, 313. 36. ​Swift, The Conduct of the Allies, 87. 37. ​“ The Queen’s and the Duke of Ormonde’s New Toast” (London: 1712). BL J/11602​ .i.12/6. 38. ​Jonathan Swift, The Examiner 2, no. 6, January 3–10, 1711. 39. ​Jonathan Swift, “A Fable of the ­Widow and Her Cat,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1: 154. 40. ​G. F. W. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 32. 41. ​Hegel, Philosophy of History, 35. 42. ​Sir Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 2 vols (London: George G. Harrap, 1947), 2:984. 43. ​Hugh Dalrymple, Rodondo: or, The State Jugglers (London, 1763), p. 17. 44. ​Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken, “ ‘Lost to All Shame’: Swift’s A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General,” in Festschrift für Karl Schneider zum 70. Geburtstag am 18. April 1982, eds Ernst S. Dick and Kurt R. Jankowsky (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1982), 467–777. Analogously, Claude Rawson has characterized the tone of this early lampoon as “fierce flat astringency” (“ ‘I the Lofty Stile Decline’: Self-­Apology and the ‘Heroick Strain’ in Some of Swift’s Poems,” The En­glish Hero, 1660–1800 [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982], 104). 45. ​Jonathan Swift, “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1:296. 46. ​Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. David Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 96–101. Hereafter, citations appear in the text and are to this edition of the work. 47. ​Louise K. Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds (Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), 127. 48. ​Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts, 1728–1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 25. 49. ​See Horn, Marlborough: A Survey, 534 (552). 50. ​Jonathan Swift, The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, ed. Herbert Davis, intro. Harold Williams (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), 8.

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51. ​A Whig’s Remarks on the Tory History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne (London: J. Staples, 1758), 10. 52. ​ A Whig’s Remarks, iii. A Whig’s Remarks, 24. 53. ​ 54. ​J. R. Jones, Marlborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 221. 55. ​Jonathan Swift, The Examiner 2, no. 7, January 3–10, 1711. 56. ​Sarah Churchill, Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), 2:195. 57. ​Swift, The History of the Four Last Years, 8.

Western Gardens, Eastern Views asian travelers on greenscapes of the british isles Bärbel Czennia

In an essay on plea­sure gardens, Peter Borsay observes that green spaces in urban eighteenth-­century Britain have long been neglected for two reasons: “the focus of horticultural history has been on the rural and particularly country-­house garden” and “urban historians have concentrated on the nongreen built environment.”1 By expanding traditional garden history into “a broader environmental history,” Borsay alerts his readers to a wealth of under-­researched greenscapes beside the En­g lish landscape garden in the manner of Stourhead or Stowe, ranging from “small pockets of vegetation—­such as private gardens, allotments, churchyards, and squares” to “the sprawling edges of the city,” merging “seamlessly into closes, fields, and meadows of varying types.”2 The significance of ­t hese green spaces (as well as of institutional gardens, public parks, and the more specialized plea­sure gardens) for the daily life of eighteenth-­century town dwellers and outside visitors has been documented and preserved in con­temporary guidebooks, a wealth of private memoirs, letters, and travel reports. Borsay repeatedly refers to personal responses, but, like many other garden historians, concentrates on British-­born garden users, to which he adds a number of tourists from Continental Eu­rope.3 This essay focuses on garden visitors from the East whose journeys to the West bridged much vaster geo­graph­i­cal and cultural distances than ­t hose of German-­ speaking Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach or Karl Philip Moritz. Like eighteenth-­ century urban greenscapes, their visitors from Asia deserve more scholarly attention than they have so far received.4 Not only does their personal testimony confirm the existence of a remarkably broad “spectrum of public and semi-­public green spaces” in eighteenth-­century Britain and Ireland,5 but Eastern perceptions of Western green spaces also differ in in­ter­est­ing ways from ­those of cultural insiders. In addition to a significant “counterflow” of “Indian men and w ­ omen of all 185

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classes” who visited the British Isles during the Georgian era,6 Armenian freedom fighters, Persian diplomats, and many other travelers from the East enjoyed local gardens during extended stays that lasted between several months and several years. Previous studies have highlighted the revisionist and subversive potential of travel narratives from the East, paying special attention to Eastern perceptions of Western technology, gender and sexual relations, and religious practices.7 This essay seeks to expand beyond extant research by examining Eastern responses to Western greenscapes, an aspect of intercultural encounters that remains underexplored. By combining two overlooked areas of research—­green spaces beyond the country ­house garden and Eastern responses to Western outdoor environments— I hope to contribute to three promising trends in eighteenth-­century studies: (a) a shift from nation-­based to globalized eighteenth-­century studies;8 (b) a shift of garden studies from their traditional emphasis on a production-­ oriented history of garden design to a history of garden reception;9 and (c) a shift in historiography that replaces the traditional Eurocentric perspective with one “that seeks to comprehend” Eastern cultures and empires on their own terms “and, in the pro­cess, to de-­exoticize” them.10 Instead of mea­sur­ing Eastern visitors’ experiences of Western gardens against a Western standard and finding them lacking, this essay looks at “Eu­rope . . . ​from afar” and explores green spaces of “the Far West . . . ​from the viewpoint of the . . . ​ East.”11 Privileging the personal impressions and subjective preferences of visitors from Asia rather than t­ hose of con­temporary British garden authorities such as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Lancelot Brown, or Humphry Repton, the essay asks: How much attention did Eastern travelers pay to green spaces in Britain? Which par­tic­u­lar private or public gardens did they experience and how? Which aspects of Western greenscapes did Asian visitors highlight and consider worth sharing with their readers? The last question requires a double answer insofar as the audiences of cultural interlopers may be as diverse as the individual circumstances and identities of the travelers themselves. Depending on the visitors’ linguistic competence, cultural background, and travel motivation, their audiences could be ­limited to the Eastern or the Western hemi­sphere. Travelogues translated during the lifetime of the visitors, however, sometimes encountered very dif­fer­ent audiences in both worlds si­mul­ta­neously or successively. Central to my analy­sis are four Asian travelers who visited the British Isles (often in combination with places on the Eu­ro­pean continent) between 1750 and 1810: Joseph Émïn (1726–1809); Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin (1730–1800?); Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1752–1806); and Mirza Abul Hassan Khan (1776–1846). Joseph Émïn, a Christian Armenian born in Persian exile and a second-­ generation immigrant to Calcutta, visited ­England from 1751 to 1759 and again briefly in 1761, seeking Eu­ro­pean support for the liberation of Armenia from Persian and Ottoman dominion. Having left India as a young adult against his ­father’s ­will, he was initially obliged to earn his living through hard physical l­ abor, which brought him into close contact with native speakers and accelerated his acquisi-

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tion of En­glish. Motivated by youthful hopes of obtaining support for his po­liti­cal cause (which would ultimately be disappointed), Émïn wrote primarily for a British audience that he perceived as potential cultural ally against a hostile Muslim regime in his Central Asian homeland.12 By contrast, Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, a Muslim member of the Bengali social elite who visited E ­ ngland on a diplomatic mission between 1766 and 1768, spoke hardly any En­glish at all and wrote exclusively for a Persian-­speaking audience, although his original travelogue was never published.13 Frustrated by his unsuccessful diplomatic efforts, increasingly alienated from his British travel sponsor, and unable to communicate in En­glish, I’tesamuddin remained comparatively ­isolated during his visit and, as Michael Fisher puts it, confined to “visual observation” of Eu­ro­pean “technology, ­people, and amusements.”14 Indo-­Persian poet and scholar Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, a second-­generation resident of India, visited Ireland, E ­ ngland, Scotland, and France from 1799 to 1803.15 Like I’tesamuddin, he wrote his travelogue primarily for South-­Asian readers in Persian. Owing to an unusual twist in its reception history, however, Abu Taleb’s travel report was made accessible to English-­speaking readers (in 1810) even before it was published for a Persian-­speaking audience in India (in 1812). While I’tesamuddin and Abu Taleb ­were both members of the Bengali educated class and sufficiently independent-­minded to resist uncritical admiration of Western culture, only Abu Taleb, fluent in En­glish and more gregarious and culturally adaptable than I’tesamuddin, became a successful intercultural mediator, widely appreciated in both East and West. Lionized by his aristocratic British hosts as “the Persian Prince,” he clearly appealed to cosmopolitan Western readers who may have perceived him as a nonfictional version of “Oriental” cultural critics of the West pop­ u­lar­ized by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760). Abu Taleb’s travel account also became an authoritative source of cultural information on Britain for several successive generations of educated Indian travelers preparing for a trip to Eu­rope.16 Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, who visited ­England ten years ­later, between 1809 and 1810, wrote exclusively for an Eastern audience.17 Like I’tesamuddin, Abul Hassan had ­little if any command of En­glish, but as a diplomat in the ser­v ice of Fath-­ Ali Shah Qajar (1772–1834), he was surrounded by culturally sensitive, bilingual representatives of the British Empire: Sir Gore Ouseley (1774–1844), his official London host, who introduced him to the local social elite and l­ater became Britain’s first ambassador to Persia; and James Justinian Morier (1782–1849), who became his personal translator and ­later secretary of embassy on Ouseley’s staff. Both mentors enabled Abul Hassan to engage more successfully with native British p ­ eople and culture than I’tesamuddin.

Outdoor Sociability in the Far West For readers familiar with the traditional narrative of eighteenth-­century Western garden history, it may come as a surprise that Eastern travelers pay very ­little

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attention to the aesthetic paradigm shift from the formal Baroque garden to the emerging landscape garden discussed by influential British contemporaries. Neither do Asian visitors associate less formal gardens with an ­i magined “En­g lishness” as repeatedly suggested by Joseph Addison in the Tatler and Spectator and by Horace Walpole in his essay on En­glish garden history.18 Rather than as nation-­builders or aesthetic connoisseurs, eighteenth-­century visitors from the East embrace Western greenscapes predominantly as amateur garden users. Most of all, they enjoy Britain’s parks and gardens as sites of comparatively informal social interaction. In the green outdoors, distinctions of social rank and etiquette appear to be loosened or temporarily suspended, enabling; foreigners to study local customs and to engage more easily with ­people from all walks of life. Explaining to his Asian readers the En­glish custom “for gentlemen of fortune to quit London during the summer months, and to amuse themselves by travelling about the country,” Abu Taleb proudly reports that, in 1801, “Mr. Cockerell,” recently retired ­after de­cades of ser­v ice for the East India Com­pany, “did me the favour to take me with him” and that their “first day’s journey was to Windsor, the country residence of the King” (TAT, 125). Rather than elaborate on any details of the extensive renovations that Windsor Park had under­gone since the beginning of the reign of George III (in 1760), “the Persian Prince” condenses his aesthetic verdict into two adjectives, “extensive and beautiful,” before dedicating the next two thirds of a lengthy paragraph to details of the palace interior. Abul Hassan, “the Persian Ambassador” who visited Windsor ten years a­ fter Abu Taleb, also dispenses with a description of Windsor’s landscaping and appears more interested in the social interaction between a Western ruler and his p ­ eople out of doors: ­After lunch we set off for Windsor, where the King lives with his ­family and staff. The Palace . . . ​is built around a vast open space, like a fortified ­castle. . . . ​­Because Sunday is a holiday in ­England and the ­people do not work, they come out to Windsor to see their King. To the sound of Royal ­music, the King walks along the high terrace which surrounds the ­Castle: he talks to the ­people and listens to their prob­lems. (JAH, 280)

Another famous landscape garden receiving high praise from Abu Taleb is Blenheim. : “This place is, without comparison, superior to any ­thing I ever beheld. The beauties of Windsor Park faded before it; and ­every other place I had visited was effaced from my recollection, on viewing its magnificence” (TAT, 127). While the visitor is impressed by Blenheim’s beauty and extension (“fourteen miles in circumference” TAT, 127), most references to par­tic­u ­lar design features remain comparatively general and could equally well describe other con­temporary landscape gardens(“large and shady trees”; “many rivulets of clear w ­ ater”; “several handsome bridges” TAT, 127). What truly distinguishes Blenheim in the eyes of Abut Taleb, however, and, therefore, results in much greater verbal detail, is the special relationship between a female Western ruler and her loyal servant that the garden commemorates:

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In the ­middle of the park stands a stone pillar, seventy yards high, on the top of which is sculptured, in marble, a statue of the g­ reat Duke, as large as life. This illustrious person was the Generalissimo of Anne, one of the most celebrated Queens of ­England; and, in return for his eminent ser­v ices, was rewarded with this mansion, and a pension of 50,000 rupees annually. (TAT, 127)

The intercultural appeal of the foundation story related to Blenheim’s palace and gardens—­military heroism generously rewarded—is further highlighted by Abu Taleb’s reference to specific symbolic connotations of natu­ral and architectural garden features: “The trees in the park are said to have been planted to resemble an army drawn up in b ­ attle array.”19 Famous landscape gardens in relative proximity to Blenheim, often visited by eighteenth-­century Western garden tourists before or ­after the Duke of Marlborough’s country seat, are not on Abu Taleb’s itinerary. Instead, he privileges estates owned by his British friends and emphasizes the value of their gardens as sites of lively sociability rather than as part of a systematic study of British garden aesthetics : “Early next morning we pursued our journey: we breakfasted at Chipping Norton, and dined at Stowe; a­ fter which we proceeded to Seisincot, the ­house of Mr. Cockerell” (TAT, 128).20 A private garden closer to London, “solely appropriated to the use of the Freemasons” (TAT, 146), also impresses Abu Taleb as “beautiful”; but, again, its beauty is not substantiated by further details of the design. The Eastern visitor appears more attracted to manmade entertainments witnessed within the “Spa Garden,” including elegant illumination, alfresco dining “­under the trees,” and “fire-­works” (TAT, 146–147). Abu Taleb dedicates even more space to a description of the social dynamics of an intercultural encounter observed at this outdoor venue. Flattered by the attention he himself attracts as a representative of a foreign culture, the Eastern visitor is si­mul­ta­neously intrigued and mildly alarmed by the social heterogeneity of the attendants of an event that he likens to “scenes described in the Fairy Tales, or the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” (TAT, 147). While he seems to enjoy the relaxing effect of wine on his own interaction with members of the opposite sex who “frequently challenged” him “to replenish” his glass, he also notices with some bewilderment and concern the destabilizing effect of alcohol on traditional bound­a ries of decorum that normally separate members of the social elite—­ represented by “the Prince of Wales”—­and members “of the lower order”: “Exhilarated, e­ ither by the gay scene before them, or by the wine they had drunk, [they] talked in the most familiar but affectionate style of their ­Brother George” (TAT, 146–147). Abu Taleb’s account of a garden party held by the Duke of Devonshire at Chiswick House likewise concentrates on the illustrious attendees and their comportment. Chiswick’s famous landscape garden, on the other hand, is summed up as “bowers of roses and walks of jessamine” (TAT, 190) and presented as a theatrical backdrop for an enjoyable social function. Both the quantity of references and the greater detail of descriptions of green spaces located in or near big cities suggest that Asian visitors ­were ­either more familiar with or more strongly attracted to public parks than the less accessible

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private country-­house gardens. As temporary transplants based in London and other port cities, they also spent more time in urban greenscapes. Public parks provided inexpensive entertainment and enabled visitors from the East to pursue cultural field studies in the most literal sense. Travel writers frequently describe how the social diversity found in city parks alleviates their feeling of exile or homesickness and how it induces, at least momentarily, a reassuring sense of belonging and integration into a multicultural urban outdoor community. For young Joseph Émïn, a recreational Sunday walk in London’s St. James’s Park became a life-­changing event. Not only did it provide him with an opportunity for people-­watching (LAJE, 88–90), it also gained him access to the upper strata of British society. Strolling along by himself one after­noon in 1755 and identifying in the crowd a former acquaintance from Calcutta “accompanied by another, very tall and well made . . . ​stranger,” the “noble-­looking . . . ​countenance” of the latter induces him to overcome his shyness and to address that person directly (LAJE, 85). Instead of triggering the anticipated humiliating rebuke, his daring violation of social decorum marks the beginning of an impor­tant friendship. The Western “stranger” soon ­after becomes Émïn’s cultural mentor, relieves him from his subsistence as a domestic servant, assists his social networking efforts, and opens the doors to influential members of Britain’s ruling class for him. Having enjoyed some “conversation in his walk,” the younger of the two British gentlemen invites the Asian visitor of modest means to their l­ittle picnic of “some rusks and . . . ​ some milk” in “the small Wilderness” (LAJE, 89). The informality of their first encounter in a public park paves the way for continued sociability on equal terms in the polite stranger’s apartment. “Begged to be favoured with the name of a gentleman who treated him with so much courtesy,” his British host, a ­future defender of Indian interests against British corruption, once again emphasizes their ­human commonalities rather than their social and cultural differences—­ and thereby confirms the social leveling power of public parks: “Sir, my name is Edmund Burke, at your ser­v ice; I am a runaway son from a f­ather, as you are” (LAJE, 90). The beginning of Émïn’s and Burke’s intercultural friendship in St.  James’s Park illustrates the importance of public green spaces for cultural boundary crossers. The temporary suspension of regular social decorum in the informal outdoor environment facilitates a less hierarchical and less asymmetrical form of sociability that would have been far less likely to occur in most eighteenth-­century indoor venues. Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin also enjoys weekend walks in London’s parks as an opportunity to mix with local ­people. Animated by the lively activities of other visitors in front of the “Queen’s Palace,”21 he describes the scene in g­ reat detail: The road . . . ​is very broad and charming. On one side is the palace, on the other a pond which is part of a park. Deer are kept in the park and the walks in it are lined with shady walnut trees. On Sundays, men and w ­ omen, old and young, rich and poor, natives and foreigners, all come h ­ ere to stroll and amuse themselves. In ­these delightful surroundings a heavy heart is automatically lightened.

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Sauntering courtesans with lissom figures and amorous maidens with the f­ aces of houris spread a heavenly aura and the visitor’s soul becomes a flowering garden. Th ­ ese fairy-­faced ravishers of the heart move with a thousand blandishments and coquetries; the earth is transformed into a paradise, and heaven itself hangs down its head in shame at seeing such beauty. Men meet their fairy-­ like sweethearts and make love without fear of rivals or the Police, unlike India, where the Kotwal [Police Chief] is also a cruel guardian of public morals; and gallants can sate their eyes on rosy cheeks. As soon as I saw this place I involuntarily exclaimed: If ­t here’s a heaven on the face of the earth, It is this! It is this! It is this! (WV, 60)

In addition to feeling less isolated among such diverse garden users, I’tesamuddin enjoys the temporary freedom from the stricter social conventions of his home country. Observing the uninhibited recruitment efforts of London prostitutes in a public space and overt flirtation between members of opposite sexes, he employs Persian love poetry to express his sense of liberation. I’tesamuddin’s erotically charged sketch of life in a British urban park not only exoticizes a Western greenscape; it also inverts ste­reo­t ypes of “Oriental” licentiousness perpetuated by Western tales about the East. Both narrative strategies may have heightened the diary’s entertainment value for readers in I’tesamuddin’s home country. When Abul Hassan Khan receives his first guided tour of London’s public parks thirty years ­later, he appears as favorably impressed with the social diversity of the visitors, the unrestrained interactions of Western men and ­women, and the presence of wildlife in the ­middle of a big city, as Émïn and I’tesamuddin before him—­ despite the fact that his visit occurred during the least attractive season of the year, on December 31, 1809: ­ ecause Sunday is their holy day, the En­glish go to church to worship in their B own fashion. Then young and old, nobles and commoners alike, go out riding in carriages in clean and colourful clothes. . . . ​For plea­sure and relaxation, they go to the parks, vast maidans or open spaces, which are the Bagh-­iShah, the King’s Gardens, near the Royal Palace. In En­glish, they are called Hyde Park and St. James’s Park. In the park we saw some 100,000 men and ­women parading themselves on foot and on h ­ orse­back. Elsewhere pretty girls and handsome youths w ­ ere admiring the gardens: although it was winter, the verdure of the park rivalled the Bagh-­iEram, the Garden of Eden. Everywhere t­ here ­were groups chatting gaily together on the grass; but more remarkable ­were the wandering herds of beautifully spotted deer. I was told that the deer belong to the King. They are as ­free as London’s citizens to roam in the pleasant parks, and they live and breed t­ here; they are not afraid of ­people. Indeed, it is a vast and delightful pleasure-­g round—as exhilarating as a draught of wine. If a sorrowing soul traverse ­t hese heavenly fields, his head is

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crowned with flowers of joy, and looking on t­ hese saffron beds—­luxurious as Kashmir’s—he smiles despite himself. In the gardens and on the paths, beauteous ­women shine like the sun and rouse the envy of the stars; and the houris of paradise blush with shame to look upon the rose-­cheeked beauties of the earth below. In absolute amazement, I said to Sir Gore Ouseley: If ­there be paradise on earth, It is this, oh! it is this! (JAH, 78)

According to a footnote in the En­glish translation, the verses quoted by Abul Hassan ­were not his own but “inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Private Audience in the Red Fort of Delhi.”22 The similarity between Abul Hassan’s and I’tesamuddin’s wording, including the quotation of Persian poetry in the manner of Hafiz, indicates Abul Hassan’s familiarity with, if not a degree of dependence on, the ­earlier travelogue. The borrowing of rhetorically effective passages was not uncommon among travelers who visited the same places. ­Going well beyond intentional or unconscious plagiarism, such verbal echoes also illustrate the power of influence among writers and the degree to which Eastern visitors could experience Western horticultural novelties through the eyes of ­those who had traveled before them. Abul Hassan’s enjoyment of informal sociability in London’s parks increases during the following spring ­a fter a horse-­r iding accident. It culminates in high praise for Western hospitality ­toward foreign visitors, contrasted with a less favorable statement on his fellow-­citizens in Persia: I went riding in the Park. For no apparent reason, Sir Gore Ouseley’s mare, which I ­ride e­ very day, fell while we w ­ ere galloping; but I did not fall heavi­ly and was not injured at all. Even so, ­because it is their custom to show kindness to foreigners, all the riders in the Park rushed to see if I had been hurt and to offer help. They dismounted and expressed much anxiety about me. A lady and a gentleman who w ­ ere driving along the path in their carriage got down and came to ask if I was all right. Every­one was very glad that I was unhurt. What a contrast to Ira­ni­ans who feel no compassion or concern for one another’s welfare. (JAH, 234)

Once again, the Eastern visitor pre­sents a Western greenscape as an almost utopian space. However, this encounter in a park is not erotically charged. Instead, Abul Hassan pre­sents it as a transcendent moment, demonstrating how compassion enables members of dif­fer­ent groups to acknowledge each other’s humanity and to bridge cultural divides. Contrasting the empathy of London park visitors with the perceived indifference among his own ­people, the Persian ambassador teaches his compatriots a lesson in ethics. Unlike Voltaire’s or Montesquieu’s defamiliarizing “Oriental” settings, which invited French readers to take a critical look at their own social mores and institutions from the view point of an imaginary “Far” East, the setting of Abul Hassan’s “Occidental” vignette is real and his gratitude for the kindness of Westerners genuine. As I ­w ill show ­later, however,

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Abul Hassan’s favorable view of the West is l­ imited to encounters in the green outdoors, whereas indoor meetings and spaces are often perceived as confining, depressing, or outright sickening. While London’s public parks enjoyed ­great popularity with Asian visitors, London’s official plea­sure gardens inspired far less enthusiasm than the explicit promise of “plea­sure” in their designation suggested. Vauxhall, for instance, seems to have lacked the kind of sociability that all four travelers enjoyed in less commercialized venues. I’tesamuddin describes the variety of Vauxhall entertainments in a politely neutral tone: In the centre of the garden is a ­house where ­t here is ­music and dancing. Celebrated singers perform ­here to warm applause. In the recesses of the garden t­ here are arbours, in one of which ­t here are many pictures depicting men and ­women and, in some cases, beautiful, bewinged fairies. (WV, 70)

But Vauxhall cele­brations of imperial triumph, clearly set up to tickle the national pride of British visitors, affect garden visitors from Asia, especially Indian Muslims, in a more ambiguous way, resulting in a quick change of topics: ­ ere is also an accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of the scene ­a fter the defeat of Nawab Th Siraj-­ud-­dowla at Plassey; it shows Nawab Mir Zafar Ali Khan, Lord Clive and the En­glish officers embracing each other and shaking hands. Elsewhere in the garden ­t here are wonderful displays of fireworks and cascades. (WV, 70)

Abu Taleb, despite his status as a special guest of honor, also emphasizes the excessive crowds at Vauxhall rather than any particularly pleasing sociable encounter or physical feature of the garden itself: Soon ­a fter my arrival in London, an entertainment was given at Vauxhall for the benefit of some public charity. . . . ​As I was ever ready to assist any public charity, I agreed to go; and it was immediately inserted in the newspapers, that the Prince Abu Taleb would honour the gardens with his presence on the appointed night. As Vauxhall is situated on the opposite side of the river, and I had never been seen in that part of the town, the crowd of ­people who assembled in the eve­ning was greater than ever before known, and it was with much difficulty I could pass through them. (TAT, 158)

Abul Hassan, who visited Vauxhall together with “Sir Charles Cockerell and some of his friends” (JAH, 261), appears even less impressed than Eastern travelers before him. While his wording is detailed and descriptive, the scarcity of adjectives expressing strong positive evaluations reveals his emotional detachment. Among the “won­ders” that he finds “impossible to describe” are “four broad ave­nues planted so thickly with tall trees that the sun does not penetrate their branches,” “wooden arcades covered with painted cloth and hung with coloured lanterns—­ gold, red and white—­fi lled with sweet-­smelling oil,” “cascades of ­water,” and “in the centre of the garden . . . ​a pavilion which this eve­ning was decorated with illuminations of the King of ­England and his Royal Crown” (JAH, 261). Although

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“beautiful w ­ omen sang melodious songs to the m ­ usic of 100 musicians,” the visitor appears nearly overwhelmed by the crowds and lack of social segregation: Some 10,000 ladies and gentlemen and ordinary folk w ­ ere ­t here, enjoying themselves; some of them ­were dancing. Under­neath the arcades which line the gardens ­t here ­were some 1000 ­tables, each with chairs for ten ­people, where anyone could sit down to eat or drink wine: a variety of meats and fruits was ready prepared. (JAH, 261)

Poor visibility adds an almost illusionary quality to the nocturnal scene and further diminishes Abul Hassan’s enjoyment: On one side of the gardens a scene had been mounted on a raised platform so that it could be seen by ­people standing at a distance: ­there appeared to be a small lake with a boat and waterfalls and fountains and a bridge over which p ­ eople passed from one side to the other on foot, on h ­ orse­back and in carriages; but I truly do not know if it was real or an illusion. The ave­nues ­were lighted by rows of tall candelabra and by lanterns hung from the trees. In one place t­ here ­were fireworks. . . . ​It was early in the morning when we returned home. (JAH, 261–262)

Compared with the enthusiasm Abul Hassan exhibits during visits to London’s palace parks, the tone of his description of an official plea­sure garden appears dutifully polite rather than truly pleased.

Landscape Beauty and Western Exotic: The Familiar Versus the Unfamiliar While all four Eastern visitors emphasize the role of public parks for urban sociability, they are by no means blind to the beauty of Western gardens. Natu­ral and architectural attractions are presented as especially impor­tant for the well-­being of city dwellers. Introducing his readers to public parks as “places of recreation for the inhabitants” of big Western cities, Abu Taleb offers a list of recurring and typical features, including an extent of ground inclosed with a wall, containing rows of shady trees, verdant pastures, and brooks of w ­ ater, over which are thrown ornamental arches ­either of stone or marble. ­Cattle and sheep are permitted to graze in ­these parks; and deer are frequently allowed to run wild in them, and increase their numbers. . . . ​In some of the parks t­ here are handsome buildings and delightful gardens, to which the inhabitants of the city resort in ­great numbers on Sundays. (TAT, 105).

Contrary to potential expectations of En­glish readers, however, Abu Taleb reserves his highest praise not for a green space in the metropolitan center of the British Empire, London, but for a park located in Britain’s less prestigious imperial backyard, Ireland, open to all Dubliners since 1745:

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The most charming place I have ever beheld is Phoenix Park. Besides the beauties which I have described belonging to parks in general, it contains several buildings of hewn stone; and the Dublin river runs through the ­middle of it, the banks of which are sloped, and formed into verdant lawns; and over the stream are erected two elegant stone bridges: it also contains several rising grounds or hills, on the shaded sides of which, during the winter, snow is sometimes to be seen, while the other parts retain their verdure: this forms an agreeable contrast, and renders the w ­ hole of the scenery peculiarly in­ter­est­i ng. On viewing this delightful spot, I was made sensible of the just sentiments of the En­glish gentlemen in India, who, notwithstanding their high rank and ­great incomes, consider that country as merely a place of temporary sojourn, and have their thoughts always bent on returning to their native land.” (TAT, 106)

Abu Taleb’s partiality for Irish green spaces extends to a park near the city of Kilkenny, “celebrated throughout Ireland for the purity of its air, the fineness of its ­water, the healthiness of its situation and the beauty and urbanity of its inhabitants” (TAT, 99). He also uses his own example to illustrate the power­f ul effect of landscape beauty on the emotions of a perceptive garden user: I was so delighted with the transient view I had of it, that I would not sit down to breakfast, but, having taken a piece of bread in my hand, walked to the river: this I found came rolling down a verdant hill at some distance, but was in its pro­gress interrupted by a fall, which added much to the beauty of the scenery. On the opposite side of the river, the ground was laid out in gardens and orchards, resembling a terrestrial paradise; in short, I am at a loss for words to express the delight I felt on beholding this charming place. (TAT, 99)

However, not all Eastern visitors shared Abu Taleb’s appreciation of Western gardens as complex aesthetic compositions. Joseph Émïn, preoccupied with his military interest and the need for fresh air ­after long work weeks as a servant, takes note neither of the plant life nor of any architectural features in St. James’s Park. In keeping with his involvement in Armenia’s liberation movement, Émïn visits the park more often to watch the changes of the guard (LAJE, 84) and “the drilling of the recruits” (LAJE, 88). I’tesamuddin’s willingness to rec­ord horticultural details depends on their appeal to his personal taste. Underimpressed with Vauxhall, he condenses the plea­ sure garden into “lovely tree-­lined walks,” interrupted at intervals by “wooden pavilions of vari­ous shapes—­triangular, round rectangular or octagonal—­containing statuary festooned with creepers” (WV, 70). By contrast, I’tesamuddin dedicates considerably more narrative space to botanical details that he vividly remembers as pleasant: for instance, to flowers, ­either b ­ ecause of familiarity and a happy sense of recognition, also evident from his use of their Indian names, or ­because of unfamiliarity with local species that impress him as striking and novel: Though ­there is a ­great variety of flowers in India and Persia, I was quite impressed by ­t hose I saw in Vilayet. Among them ­were the tuberose, the ­rose, the cocks-

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comb flower, tulip, marigold, narcissus, gool mhendee, nafurman, beli, mograh, jui and chameli, besides a large number of white, red, yellow and blue flowers whose names I do not know. ­There was one flower, called the carnation, concerning which I recollect the following couplet in praise of a mistress: The ­rose is red, the violet’s blue; Carnation’s sweet, and so are you. It was in ­England that I saw the largest roses in the world, growing in thousands. (WV, 130)

Like I’tesamuddin, Abul Hassan responds more enthusiastically and in greater detail to botanical variety and beauty in Western gardens when he detects ele­ments familiar from his Eastern homeland in the unfamiliar Western environment. In such passages, he adopts an almost poetic language, reverberating with personal memories of Persian gardens in the Mughal or charbagh tradition with their emphasis on pools, fountains, and canals, trees, geometrical ele­ments, and religious symbolism. Referring to the garden adjacent to Sir Ouseley’s country-­house “Claramount,” he rejoices: From the room where we sat we could see a fountain of clear and pure w ­ ater; and Sir Gore Ouseley said he had planted the 30,000 trees of fir and pine himself. We went out to inspect the fountain, the envy of the Fountain of Life, and then we walked among the trees—­c ypress, fir, pine and juniper, citrus, apple and quince—­a nd through the vineyards, planted with a variety of grapes. (JAH, 86)

During a visit to an unspecified country-­house of an Ouseley friend, Abul Hassan enjoys walking along the garden paths admiring the flowers and trees planted by the stream. In the garden ­t here is a fountain like t­ hose we have in Iran, with a water-­jet in the centre. The fish swimming in it are red and white, gold and violet; I was told they are descended from fish originally brought from China. (JAH, 214)

The combined experience of w ­ ater features and fauna or flora of Eastern origin, for instance, cypresses, citrus trees, quinces, and koi fish,23 on a Eu­ro­pean summer day triggers the strongest responses from the Persian visitor. Feeling mentally transported back to his homeland, his imagination momentarily transforms even Western garden o ­ wners into orientalized figures. Describing Kenwood House in Hampstead, Abul Hassan perceives a magnificent ­house set in a large garden. Our young host, Lord Mansfield, graceful as a cypress . . . ​greeted us with much ceremony. He conducted us to his splendid h ­ ouse through woods of juniper, box and spruce, as pleasing as the gardens of Kashmir or the flowering Garden of Eden. (JAH, 223)24

He also uses orientalizing horticultural similes for his romantic interest “Miss Pole,” likening her to a “cypress,” “rosebud,” and “hyacinth” (99). Seen through the

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eyes of a homesick visitor from the East, even St. James’s Park on a bleak December day begins to resemble a Persian garden: Fi­nally we reached a spacious square with colonnades. Nearby, at one side of the square, was a vast pool; and massive trees w ­ ere planted—­like worshippers with arms raised in prayer. Streams of w ­ ater ran in channels. Truly, it was a marvellous sight! (JAH, 59)

Perceptive and emotional, Abul Hassan finds landscape beauty even in the smallest green spaces, including a smaller type of urban green conceived by town-­ planners during the Georgian era, called a “square.”25 Explaining this relatively new Western garden type to his Asian readers, he comments on London’s elegant Portman Square: Many London h ­ ouses are built around “squares”: ­t hese are large, open maidans, enclosed by iron railings as high as a man and set vertically a hand’s breadth apart. The streets between the h ­ ouses and the square are wide enough for three carriages to drive abreast; and streets for carriages, horse-­riders and pedestrians lead out from each corner. Each square belongs to the ­owners of the ­houses surrounding it, and only they are allowed to go in. On each side ­t here is an iron gate which the residents—­men, ­women and ­children—­use when they wish to spend some time walking and relaxing within. The squares are like pleasant gardens, planted with a variety of trees and beautiful, bright flowers. Most squares also have a pool of ­water and wide, straight paths to walk along. Three gardeners are kept busy in each square repairing the paths, planting trees and flowers and tending the shrubs. At night street lamps are lighted—­like t­ hose outside each ­house. The doors and win­dows of all the ­houses look out on to the square. It is pleasant to walk t­ here in all seasons: I always felt like singing and happily looked forward to walking in that pleasure-­garden with Lord Teignmouth and his wife and ­children. The ladies of the square used to watch me from their win­dows. (JAH, 88)

Abul Hassan’s emphasis on gardens as recreational spaces, no ­matter how big or small, rural or urban, formal or informal, is shared by other Asian visitors, including I’tesamuddin and Abu Taleb. The latter additionally displays a strong interest in Western technological innovations related to agriculture and horticulture. While Abu Taleb mentions numerous visits to private country-­house gardens in passing, his rather short and selective comments indicate enjoyment without much concern for par­tic­u­lar Western garden aesthetics. Cockerell’s country retreat in the Cotswolds, for example, is acknowledged as a “delightful spot” (TAT, 128),26 but the host’s invitation for a second visit politely rejected in ­favor of a speedy return to Abu Taleb’s amorous interests in London. The “grounds and garden” of “Mr. Hastings, the late worthy Governor-­general of India” (TAT, 128) in nearby Daylesford are complimented for their own­er’s “­great taste and judgment” (TAT, 129), but the visitor’s attention quickly moves on to details of more practical interest, especially for Indian readers, such as the “arrangement and economy” of a

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Western “farmyard” and a detailed description of Hastings’s dairy. Unfortunately, the En­g lish translator Charles Stewart abbreviates Abu Taleb’s description of a garden-­related Western invention that fascinated Eastern travelers far away from home and craving familiar food: One of the greatest luxuries the En­glish enjoy is the produce of their hot-­houses. In ­these buildings they raise vegetables and fruit in the coldest season of the year; and the ­tables of the rich are covered with pine-­apples, melons, and other fruits of the torrid zone. In this instance they excel us; for none of the Emperors of Hindoostan, in all the plenitude of their power, could ever have forced a gooseberry or a cherry, two of the most common fruits in Eu­rope, to grow in their dominions. (TAT, 159)27

Abu Taleb also praises the green­house of “Mr. Addington, the prime minister, who possesses very extensive gardens, and where I had an opportunity of seeing a large collection of exotics. During the summer, t­ hese trees are exposed in the open air; but in winter they are shut up in rooms covered with glass” (TAT, 125). Abu Taleb’s comments on conservatories (heated by sunlight only or additional stoves) ­were not the first expressions of Eastern admiration for this Western invention. Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin had entertained his Indian readers with construction details of an En­glish “stove ­house” as early as 1765: The cold weather in Eu­rope ­doesn’t allow one to grow Indian fruits and flowers in the open. A special kind of h ­ ouse is constructed for the purpose, three sides of which are of brick, while the fourth, which f­ aces south, is made of glass-­plates that keep out the cold air but let in the sun’s rays. In the cold season stoves are lit the ­house for heat, and fruit and flower seeds are sown in troughs filled with mould. The heat of the stoves and the warmth of the sunlight combine to aid the growth of Indian plants. Eu­ro­pean gardeners grow Eastern fruits in this manner and make a very good profit, charging as much as five rupees for a pomegranate and three for a musk-­melon. (WV, 59)28

Asian visitors embrace older Western garden fashions as pleasantly exotic even a­ fter the British horticultural avant-­garde had begun to stigmatize formal design features as backward or outright unpatriotic. While Pope ridiculed En­glish topiary in the Guardian and Addison politicized trees clipped into ornamental shapes as expressions of “French tyranny,”29 Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, on the other hand, admired fanciful plant sculptures and symmetrical parterres. “The King’s garden, which is outside the city,” he writes, most likely alluding to the formal gardens of Hampton Court, has pleasant walks, lawns, and neatly arranged bed of vari­ous shapes—­triangles, squares, heaxagons and octagons. . . . ​The trees along the walks in the King’s garden are arranged very tastefully. By cutting the branches many of them have been ­shaped into ­human forms, so that at night one might ­mistake them for real ­people. It takes many days of work to tailor the trees into ­these shapes. (WV, 59–60).

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Not only is I’tesamuddin’s comment a valuable reminder of the persisting popularity and ubiquity of formal ele­ments in many En­glish gardens throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury; it also suggests that modern garden historians need to distinguish more between the ideological concerns of eighteenth-­century garden designers and the diversity of tastes of successive generations of ­actual garden users. Oxford’s “many old gardens” are likewise praised not only for their “pleasant walks, flower-­beds, arbours and pools of w ­ ater,” but also for featuring “branches of trees and plants . . . ​cut to form accurate repre­sen­ta­tions of ­human beings, quadrupeds and cottages, which are curiously charming” and “the result of lifelong devotion by expert gardeners” (WV, 71). Another Western curiosity that catches the attention of visitors from Asia is the neoclassical taste for garden statues. While Abu Taleb has unreserved praise for Dublin’s city squares, his tone becomes more ambiguous where he describes the sculptures that ornament such urban gardens: ­ ere are several extensive and beautiful squares. . . . ​In some of the squares t­ here Th is a stone platform erected, on which is placed the equestrian statue of one of their kings; and when seen from a distance, it appears as if the ­horse was curveting in the air. (TAT, 104)

If this passage leaves his readers wondering w ­ hether to admire the unusual equine posture as heroic or to smile about an optical illusion that appears involuntarily comical, Abu Taleb is more openly satirical in the paragraph that follows: In this country, and all through Eu­rope, but especially in France and Italy, statues of stone and marble are held in high estimation, approaching to idolatry. . . . ​ Th ­ ere is a ­great variety of ­t hese figures, and they seem to have appropriate statues for ­every situation . . . ​and in the gardens they put up dev­ils, tigers, or wolves in pursuit of a fox, in hopes that animals, on beholding ­t hese figures, ­w ill be frightened, and not come into the garden. (TAT, 105)

More out­spoken than most Asian visitors, Abu Taleb is a keen observer of gardens in the Far West not only as sites of joyful sociability and as miniature preserves of natu­ral beauty for exhausted urban flâneurs. As I ­w ill show in a third section, he also employs descriptions of green spaces to challenge British concepts of social hierarchy, privilege, and power.

A Cure for Heavy Hearts: Health and Critique of Empire in the Greenscapes of the Far West Some of Abu Taleb’s observations could be interpreted as a subtle critique of empire, directed ­toward readers in his homeland. By pointing out negative aspects of the Western way of life, he indirectly questions Britain’s suitability as a valid model for its imperial zones of influence in the Eastern hemi­sphere. According to Abu Taleb, “The greatest ornament London can boast, is its numerous squares; many of which are very extensive” and all of which contain “a kind of garden” in their

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center, “surrounded with iron rails, to which ­every proprietor of a ­house in the square has a key, and where the w ­ omen and c­ hildren can walk, at all hours, without being liable to molestation or insult” (TAT, 152). While the Eastern visitor admires the beauty and the con­ve­nience of such green islands in big cities and is clearly proud “of being acquainted with Mr. Hartman,” a member of the local social elite “who lived in a very magnificent style in Portman Square” (TAT, 144), Abu Taleb is also aware of the social exclusivity of t­ hese urban greenscapes.30 London’s beautiful squares, he remarks, are “only inhabited by p ­ eople of large fortune” (TAT, 152). Londoners living in less privileged quarters, then, might be more “liable to molestation or insult” close to their homes. Just as in London, the “centre part of some of the squares” in Dublin “is laid out in handsome gardens, where the genteel inhabitants walk e­ very morning and eve­ning, and from which the common ­people are excluded. Bands of wandering musicians also come ­here, and play for a small reward” (TAT, 105). Although this observation does not explic­itly criticize the social stratifications observed in eighteenth-­century British society, Abu Taleb is neither blind to social in­equality nor shy to comment where he detects imperfections in the green paradises of the West. Traversing the Irish countryside in a coach, for example, the Indian visitor contrasts the beauty of elegant country-­houses dotting the landscape between Kilkenny and Dublin with the miserable dwellings of the rural poor: “The poverty of the peasants, or common p ­ eople . . . ​is such, that the peasants of India are rich when compared to them” (TAT, 100). He further elaborates that Irish tenant farmers “never taste meat . . . ​but subsist entirely upon potatoes” and “that, in the farm-­houses, the goats, pigs, dogs, men, w ­ omen, and ­children, lie all together.” Even more surprising, “whilst on our journey, the boys frequently ran for miles with the coach, in hopes of obtaining a piece of bread” (TAT, 100).31 Like an artful painter, Abu Taleb first fills in the background of his canvas with a picturesque landscape. His subsequent injection of hungry, dusty ­children’s ­faces into the foreground of this genre picture, bobbing up and down outside a wealthy traveler’s coach win­ dow, punctures the rural idyll and subtly undermines the suggestion of Western, especially British, perfection. Read against such shocking scenes, Abu Taleb’s seemingly favorable description of “the country all round Dublin” as “very picturesque” and far surpassing London obtains a new, slightly ominous meaning: “At the distance of few miles from the city, ­there is a ­great variety of hamlets and country-­ houses, where the p ­ eople of opulence reside during the summer” (TAT, 105). Exposing the darker side of British rule in Ireland, especially within or close to “the Pale,” the area most strongly associated with forceful British occupation, may also be read as a first step ­toward questioning the legitimacy of British rule in other parts of the world, including India. To discourage any naive notion of Western superiority in his Indian readers, Abu Taleb often employs a mildly satirical, didactic humor that is too artful to be brushed off as the naivete of an innocent abroad. While he clearly admires many aspects of British greenscapes, he never entirely succumbs to the aesthetic norms of Georgian garden design. His mildly irrever-

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ent remarks about the ubiquity of garden sculptures in Ireland and other Eu­ro­ pean countries already revealed his in­de­pen­dent spirit. Rather than becoming overly impressed, he keeps a healthy distance from Western customs and garden tastes. His contention that Irish fountains and statues are surrounded by fences and illuminated at night “to prevent ­people from hurting themselves by r­ unning against them” (TAT, 104) is another example of Abu Taleb’s critical and mildly irreverent sense of humor. Eastern criticism of Western culture sometimes assumes the form of a pseudo-­ compliment, for instance, where expressions of seemingly unqualified enthusiasm for Western green spaces are loaded with subtle hints to Western deficits. Homesick and suffering from the unfamiliar living conditions, Abul Hassan becomes a master of this rhetorical device: by emphasizing the restorative effect of garden visits for his physical and emotional health, he directs his readers’ attention to prob­lems of Western modernization—­u rban sprawl, overcrowding, noise, and environmental pollution. Such relatively specific criticism may in turn encourage Eastern readers to question more radically the cultural and po­liti­cal authority of the West, especially imperial Britain’s attempt to control their Asian homelands. ­After one of Abul Hassan Khan’s many health crises—­a fit of fainting brought on by bad air during an overcrowded reception—­his En­g lish host, Sir Ouseley, takes him on a multi-­day tour of country estates. This trip immediately revives the spirits of the Persian guest but also induces him to name the culprit for his damaged health: ­ fter last night I was not feeling very well and I stayed in bed late. . . . ​Sir Gore A Ouseley de­cided that I needed a change and insisted that I should spend a few days in the country. So we got into the carriage . . . ​and went fifteen miles to the ­house of one of Sir Gore Ouseley’s neighbours in the country. . . . ​Their kindness and the fresh country air—­which is so much better than London’s—­quite cured me of the shock I suffered at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. (JAH, 213)

A week ­later, Abul Hassan is introduced to Richmond Park and Chiswick House and Gardens, both of which he experiences not primarily as highlights of neoclassical En­glish garden design, but as healing places enabling him to reconnect with nature in the most elementary sense: But first we went to Richmond, where ­t here is a Royal Palace. In this season of early spring, the fields are green and the flowers are blooming—­never in all my travels have I seen such a pleasing view. I got out of the carriage and I begged Sir Gore Ouseley to let me stay t­ here for a few days, to relax and banish sorrow, to look upon the tulips and the hyacinths, and to escape for a moment the gloom of London (where even if the sun does emerge from ­behind its veil of cloud, it is often obscured by high walls). But Sir Gore Ouseley replied that it would not be pos­si­ble to find a suitable h ­ ouse for me ­here.

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We went on to the Duchess of Devonshire’s. Her ­house stands in the ­middle of a delightful garden, planted with pine trees and surrounded by a stream, like the Garden of Eden. It is beautifully laid out with flower-­beds and walk-­ways. . . . ​ We returned to town through beautiful green hills and valleys. (JAH, 218)

Abul Hassan’s sense of displacement and the resulting bouts of physical unease required frequent interventions by his British hosts. Visits to country and city gardens stabilized the Persian ambassador’s mood and served as remedy against depression: a multi-­day visit “to the ­house of the Markgravine” was scheduled “so that I might forget my trou­bles in ­those pleasant surroundings” (JAH, 227), a visit to Hyde Park “[b]ecause I was feeling bilious and sad” (JAH, 73). For Abul Hassan, the soothing effect of that “vast open field” increases during spring when it “becomes a flower-­ garden with green lawns two miles square,” and he can share the “paths” with like-­ minded “men and ­women,” also walking “for plea­sure and relaxation” (JAH, 73). Even the smallest patches of city green provide temporary relief for Abul Hassan’s delicate disposition: “Lord Teignmouth . . . ​a good and dear friend . . . ​brought me the key to the [Portman] square in front of his ­house, so that whenever I wished I might take my ease ­t here and so banish the grief and dust of my exile” (JAH, 88). Recognizing signs of homesickness in the face of the Persian diplomat, even the Prince of Wales offers him access to his private gardens at Carlton House: “If ever you are feeling melancholy on a rainy day, come to my covered pavilion in the garden, relax and banish sorrow from your heart. Ride my own h ­ orses and visit the 32 flower-­strewn countryside round London” (JAH, 113). Abul Hassan’s enjoyment of Western gardens, his frequent juxtaposition of healthy country living and sickening confinement in the city, and his proto-­ environmental condemnations of the toxicity of urban development closely resemble arguments si­mul­ta­neously advanced by representatives of con­temporary Romanticism. Abul Hassan seems to share with writers like Words­worth a deep-­ set skepticism t­oward ideas of modernity that deprive h ­ uman beings of elementary resources such as clean air and w ­ ater, open space, quiet, and natu­ral beauty. Coming from the mouth of a geo­graph­i­cal outsider and cultural boundary crosser rather than from a British citizen, however, Abul Hassan’s critique appears to be directed at more power­f ul forces than t­ hose targeted by an emerging local environmentalism. Against the background of Britain’s tightening grip on Persia during the first half of the nineteenth ­century, Abul Hassan’s unease with British urbanization could also be more broadly interpreted as protest against a Janus-­ faced global player that aggressively undermined po­liti­cal sovereignty in the visitor’s homeland while presenting itself to the world as a benevolent harbinger of pro­gress and a (supposedly) superior way of life.

Conclusion In contrast to many travelers from Continental Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca, eighteenth-­ century travelers from Asia did not visit the British Isles primarily as garden tour-

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ists. B ­ ecause their primary motivation for travel to the West was professional and related to their home countries’ po­liti­cal and economic entanglements with the British Empire, the narrative space set aside in their travelogues for descriptions of greenscapes is relatively small. Although ­limited in quantity, Eastern views of Western gardens significantly enhance and diversify our understanding of eighteenth-­century garden uses. ­Whether they explore Britain’s green spaces in the com­pany of local hosts or on their own, garden visitors from the East exhibit an open-­minded but by no means uncritical curiosity for the West. While they welcomed the opportunity to visit private country-­house gardens, they spent far more time in public urban gardens, located closer to Britain’s rapidly growing capital and other big port cities, where most foreigners lived during their temporary residence. Unaffected by inner-­British aesthetic debates and paradigm shifts, Asian visitors sought and found in Western gardens the fulfillment of elementary ­human needs: sociability, natu­ral beauty, physical exercise, and the preservation or restoration of physical and ­mental health. As cultural transplants, visitors from the East delighted in the discovery of the familiar in an unfamiliar world; as intercultural mediators and educators, they introduced their readers to horticultural novelties, innovative garden design and technologies, and foreign social concepts; as temporary settlers in the West, they employed British greenscapes as mirrors, reflecting bumps on the road to modernity and challenging Western ideas of cultural superiority.

notes 1. ​Peter Borsay, “Plea­sure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century,” in The Plea­sure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 51; my emphasis. 2. ​Borsay, “Plea­sure Gardens,” 51. 3. ​Borsay, “Plea­sure Gardens,” 49, 53, 61, 64, and 65. 4. ​See, for instance, Amrita Satapathy, “The Idea of E ­ ngland in Eighteenth-­Century Indian Travel Writing,” CLCWeb: Comparative Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 14, no. 2 (2012),doi​.­org​/­10​.­7771​ /­1481​-­4374​.­1957. I ­w ill use the terms “Asia” and “Asian” in the broadest geo­graph­i­cal sense to cover travel writers from diverse cultural backgrounds and from homelands with territorial bound­aries and designations that remained unstable throughout the eigh­teenth ­century. 5. ​Borsay, “Plea­sure Gardens,” 54. 6. ​Michael H. Fisher, “From India to ­England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no.  1 (2007): 153–172, doi:10.1525/ hlq.2007.70.1.153. 7. ​Simon Digby, “An Eighteenth-­Century Narrative of a Journey from Bengal to ­England: Munshi Ismail’s New History,” Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell, ed. Christopher Shackle (London: SOAS, University of London, 1989), 49–65; Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eigh­teenth ­Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kate Teltscher, “The Shampooing Surgeon and the Persian Prince: Two Indians in Early Nineteenth-­Century Britain,” Interventions 2, no. 3 (2000): 409–423; Mohammad Tavakoli-­Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Pauls Press, 2004); Nigel Leask, “ ‘ Traveling the Other Way’: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810) and Romantic Orientalism,” in Romantic Repre­sen­ta­tions of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin (London: Routledge: 2006), 220–237; C. L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2008); Amrit Sen, “ ‘The Persian Prince in London’: Autoethnography and Positionality in Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan,” Asiatic 2, no. 1 (2008): 58–68; Norbert Schürer, “Surveying the Eighteenth-­Century Anglo-­Indian Canon,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 7, no.  7 (2010): 597–609, and “Sustaining Identity in I’tesamuddin’s The Won­ders of Vilayet,” Eigh­teenth ­Century 52, no. 2 (2011), 137–155; Mona Narain, “Eighteenth-­Century Indians’ Travel Narratives and Cross-­Cultural Encounters with the West,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 9, no. 2 (2012): 151–165. 8. ​See, for instance, Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Globalism: British Lit­ er­a­ture and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014); Samara Anne Cahill and Kevin L. Cope, eds., Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eigh­ teenth ­Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015). 9. ​See, for instance, John Dixon Hunt, The Afterlife of Gardens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: ­Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-­Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 10. ​Quoted from the back cover of Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For the same idea in less condensed form, see Goffman’s introduction, 4–5. 11. ​Goffman, Ottoman Empire, 6. 12. ​Joseph Émïn, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Émïn, an Armenian. Written in En­glish by Himself (London,1792); hereafter cited in text as LAJE. 13. ​Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, The Won­ders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian, of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, trans. Kaiser Haq (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2002). Haq’s version, hereafter cited in text as WV, is based on a Bengali translation by A. B. M. Habibullah (1987) of the Persian original, with additional consideration of James Edward Alexander’s abridged En­glish translation (1827). 14. ​Fisher, “From India to ­England and Back,” 162. 15. ​Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Eu­rope, during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, ed. Daniel O’Quinn (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009); hereafter cited in text as TAT. 16. ​Fisher, “From India to ­England and Back,” 169. 17. ​Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George, 1809–10: The Journal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans. Margaret Morris Cloake (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988); hereafter cited in text as JAH. Several manuscript versions in Persian circulated during the author’s lifetime; a second diplomatic mission to London in 1819 did not result in further publications. 18. ​Discussed controversially by Heinz-­Joachim Müllenbrock, “The ‘En­g lishness’ of the En­glish Landscape Garden and the Ge­ne­tic Role of Lit­er­a­ture: A Reassessment,” Journal of Garden History 8 (1988): 97–103, and Stephen Bending, “Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-­ Century Garden History,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 209–226. 19. ​I thank Richard Coulton, Queen Mary University of London, for alerting me to details of Henry Wise’s original design, which apparently comprised tree arrangements planted to resemble the deployment of troops at the ­battle of Blenheim. It is, however, unlikely that such Baroque mannerisms survived Lancelot Brown’s radical naturalization of the gardens (beginning in 1764) ­until the time of Abu Taleb’s visit in 1801. In the quotation, Abu Taleb possibly refers to information received from his friend Cockerell or from other con­temporary sources. 20. ​I agree with Richard Coulton that “Stowe” in this context does not refer to Cobham’s country seat in Buckinghamshire but is more likely an eighteenth-­century spelling variant for Stow-­on-­t he-­Wold, Gloucestershire, a more con­ve­nient stopping place on a journey from Blenheim to Cockerell’s “Seisincot” (modern “Sezincote”) in the North Cotswolds near Moreton-­in-­Marsh. 21. ​By 1765 prob­ably Buckingham House, bought by George III for Queen Charlotte and their growing ­family.

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22. ​JAH, 79. It is unclear w ­ hether the footnote was added by the translator or originates in Abul Hassan’s manuscript. For the complex textual history of his work and the coexistence of vari­ous copies, see also translator’s foreword, JAH, 9. 23. ​Considering the ge­ne­tic origin of Malus domestica in Central Asian Malus sieversii, even the “apple” could be added to this list. 24. ​Equally enthusiastic are his descriptions of the garden of Brandenburgh House, Hammersmith, (JAH, 178); of “a magnificent four-­storey building set in a square and surrounded by green parkland traversed by two streams” near Greenwich (JAH, 208); of “Wormleybury,” Sir Abraham Hume’s ­house and garden in Hertfordshire (JAH, 215 and 217); of the country-­ house garden of Jessie Goldsmid, ­daughter of an East India Com­pany merchant (JAH, 256); of the garden of Abraham Goldsmid, including “a building which ­houses a collection of all sorts of wild animals and birds from India, China, the New World and Eu­rope, as well as flowers and fruit trees” (JAH, 271); of Ken­sington Gardens where “streams of r­ unning ­water and elegant ave­nues, lined with rows of stately trees . . . ​seem to touch the sky,” and with “trees of fragrant oranges and lemons . . . ​next to trees of other fruits; new green shoots emerging from their beds whisper to the green lawns” (JAH, 79). Abul Hassan’s extraordinary appreciation for and extensive use of Western green spaces is also evident from frequent reports of daily walks and horse-­back excursions in London parks, “the open fields of London,” and the surrounding “countryside.” 25. ​See also Kevin L. Cope, “Creating the Territories of Recreation: Parks, Squares, and the Exotic in London’s L ­ ittle Wilderness,” in Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Lit­er­a­ture in Transition, 1660–1714, ed. Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 324–328. 26. ​According to Raymond Head, The Indian Style (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 37, Abu Taleb’s 1801 visit may have encouraged Cockerell to “indianize” Sezincote (beginning in 1805); see also Bärbel Czennia, “Green Rubies from the Gan­ges: Gardening as Intercultural Networking,” in Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eigh­ teenth ­Century, edited by Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, 92–131 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020). 27. ​“[­Here follows a minute description of a hot-­house, which is omitted.]” (TAT, 159). See also Abu Taleb on Cockerell’s town­house dinners, where “the choicest fruits and rarities procurable in London” ­were served, “produced by artificial heat; for the En­glish, not content with the fruits of their own climate, contrive, by the assistance of glass and fire, to cultivate ­t hose of the torrid zone” (TAT, 125). 28. ​Abul Hassan likewise expresses admiration for En­glish hot-­house technology, calling “the cultivation of fruit in winter” “one of the won­ders of this city” (JAH, 235), although “out-­ of-­season grapes and oranges taste very dif­fer­ent from the summer va­ri­e­ties.The fruit is grown in small gardens surrounded by kilns like ­t hose we use to warm our hammams in Iran. The gardens are roofed over to keep in the heat. All sorts of fruit may be grown and sold at high prices: four winter oranges sell for one qurosh.” (JAH, 236). Introduced to an unfamiliar fruit at Kenwood House, Hampstead, resembling “the mulberry” and also “grown in the hot-­house,” he “asked to see the tree which produced this fruit” and was shown “a bush like the lentil. In En­glish this fruit is called ‘strawberry.’ ” (JAH, 223). The Guardian 278 (September 29, 1713). 29. ​ 30. ​His awareness of social divisions within British society is further heightened by Elizabeth Montagu’s annual charity event for young chimney sweeps in Portman Square (TAT, 148). 31. ​See also his reference to the fertility of the land contrasted with the unequal distribution of wealth (TAT, 100) and to the privileges of the Anglo-­Irish elite, reflected in visual markers of rural property bound­aries (TAT, 151). A rhetorical parallel between En­glish gentlemen and “Arab tribes” forsaking “the cities during the summer season” to “seek, in the fresh and ­wholesome air of the country, a supply of health and vigour for the ensuing winter” (TAT, 151–152) emphasizes similarity between Britain’s and India’s social stratifications rather than difference.

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32. ​See also JAH, 151: “When the sun ­rose, I awoke with a severe pain in my chest—­I thought I would die! But walking for a time in Lord Teignmouth’s square, I gained some mea­sure of relief,” my emphases. JAH, 188: “I was feeling bilious and unwell, so . . . ​I went riding in the King’s Garden. Th ­ ere I happened to meet Lady Arden and her second ­daughter, Helena. I dismounted and relaxed with my friends”; and JAH, 194: “Sir Gore Ouseley returned from his country h ­ ouse. Happily, he told me that the fresh country air, which is far better than London’s, has cured his charming wife of her illness.”

Publishers Can Cause Earthquakes explanations and enigmas of the seismic enlightenment Kevin L. Cope

“The Age of Reason,” “the Age of Johnson,” “the Age of Voltaire,” “the Age of Exuberance”—­a ll of t­ hese and more have been applied with minimal success to the bountifully clumsy “long eigh­teenth ­century”: that big, gawking period in which the diversity of literary, artistic, philosophical, and scientific activity makes name-­tagging problematic. To date, no one has gone below ground level by dubbing the period “the Age of Earthquakes.” That designation may have been withheld owing to the distracting influence of one colossal shock, the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which deflects attention from the overall high level of seismic activity throughout the Enlightenment.1 Estimating comparative levels of tectonic motility may seem naive in our era, when seismographs continuously detect undulations anywhere in the world and where tremor notifications pop up more frequently than email. In the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, however, improving long-­distance communication, a ravenous audience appetite for periodical journalism, plenty of pamphleteering, and a zest for controversy combined with a spate of noteworthy earthquakes to keep the instability of terra firma in the public eye. In 1750 alone, Britain experienced seven significant earthquakes, including two major shocks to urban London. During the hundred years of the calendrical eigh­teenth ­century, the British Isles sustained at least forty-­four mea­sur­able, damage-­inflicting earthquakes. Adding in an outburst of volcanic eruptions from Sicily to Iceland, assorted freak tidal waves in ports across Eu­rope, shocks in the colonies, and a few geological prodigies certainly makes for a “seismic Enlightenment.” Publishers, such as the honoree for this volume, seldom unsettle the earth, but the long-­eighteenth-­century publishing industry transformed (and exploited) earthquake events. Book magnates promoted interdisciplinary controversies about 207

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earth movements that previously would have easily passed as miracles, signs, or divine judgments. A plethora of publications—­some of them lavish, illustrated, and finely produced; ­others of them chapbooks for a less discriminating clientele—­ treated earthquakes as vivid phenomena meriting disciplined discussion or orderly research or reverent awe or fearful horror or amazed appreciation.2 The proj­ect of disentangling the scientific from the sanctified aspects of earthquakes continued throughout and beyond the eigh­teenth ­century and involved prominent virtuosi such as John Ray, William Warburton, and William Stukeley. As that disentangling progressed, both British and Continental book culture explored an early form of disaster infotainment. Thin bound­aries between journalism, science-­ based speculation, religiosity, compassion, charity, entertainment, and, occasionally, amusement opened up into fertile lands for the cultivation of new topics, new sciences, and new attitudes. Preliminary exploration of this uneven, moving terrain—of the experiments, oddities, and interdisciplinary innovations appertaining to the long-­eighteenth-­ century earthquake experience—is the first goal of this chapter. Unlike chemistry or biology, which lent themselves to small laboratory spaces and which yielded to modest eighteenth-­century instrumentation, early seismology surmounted special challenges. Massive under­ground events resisted the kind of empirical observation that became the hallmark of modern science. In an era without deep drills, distant reconnaissance satellites, or real-­time response capabilities, full and direct observation of the earth’s recesses remained impossible. Even the most restrained speculation about earthquakes relied on imagination to fill in missing details and to fill out explanations; nevertheless, dealing with “shakings of the earth” called for the kind of robust interpretation and effective action that only evidence-­based science could deliver. Tension between the drive to complete the earthquake story and the need to get it right—to explain, predict, and respond to an onslaught of earthquakes—­proved a productive stressor: a source of daring speculation, a wellspring of inventive writing, and eventually a generator of natural-­historical truth.

Earthquakes: The Stories and the Sequels Unlike many memorable actions of Enlightenment science that tended to occur quickly—­t he assorted efforts to produce a vacuum, Herschel’s sightings of nebulae, Lavoisier’s identification of oxygen—­both earthquakes and their scientific study took their time. They could last a few seconds, several minutes, or hours; they could propagate aftershocks; they could queue up in series lasting for months; they could inflict damage requiring years to repair. ­Whether in the efforts of Buffon, Linnaeus, or Lamarck to classify the many forms of life or in the efforts of Charles Messier to cata­logue stars, Enlightenment science favored synchrony as expressed in comprehensive explanatory structures that seemed to hover above time. Earthquakes required gradual development of a science suitable to phenomena that move and change over longer periods. The plurality of earthquake documents thus

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take the form of on-­site, real-­time reports from the field that explain events while they are happening and that run on considerably longer than a lab report.3 Science and audience interest thus converge in the adoption of narrative as the preferred genre for earthquake analy­sis. Among the most common compositions in the genre are what might be called colloquial quake accounts: long, surprisingly easygoing reports detailing all the l­ittle effects occurring during an earthquake in ordinary, domestic locations. A fine example of this genre is a charming account of a 1676 tremor that rumbled through the hamlet of West-­Brummidge in Staffordshire: At a place called West-­Brummidge in Staffordshire, within four miles of Brummingham, (that famous Town for Iron-­ware, scituate on the edge of Warwickshire) on the said Tuesday, the fourth of January instant, in the after­noon, the wind thereabouts for several days before having been very calm, and more still than is usual for the season; On a sudden a strange rushing noise was heard in the Air, and so continued for some time, to the g­ reat admiration of many p ­ eople that heard it; which was the more increased, for that they could not perceive any very sensible blast or strong gust of wind, which might be the occasion of such an uncouth Murmur, but this their won­der was by and by forced up to the highest pitch of amazement and terror, when they began to perceive the Ground to quake and ­tremble ­under their feet. Which it did so evidently, that Pewter-­d ishes fell from off the Shelves on which they ­were placed, in several ­houses; nay as it is attest by divers credible Eye-­witnesses, it made the very Stones in the streets and lanes to beat and knock against one another. The Inhabitants in fear run out of their ­houses, dreading they would be shaken down upon their heads; but blessed be God no harm was done, that we hear of. The Earthquake was not onely in this single Town, but at all other Villages neer, for several miles, in Staffordshire, and divers parts of Warwickshire.4

In addition to endorsing the (minority) opinion that “air quakes” could set off earthquakes, the passage scans a large slice from the ­middle segment of experience, ­whether a local atmospheric effect heard by “many” ­people or prized pewter vessels tipping off the shelves or a sort of castanet choir created by the stones of the street. On the one hand, the passage reports a colossal event; on the other hand, the story is unabashedly domestic, focusing on crockery and cobblestones; on the proverbial third hand, the report relies on narrative not only to create a big to-do but also to raise scientific questions. An ­earlier account of an earthquake in Coventry takes a similarly mom-­and-­pop approach, lamenting the unsettling of pot­ eoples’ beds, and ruing the damage to the tery, cringing at the shaking of good p local church steeples and spires.5 Detailed narratives like the foregoing have a way of counterpointing one another as they compose the larger scientific story about our planet. Earthquakes contrast with most objects of scientific study in that they differ from one another. Gravity

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and hydrogen exhibit the same characteristics in Oxford, near Sydney, and in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but an earthquake along the coast of Ec­ua­dor varies in numerous ways from a shaker in Palermo. Narrative accounts that can operate at multiple levels, from chemical analy­sis to historical record-­keeping to cultural commentary, bridge ­t hese differences and enable globally valid explanations of earthquakes, their workings, and their implications. The vast majority of earthquake narratives are characterized by what might be described as “another syndrome”: the following up of one earthquake account with another, dif­fer­ent earthquake account by way of hinting at a pattern and by way of creating a long, seemingly systematic story out of similar but seldom identical events. One unknown author cultivates “another syndrome” with par­tic­u ­lar acumen. In a book that describes another Oxfordshire quake and even another Jamaica tremor, this unnamed author reports that effects similar to the initial Oxford quake occurred previously in another tremor north of Oxford, then resonated throughout north-­central E ­ ngland—­t hat another report like that from Oxford could lead to a second report from north Oxford and then yet another report from Derbyshire: ­ ere was another Earthquake, far more considerable, which happened OctoTh ber the 9th, about Eleven at Night, and was northward in Oxfordshire very much; some say, it was felt in Oxford: It spread all over the midland Countries; and it extended into Derbyshire, in which, as in the Coal Countries, it was very violent; and it was reported, that it was in all the Places affected at the same Time, and that it produced some remarkable Effects.6

The apparent synonymy of the effects of ­t hese vari­ous shocks gives the impression that three or more dispersed events comprise a single story. Similarly, another account of this 1683 Oxford temblor covers much of this same ground. This account first gawks at the tumbling “­Tables, Stools, Trunks and Chests” in Oxfordshire cottages and wryly observes local sluggards who, energized by terror, run fearfully from their beds. It then compares ­these frightening but slightly comical local events to their more frequent and familiar counter­parts in Italy and Turkey.7 Rhetorical sleight-­of-­hand heightens the status of a modest En­glish Midlands earthquake by slipping it into the generalized portfolio of global seismological reporting.

Classifying Earthquakes: Natu­r al, Super­natural, Hybrid Figuring out how to tell the story of earthquakes means determining what earthquakes might be. The abundance of detectable, damaging earthquakes during the long eigh­teenth c­ entury encouraged the inventorying of seismic events, which, in turn, required rudimentary classification. But it was more than the variousness of earthquakes that puzzled classifiers and explainers. In their destructiveness, earthquakes complicated the Baconian-­Newtonian quest for an orderly nature managed by a benevolent deity. Voltaire’s spoof, in Candide, of Dr.  Pangloss, the Leibnizian apologist who, committed to the idea that ours is the best of all pos­si­ ble worlds, finds good purposes in the greatest disasters, points up the nagging

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doubt among cognoscenti as to ­whether geological catastrophes obeyed the divinely sanctioned law of nature. Then ­there is the prob­lem of the unpredictability of earthquakes. A virtuoso in a laboratory could reliably set an appointment to demonstrate an oxidation reaction during the 11:00 a.m. lecture, but no one could anticipate the next rolling of the earth. Earthquakes thus posed a challenge to the predictive powers of early science. How could one classify what seemed not only to perturb the orderly arrangements of nature but also to scoff at research schedules? One option, pursued by countless sermonizers (including notables such as John Wesley), is the removal of earthquakes from nature. Classifying earthquakes as miracles eliminates the need to tell their story in any secular or rational way while also removing them from the jurisdiction of science and eliminating any hope of prediction. A few intellectuals, including William Whiston and William Warburton, restricted their forays into the super­natural to manifestly symbolic earthquakes such as ­those attending the crucifixion of Jesus or tumbling the reconstructed ­temple at Jerusalem. The vast majority of jottings from religious hands, however, treat any and all earthquakes e­ ither as punitive, as penalties for some ­great collective crime of a given ­people, or as monitory and predictive, as indications of some greater evil to follow if a society fails to repent. Another option, embraced by French diplomat-­turned-­encyclopedist Sigaud de la Fond, compiler of Dictionnaire des Merveilles de la Nature, or by En­glish chronicler Zachary Grey, editor of A Chronological and Historical Account of the Most Memorable Earthquakes as well as of a sequel thereto, is the making of long lists of earthquakes, apparently in the hope that some common understanding of the earthquake phenomenon w ­ ill emerge from the archive. Unfortunately, the reader of t­ hese extensive annals of under­ ground instability is more likely to lose nerve and to contract vertigo than to form hypotheses. Innumerable pages recounting disaster a­ fter disaster undercut any ground on which science might stand. So voluminous is the long-­eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture on earthquake classification (both religious and secular) that several studies could be written on that topic alone—­and, indeed, research is underway.8 Amidst the din of angry homilists and the roar of crackpot theorists is, however, one register of telluric discourse that is especially pertinent to this study: assorted attempts to bridge or combine the natu­ral and the super­natural approaches to seismology. Advocates for the hybrid approach shift the emphasis from questions about the c­ auses of earthquakes to questions concerning their purpose, implementation, and import. Writing in response to the 1777 earthquake in Manchester and surrounding areas, Bishop Beilby Porteus suggests that positing proximate natu­ral ­causes for earthquakes need not interfere with recognizing their moral message. We need only remember that god is the ultimate cause of all natu­ral phenomena. In Porteus’s earthquake hermeneutics, the ­people of an afflicted city, state, or nation need not commit unusually bad sins in order to attract a punitive earthquake. Earthquakes may deliver general warnings about the universal iniquity of humankind.9 Porteus explores a zone of instructive ambiguity in which natu­ral and super­natural ­causes

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overlap: a space where normal cause-­and-­effect sequences may underwrite moral and religious instruction. More than a few long-­eighteenth-­century earthquake theorists operate within this zone of ambiguity.10 Some, such as Samuel Doolittle, detect a lack of uniformity in divinely instigated earthquakes. Why do some tremors last longer than o ­ thers?11 What about the territorial extent of earthquakes? Scripture portrays some earthquakes as occurring within the space of a prison cell while it shows o ­ thers rattling the entire world.12 In partial response to such questions, Robert Fleming, another compiler of earthquake lists, delivers a slate of four dif­fer­ent, mostly moral reasons as to why god, who has already revealed his ­will and law in scripture, needs to issue supplemental warnings through the diverse medium of earthquakes.13 And so with regard to the question of the spottiness of earthquake: with the confusing fact that putatively justly punitive earthquakes occur with unequal frequency in locations and among ­peoples with equal rec­ords of sinfulness. One commentator on the Jamaica earthquake asserts that unequal, capricious treatment of dif­fer­ent cultures reveals wise divine selectivity: At the same time that He (as just Judge) punishes some, He (as Gracious Benefactor) spares, delivers, and defends o ­ thers, perhaps no less guilty than the punished. Who has made the Astonishing Discriminations in the Nations of late? Why is not ­England in the ruinous Case of Italy? or Rotterdam like to St. Jago? Did blind chance make that Vis­i­ble Difference among the dwellers of Jamaica? Did Chance kill the 2000, and save the preserved? Did that unlock the Bowels of the Earth, to swallow down many alive, and cast ’em up alive at a distance, while ­others sunk down to be no more seen, or not till they w ­ ere Dead?14

Key ­here is god’s use of nature. God unlocked “the Bowels of the Earth.” God did not use magic, but deployed resources already on and in the ground. It is not natural-­historical “chance,” random physical pro­cesses, but the controlled, discretionary use of natu­ral resources that accomplishes god’s pedagogical and jurisprudential goals. God, too, becomes part of a narrative with a par­tic­u ­lar setting, an environment constrained by natu­ral law. A super­natural being thus uses natu­ ral resources to create a gigantic morality play without trespassing against science.

Settings for Shakings: Exotic and Familiar Setting is a major concern in earthquake lit­er­a­ture. Earthquake writers waver between a fascination with the foreign or exotic and an abstracting drive to discover universally applicable, fully generalized laws and princi­ples. Earthquakes striking faraway places provide a long lens for viewing cultural differences within the stabilizing framework of the law of nature. Inquirers may ask how earthquakes interact with remote ­peoples and diverse belief systems while remembering that Britain also sustains earthquakes—­t hat some commonality connects shakers in China with their counter­parts in the Peak District. As unaccountable, colossal, distant, and foreign as they might be, earthquakes help to domesticate the alien.

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They create a spectrum across rather than a hard division between calamities at home and calamities in the vast world. Among the many shaking outposts of the explored and colonized worlds, a large area of land and sea encompassing the Ca­rib­bean and equatorial South Amer­i­ca generates an outsize portion of long-­eighteenth-­century earthquake lit­er­a­t ure. Among the adventurers and earthquake annalists probing this region was virtuoso, explorer, politician, and Louisiana territory governor Antonio de Ulloa, who, despite his Spanish affiliations, passed eight years in Ec­ua­dor as a scientific emissary working for the French. The colorful, sometimes swashbuckling Ulloa took a special interest in seismology. He assembled a chronology of earthquakes in Peru, Chile, and surrounding areas, including in his inventory over twenty quakes that occurred between the late sixteenth and ­middle eigh­teenth ­century. Ulloa mixes taxonomy with narrative. He first provides a tabular summary of recent earthquakes—­“2. 9 July  1586 (violent; commemorated on the day of St.  Elizabeth’s invitation.) . . . ​5. 3 November  1655—­damaged large ­houses. . . . ​20 October  1687, 4:00 a.m.: devastating, repeat shocks, tidal waves overwhelming Callao and its post”—­ t hen supplements ­ t hose observations with detailed accounts of the stronger shocks.15 Ulloa’s double, differentially detailed descriptions of equatorial earthquakes insinuate that the lower latitudes abound in the kind of under­ ground activity that occurs less frequently everywhere e­ lse, hence can provide an outlandish study site for geological pro­cesses underway in Eu­rope. Subtler than most travel writers, Ulloa suggests that our interest in South Amer­i­ca should extend beyond colorful customs and exotic p ­ eoples and down into the recesses of the earth. Both the differences and the similarities between the old and new worlds extend deep into the foundations of our experience. ­After entering the prevalence of “fleas and bugs” on the deficit side of his site assessment ledger, Ulloa remarks that “the next and indeed a most dreadful circumstance is that of earthquakes, to which this country is so subject, that the inhabitants are ­u nder continual apprehension of being, from their suddenness and vio­lence, buried in the ruins of their own ­houses.”16 In Quito, Ulloa makes a similar transition, proceeding from remarks on “dreadful” and “amazing” thunderstorms to the “terrible circumstance” of frequent earthquakes.17 Ulloa’s jumpy inventories establish the familiarity of the distant colonial world while also underlining its fundamental difference and its unique eligibility for seismological study as well as for narrative exposition. Cultural difference arises not only from h ­ uman diversity but also from the very literal groundswell of earthquakes. The architecturally aware Ulloa notes that “on account of the dangerous consequences so often resulting from earthquakes, [houses in Quito are built] without any story,” an observation that he also makes with re­spect to Concepción, Chile.18 However subtly, Ulloa recognizes earthquakes as part of the pro­cess of cultural differentiation, in this case as a natu­ral ­factor that influences the range of and options for architecture. Ulloa’s comments on Concepción include reflections on the earthquake-­induced tidal wave of July 8, 1730, which, in tandem with a series of aftershocks, wiped out even single-­storey structures. Ulloa thus portrays cities that, unlike their ancient old-­world

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counter­parts, enjoy very l­ittle in the way of stability or predictability. Architecture, with its stones and bricks and metal components, provides a liaison between the artificial and the earthy—­between the favorable Eu­ro­pean influence and the dangers of the new world. As terrain alternately heaves and ­settles and as structures rise and fall, the mix of physical pro­cesses and cultural practices alternately emphasizes and deemphasizes the similarity of South Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. In his view of the aftermath of the June 20, 1698, earthquake in Quito, Ulloa shows only two structures remaining in the Latacunga district: a new-­world secular building and the complete Jesuit church.19 A permanent marker of the old world remains steadfast while the shaky remnants of a new-­world edifice embody the inevitability of change in a place where the earth seems not play by its own rules. Ulloa thus provides a devastating visual rendering of the interplay of old and new and of the familiar and exotic in the fate of structures built from earth’s shaking stones. South Amer­i­ca and the Gulf of Mexico basin w ­ ere not the only venues to offer an abundance of local color to the earthquake audience. Earthquake phi­los­o­pher C. Hallywell prefers arctic scenes. His lively rendering of ever-­rumbling Greenland mixes landscape descriptions of the frozen volcanic expanse with detailed description of the innovative habitation of outposted Dominican friars, whose ecologically harmonious lifestyle features sophisticated geothermal heating and plumbing. Unlikely as it seems, the cold-­climate friars facilitate the same convergence of the familiar and the exotic and of the scientific and superstitious that Ulloa discovered in South Amer­i­ca. The coolly exotic friars provide a site for philosophical reflection in the midst of what Hallywell artfully calls a “flammivomous” landscape.20 Similar mixes of the exotic and the familiar can also be found close to home. Consider an En­g lishman’s escape from the Lisbon earthquake, as recounted by Thomas Hunter: Our Author . . . ​Captain Richard Overton, Commander of the Brigantine Harry and Betty, belonging to Liverpool—­—­miraculously escaped: for at the Time the Earthquake began, a Barber was shaving him, but on perceiving the ­whole House to be immediately agitated, with a violent Concussion, and not apprehending what it was (never having felt an Earthquake before), ’till e­ very Th ­ ing round about him was turned topsy-­turvy, and the Roof and Floors came tumbling down upon their Heads; he then bethought of flying out for Safety, the Tonsor having only half performed his Operation; but before he could get out of the Door, the Back-­Part of the Building fell in, which killed the Barber, and wounded him in the Head.—­—­Scarce had he stepped from the Threshold, but he found himself surrounded by an affrighted Multitude; some on their Knees, praying and crying out for Mercy; ­others, whom Grief and Terror had deprived of Motion, appeared as fixed Statues. Buildings and Houses waving, tottering and gaping; opened to his View, a Scene not to be Described in Words. In short, it is impossible, in Nature, to imagine a Picture that bears a stronger Resemblance to the last ­great Solemn Day.21

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This odd scene raises expectations for a devastating review of a catastrophe but also delivers slightly confusing comic ele­ments. Seen through a double lens—­t he story as related by Commander Overton and the story as reconstituted by editor Hunter back in ­England—­this other­wise horrible scene allows for the comedy that comes with distance—­w ith the long view of a situation. One barely knows what to make of Overton’s preposterous half-­shaved encounter with a wailing, penitent throng while buildings wave and collapse. The passage concludes with a return to solemnity and the arts by wryly asserting that the scene could pass as a rendering of the last day, yet neither Hunter nor his source references a last-­judgment canvas that includes a befuddled En­g lishman with half a beard slathered with shaving suds. Yet, despite looking momentarily more like a West End comedy than a scientific report, this passage accomplishes a masterful fusion of the familiar with the foreign and of the outrageous with the scientific. Before leaving the Overton account, Hunter draws back as far as pos­si­ble, momentarily invoking an interplanetary perspective by considering the influence of a comet on the Lisbon disaster.22 Few would expect the misadventure of an unshaved British mari­ner to culminate in something so extraneous and exotic as a view from outer space or a jaunt alongside a comet. The reexamination of the familiar as a fillip on the foreign—as a moment of calm in happy Britain before worldwide tectonic forces bring home, in a big way, the universality of the law of nature—­makes such startling transitions inevitable.

Mildly Paranormal Geology: Mobile Land, Ghosts, and Moderating Theories Travel to disaster sites may not be the only way to reach exotic phenomena. ­Every now and then, unusual land masses make their way to observers. Long-­eighteenth-­ century earthquake lit­er­a­ture abounds in surprising stories about quick motion by ponderous chunks of terrain. The most famous of ­these incidents among eighteenth-­century audiences is the case of the moving hill at Marclay (or Marclay Hill). Several authors and editors report that, in 1571, Marclay Hill surged up from the ground and traveled a prodigious distance.23 Ambulatory escarpments ­were not ­limited to Britain. In Burgundy, France, “a Mountain removing out of its place, destroyed many thousand of the poor Husbandmen.”24 In South Amer­i­ca, the eruption of Chimborazo resulted in the issuing of “such a ­g reat quantity of ­water as caused an inundation throughout the neighbourhood, if mouldering earth mixed with w ­ ater into a mud may be so called,” a torrent that buried the nearby village of Latacunga and reconfigured the landscape.25 A satirist known only as “L. H.” imagines a series of absurd l­ egal actions arising from the peregrinations of land parcels, wondering, for example, ­whether ­t hose who lost their land and ­t hose buried by it could bring actions against one another for recovery, ejectment, trespassing, and a dozen other technical violations.26 As is demonstrated by a moving oat field in the En­glish village of Coalbrooke (now Coalbrooke Dale), the familiar can very quickly become the outlandish:

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In the dead of the Night between the 15th and 26th, Samuel Wilcocks’s Wife, who lived in a small House at the Birches, was sitting up in Bed to take care of one of her C ­ hildren that was ill; when she perceived the Bed shake u ­ nder her, and observed some Tea in a Cup to be so much agitated as to be spilt over: On the Morning of the 27th, Samuel Wilcocks and John Roberts (who likewise lived in the said House) got up betwixt three and four o ­ ’Clock [hiatus] opening the Win­ dows to see what the Weather was, they observed a small Crack in the Ground about four or five Inches wide and a Field that was sown with Oats to heave up and roll about like Waves of ­Water: The Trees moved as if blown with a high Wind, but the Air was calm and serene: The River Severn (in which at the Time was a considerable Flood) was agitated very much, and the Current seemed to run upwards: They perceived the House shake, when in a g­ reat Fright they raised the rest of the ­Family and ran out of the House, about twenty Yards, providentially the right way: They then perceived a g­ reat Crack open and run very quickly up the Ground from the River:—­immediately eigh­teen Acres of Land, with the Hedges and Trees standing (except a few only that w ­ ere overturned) moved with ­great force and [hiatus] the Severn, attended with ­great and uncommon Noise, which Wilcocks compared to a large Flock of Sheep ­running swiftly by him.—­ That Part of the Land next the River was a small Wood about two Acres, in which grew upwards of twenty large Oaks, a few of which w ­ ere thrown down, some left leaning, and the next upright as if never disturbed (but now all fell’d). The Wood was pushed with ­great velocity into the River (which at that Place was remarkably deep) and forced the ­Water into large columns a ­great height like mighty Fountains, and drove the Bed of the River on the opposite Shore, where it lodged full twelve Feet above the Surface of low ­Water, and is supposed thirty Feet perpendicular above the Bottom of the old Channel: the Side of the Wood likewise rested on the opposite Banks.—­The Current being instantly ­stopped, occasioned a g­ reat Inundation above, and so sudden a Fall below, that many Fishes ­were left on dry Land, and several Barges ­were heeled over, some of which, before the ­Water returned, w ­ ere sunk.27

A masterpiece in the manipulation of scale, this anecdote opens with tipping teacups and five-­inch cracks, proceeds to itinerant oat fields, transports the river from which the tea ­water presumably came, ratchets up from oat stalks to trees as a forest merges with the river bed, creates a new waterway, and culminates in the spewing of mighty fountains over the newly reformed land. Near, far, big, and small readily exchange characteristics. Delicate refreshments, domestic life, commercial agriculture, forestry, and watershed management suddenly converge as an earthquake suddenly calibrates and connects the most diverse (and differently sized) phenomena. Coordinating diverse, suddenly converging effects, the Coalbrooke account shows how a story that keeps talking, moving, and changing viewpoints can create liaisons between the extreme, the unfamiliar, the colloquial, the exotic, and the domestic.

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Land-­mass mobility in earthquake lit­er­a­ture epitomizes the elusiveness of bound­aries in, if not early science generally, then specifically early geology. Land would seem to stand for stability, yet land occasionally goes on excursions. It is not surprising, then, to find the most outlandish of all phenomena, paranormal events, blend in with mainstream accounts of earthquakes. The introduction of nondivine super­natural influences can unexpectedly tone down the mysteriousness of earthquake activity. A few prodigies, ghosts, or demigods can populate the gap between routine science and the divine creator of nature. Maintaining a super­ natural background for a physical event unexpectedly encourages secular science by keeping open the possibility that earthquakes proceed u ­ nder intelligent direction. Some theorists sought help from demigods in closing the gap between natu­ ral earthquakes and their super­natural cause. John Forster, a scholar of “uncommon phenomena in the air, ­water, or earth,” accepted the theological prohibition against grounding earthquakes in material ­causes but then replaced ­t hose physical mechanisms with spiritual ­causes. Citing Moses, Forster substitutes magical genii or “Ruahh” for material ­causes. ­These “Ruahh” act “by employing ­t hese inferior Agents” (material objects and natu­ral pro­cesses) to induce assorted “vindictive” phenomena, from famine and pestilence to lightning and earthquakes, although they invoke ­t hese disasters for moral purposes.28 The high spiritual status of the Ruahh imbues seemingly deleterious events with ethical significance. Beings that triangulate between the horrors of natu­ral disaster, the rigor of science, and the mysteriousness of god must possess peculiar characteristics. This anomalousness is all the stronger when the super­natural being beats the odds by accurately predicting an earthquake, as happened in the case of the ghost of Dr. Kidder, former bishop of Wells and Bath. Dr. Kidder’s specter appeared to another clergyman who was on his own deathbed by way of forecasting the 1750 London earthquake. As could be expected, questions arose regarding the authenticity, motivation, identity, authority, and reliability of the Kidder phantasm. Kidder supporters credentialed the shade by invoking biblical passages in which Samuel’s prophetic ghost appeared to Saul.29 Paranormal events such as the Kidder apparition received careful consideration even among sober seismologists. However preposterous, such tales play on the uncertainty concerning the natu­ral versus super­natural origin of earthquakes.30 They underline the persisting need for narrative within the new, seemingly empirical science of geology. Stories about paranormal earthquake-­a ffiliated events took advantage of the pop-­culture taste for prodigies to increase the audience for the new science of geology while translating impor­tant questions relating to nature, religion, research, and methodology into the accessible language of won­der stories. Prior to the Lima earthquake, a deeply ambiguous apparition raised a portfolio of such questions. What I mean is, a Prediction of all this la­men­ta­ble Catastrophe, (which remained in the Hands of a very few Persons, and that too without being in the least regarded) uttered many Months before it happened, by our ­Mother Teresa of

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Jesus, a Nun in the Monastery of Barefoots of St. Joseph in this City, with repeated and most efficacious asseverations of what was to come to pass: to which she added, that her Life would not last long enough for her to experience the sad Event; and in Fact she died at the Age of above a hundred years, the 15th of the same month of October, a Year before the Earthquake happened.31

From this anecdote of a prophetic event spins out a litany of queries dealing with every­t hing from the ­mental health of the prophetess to the efficacy of augury to the mass communications strategies of the divinity. Why would god deliver so impor­tant a prophecy in so odd a fashion and to so small an audience? Why should the citizens of Lima believe such tales? How would such a prophecy advance god’s plan or stem wickedness? Why would god ask his p ­ eople to heed an el­derly, possibly demented nun rather than the precepts of science? How can the accuracy of the prophecy be ignored? Such extravagant tales affirm that irregular events such as earthquakes can somehow be explained at the same time that they keep open the doors of science by reminding scholars that the final elucidation remains at a distance.

Concatenation: How (Entertaining) Earthquakes Influence Every­thing Earthquakes being such gigantic phenomena, it would seem that seismological writers would refrain from adding material to their stories. ­W hether the trivia-­ laden Coalbrooke tremor or the catastrophic Lisbon shaker, earthquakes provide more than enough subject ­matter to fill a book. That very same gigantism—­t hat re­sis­tance to explanation at the usual scale—­tempts writers to concatenate earthquakes with other, smaller events that more readily yield to available discourses and genres. Long-­eighteenth-­century authors routinely connected earthquakes with miscellaneous phenomena. This habit of explanatory concatenation—of linking outsized earthquakes to disparate events—­occurred most frequently along the vertical dimension: with re­spect to events happening in the air. ­Those who sought to concatenate celestial with subterranean events aimed to use the vis­i­ble to explain the invisible. ­W hether by imagery, analogy, or outright imagination, they sought to tack on seismology, with all its unknown subterranean actions, to meteorology, astronomy, astrology, or even what we now call UFOlogy. Both the heavens and the deeps remained largely hidden in an era with small telescopes and smaller drills, yet postulating some sort of relation between the two seemed to lessen the mutual mystery. For sensationalizing anthologists such as publisher Nathaniel Crouch, both the earth and the world aloft provided a magazine of special effects and strange tales. Better, the two realms often seem to interact. When Crouch affirms that “the shape of an Elephant was seen in the Air, and three Suns, Armies fighting, monstrous Births,” we also learn that ­t here “was a ­great earthquake in Italy.” Often, the concatenation occurs at close range, within the same sentence, as when Crouch notes

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that in 1627 “an Earthquake happened in ­England and a ­great fiery Beam was seen in the Air in France.”32 It is dangerous to think of someone like the tabloid-­ producing Crouch as a science pioneer, yet his habit of extending the chain of causality vertically, from the caverns of the earth to the apogees of space, is something new in a world where few citizens looked much beyond the first few thousand feet of elevation. A writer such as Robert Fleming, who hovers between empirical science and miracle interpretation, casually suggests that a rainy summer took a turn for the worse when effluences from the 1692 British earthquake tainted the downpour, damaging crops.33 Fleming combines seismology, meteorology, and agricultural science while adding a third, vertical dimension to scientific explanation. Stephen Hales further extends the ladder of airborne, earthquake-­ affiliated events: And in the History of Earthquakes it is observed that they generally begin in calm Weather, with a black Cloud; and when the Air is clear just before an Earthquake, yet ­there is then often Signs of plenty of inflammable sulphureous M ­ atter in the Air, such as Ignes fatui, or Jack-­a-­Lanterns, and the Meteors which are called falling Stars.34

Some of t­ hese sightings seem of natu­ral origin; some have a super­natural look; ­ thers rise into outer space; having a natu­ral cause in earthquakes, all seem likely o to yield to science; yet neither Hales nor anyone e­ lse can conclusively identify what makes the earth move. Extending the influence of earthquakes into the air opens a new ave­nue of explanation by allowing meteorology to have its say; meanwhile, meteorology extends its disciplinary bounds, for it must account for the hidden earth as well as the vis­i­ble sky. Readers of eighteenth-­century earthquake lit­er­a­ture may puzzle over its extreme variations in tone, mood, and genre. The selfsame author can wander between the cool but optimistic rhe­toric of science, the fervid rhe­toric of the pulpit, entertaining storytelling, oracular utterance, and occasionally comedy. ­These extreme, rapid, and unpredictable variations serve the same purpose as the concatenation of earthquakes, miscellaneous events, and assorted disciplines. Colossal and largely inexplicable, earthquakes outpace any one mode. If an on-­site report cannot tell the ­whole story, then perhaps a joke or a prophecy ­w ill fill some of the open explanatory space. In our time, the announcement of a disaster and the arrival of first responders signal a turn to a grim, thoughtful mood. Failure to show compassion or to speak with sobriety in such circumstances would be grounds to dismiss a news reporter or to delete a friend from one’s social circle. Long-­eighteenth-­century writers took the opposite approach, expecting that authorities on earthquakes would try any and e­ very rhetorical strategy to get a grip on an inherently shaky phenomenon. The miraculous, the satiric, the comic, and the devastating can all converge in the attempt to deal with so comprehensive an experience as an earthquake. A favorite topos of seismic lit­er­a­ture is the conversation that is interrupted, sometimes mid-­sentence, by the heaving earth. Consider a multimodal, tragicomic scene

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involving the earthquake-­induced burial of two prelates during the destruction of the of Beneventum: His Eminency, Orsini the Archbishop, was at that time discoursing with a Gentleman of Apice, named John Baptist Regina, a g­ reat Confident of his Eminency, they fell together, both being buried, tho’ the second ­a fter an hour and half, was found dead at the feet of his Eminency, and the Cardinal was saved miraculously, ­t here falling upon him an Image in Paper of St. Phillip Nery, to whom he is a very ­great Devotist.35

Won­der, amusement, and horror converge in a seriocomic moment as a blow to the noggin from an iconic portrait saves the higher-­ranking churchman, thus confirming the value of art, registering the devastation of the earthquake, and illustrating the staggering complexity of even this one incident in an earthquake saga. The anecdote at once portrays an earthquake as overwhelmingly big and complex but also as susceptible to momentary encapsulation in a quick anecdote. This modest passage epitomizes the challenge of finding a mood and an idiom suitable to so vast an event. It also registers bipolar energies within neoclassicism, w ­ hether the drive, per John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to reconcile variety with regularity or the hope, per Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, that an individual might find a viewpoint adequate to reconciling global calamities with cosmic order. That widest-­ranging of viewpoints, that of the satirist who seems to look everywhere and see every­t hing, is surprisingly common in earthquake lit­er­a­ture. The satirist’s roaming, itinerant glance is good at finding and commenting on the many anecdotes that compose a disaster story. ­These anecdotes come in many flavors, trims, and packages. Some communicate moral messages, as in the case of the holy bishop (­later Pope Gregory) whose h ­ ouse fell down only ­after the pious man left 36 it. Some mix a moral message with grateful wonderment at divine mercy or with amazement at unusual natu­ral pro­cesses. A confluence of mild, Horatian moralism with astonishment as well as a bit of amusement characterizes the stories of several persons who had been swallowed up by the earth and looked to be targets of god’s wrath, but who then, with the help of turbulent ­waters whipped up by seismic activity, ­were safely spewed out of the abyss at distant locations.37 Other anecdotes sport with rival religious denominations, especially Catholicism.38 One tart Italian hagiographer, looking at the post-­quake ruin of a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, reportedly remarked, “It was as if God the Son had risen for his ­Mother.” This anecdote then leads into even more complicated, tonally mixed reports concerning the sliding land parcels of the 1663 Canadian quake and concerning litigation subsequent to the transposition of land.39 ­There seems to be no limit as to how far authors w ­ ill go in this tensely satiric, judgmental, and yet amusing reduction of major disasters to offbeat incidents. Some tales report the lucky interaction of good manners and survival, as if etiquette ­were a ­factor in disaster preparedness. One gent caught in the Lisbon earthquake was saved b ­ ecause, not being fully dressed, he remained inside u ­ ntil presentable,

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thereby avoiding flying debris.40 Some stories pre­sent an unsettling mixture of bigotry, moralism, and religious chauvinism. An observer of the 1746 Peru earthquake scoffs that, in their distress, “several Jews” “kneeled and answered [a call to prayer] as the rest did: nay, the Author was told that they ­were heard to call upon Jesus Christ; a Th ­ ing (says he) worth Observation!” 41 A definitive example of this uncomfortable genre comes from satirist Richard Bentley, who rec­ords a case of tuneful patriotism cut short while foolish card games continue: A certain pretty L—­y [identified in margin as “Miss Parker”] you knew, remarkable for her Zeal last Westminster Election, was taken in near the Hustings, Covent Garden: She attempted to cry out, as she went down, Oh, my Country! but her Mouth was stopp’d before she could pronounce the w ­ hole Sentence. Several Ladies that had been playing at Brag, ­were found with the Natu­rals in their Hands.42

Positioning the victim between frivolous ladies playing at a card game, Bentley nods to patriotism while scourging the idle classes and while recognizing the brutality of earthquakes. The many anecdotes festooning the pages of Enlightenment earthquake annals suggest that an earthquake is an almost limitless phenomenon—­t hat earthquakes are capable of producing almost any story that could be written. Th ­ ese awkwardly comical yarns set earthquakes in a special class of sublime, im­mense, all-­surpassing phenomena (a category, for example, occupied by the discoveries of astronomy). The varying tone of ­t hese anecdotes, which ranges from bigotry to comedy, helps to transform destructive earthquakes into literary and artistic as well as scientific and social events: into episodic novels with no page limits. Replete, earthquake accounts look more often like Tobias Smollett’s ribald novels than like laboratory studies. Recounting the hubbub following an earthquake in the famous spa town, A Narrative of What Passed at Bath moves from room to room, from casino to dining hall to bathing fa­cil­i­t y, in a sort of interior picaresque tale, viewing the always comical, sometimes monstrous scenes unfolding among the affluent, geriatric, hypochondriacal patients. The earthquake seems to come on like a spell of the palsy: It happened on Sunday Eve­ning about six ­o’Clock, but was not generally known till the next Morning; for tho’ the Com­pany met that very Night at the Rooms, as on Sundays they always do, to drink Tea, yet the Circumstances ­t here mentioned ­were looked upon rather as ­Matters of Mirth and Pleasantry, than Proofs of any extraordinary Accident;—­—­for when a Lady said, that Mrs.—­—­—­told her, as she was sitting alone in her Room, reading a Sermon, she plainly perceived her Chair to shake u ­ nder her;—­—­Ay, replies one, I ­don’t won­der at that, she always has a foolish shaking of the Leg, and I suppose she has got into her Hysteria; pray, did she not call for her Hartshorn and her Hungry [sic] ­Water?—­—­—­—­When another said, that where she had been visiting, while they

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­ ere gravely talking upon Fashions, on a sudden one of the Com­pany cried out, w Lord, how the Room shakes, I am quite giddy! Several more, tho’ not all of us, ­were in a Manner affected.—­This produced an invidious Laugh, with some Innuendo’s upon Giddiness.43

In subsequent pages, the author, one “L. H.,” portrays plungers who, fearing the end of the world, make their last big bets; ladies who commit blunders at the game of whist owing to distracting shaking; frantic attempts by spa personnel to cover up the spillage of the medicinal ­waters and to preserve an air of calm; and unscrupulous apothecaries willing to prescribe anti-­earthquake pills. Bath spa would seem to be a homogenous environment, yet L. H. suggests that his travels could continue forever—­t hat Bath and its earthquake are equally inexhaustible topics. Earthquakes, we know ­today, are about compression: about the collision of vast crustal plates and about the pressuring up of hills, mountains, and even continents. In the more local Enlightenment, when ­limited instrumentation and slow travel made long-­range perspectives and continent-­sized studies impossible, rhetorical compression, ­whether the reduction of a major earthquake to a few quips or the quick creation of tentative, sometimes confining categories or the pulling of the paranormal into normal experience, allowed for an abbreviated form of explanation by snapshot: for an episodic rendering of disasters that w ­ ere too quick and too im­mense for current technologies. One of the last opportunities for qualitative, prose-­based science, the earthquakes of the long eigh­teenth ­century ­were coeval and consistent with popu­lar aggregative forms, ­whether the anecdote collection, with its big gatherings full of short reports, or w ­ hether prose fiction, in which dozens of chapters could extend across a story too vast for any reader to see all at once. William Cowper, with his wandering observations and his meticulous repre­sen­ta­tion of biological science in his description of cucumber growth, was not all that dissimilar from Sir William Hamilton, that traveler-­diplomat who both recorded the fierce details of and dispassionately observed comical scenes at sites of earthquake devastation. Early seismology explored the literary science of verisimilitude: of writing about phenomena that w ­ ere neither fully understood nor fully accessible so as not only to simulate but to supply truth. Following the fault line between description and speculation, earthquake writing united science with fiction without becoming science fictional.

notes 1. ​An example of this asymmetry in coverage is Theodore E. D. Braun’s and John Radner’s thorough The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Repre­sen­ta­tions and Reactions (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2005), a 350-­page collection presenting eigh­teen essays on the Lisbon earthquake and its legacy. Unlike most eighteenth-­century events, the memory of which remains among scholars, the Lisbon earthquake continues to elicit semi-­popular, scholarship-­informed works such as Nicholas Shrady’s The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the ­Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Viking, 2008). The Harvard University Library cata­logue discovers no less than 17,184 items that have been written about the Lisbon disaster since its occurrence. ­Today, the Lisbon earthquake continues to generate speculative criticism. Srinivas Aravamuden, for example, looks to the Lisbon earthquake while seeking the origins of the controverted

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“Anthropocene era”; see “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico ­behind or Ahead of His Time?” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 47 (2018): 7–25). 2. ​Epitomizing the marketability of earthquake lit­er­a­ture is London Bishop Thomas Sherlock’s notorious A Letter From The Lord Bishop of LONDON, To The Clergy and P ­ eople Of London and Westminster, On Occasion of the Late Earthquake, which sold 10,000 copies in two days, another 52,000 copies within one year, and eventually upwards of three ­later editions. On t­ hese sales figures and on similarly popu­lar responses to Sherlock, see Giovanni Tarantino, “Thomas Gordon’s Letter on Earthquakes (1750),” Notes and Queries 62, no. 3 (September 2015): 375–378. See also Christopher Smyth, “ ‘Chastisements of a Heavenly F ­ ather’: The Meaning of the London Earthquakes of 1750,” Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 2 (2010): 243–276. 3. ​Scholars have tended to focus on speculative responses to earthquakes, such as ­t hose advanced by Voltaire, John Wesley, and assorted early scientists. That somewhat ce­re­bral interest in the philosophical side of natu­ral disasters, warns Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, may not represent the largest share of earthquake writing. Looking at periodical publications such as The Gentlemen’s Magazine, De Montluzin points to the barrage of highly factual reportage that characterized the response to earthquakes. See Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, “ ‘­Every Body Apprehended an Earthquake’: The Gentleman’s Magazine’s Reporting of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Its Aftermath,” Notes and Queries 61, no. 3 (2014): 409–417. A True Relation Of the Terrible Earthquake at West-­Brummidge in Staffordshire, And the 4. ​ Places adjacent: On Tuesday the 4th of this Instant January 1675/6. As it was Lately Communicated by several Letters from ­those Parts to Diverse Eminent Citizens in London. And likewise a true Account of the Terrour of the Earthquake at Kidderminster in Worcestershire, as it was Communicated in a Letter to an Eminent Artist in London from his Correspondent ­there (London, 1676), 3–4. 5. ​See Henry Holland, Motus Medi-­terraneus (London, 1626), sig. B3r–­v. 6. ​ A Genuine Account of Earthquakes, Especially that at Oxford, In the Year 1695; and of another Terrible One at Port-­Royal, in Jamaica, In the Year 1692, &c. (London, 1750), 11. The Oxford earthquake actually happened in 1683; on the title page of the copy of the book examined, “95” is crossed out and “83” handwritten alongside. The inclusion of material on the Jamaica earthquake, however, indicates publication ­a fter 1692. For an overview of responses to the Jamaica earthquake, see Larry Gragg, “The Port Royal Earthquake,” History ­Today 50, no. 9 (September 2000): 28–34. 7. ​See Strange News From Oxfordshire: Being A True and Faithful Account of a Wonderful and Dreadful Earthquake That Happened in t­ hose Parts On Monday the 17th of this Pre­sent September, 1683 (London, 1683) (single folio sheet). 8. ​I am currently preparing a full-­length study of the subterranean world during the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, a book that ­w ill include extensive discussion of earthquakes during the period. 9. ​See Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, A Letter to the Inhabitants of Manchester, Mac­ ose Places (Chesclesfield, and the Adjacent Parts; On Occasion Of The Late Earthquake In Th ter, n.d.), 10–11. 10. ​Motivations for pursuing the hybrid, mixed natural-­supernatural approach ranged from curiosity to social expediency. In commenting on the New ­England (Cape Ann) earthquake of 1755, Whitney Barlow Robles notes that New ­England divines followed their old-­world colleagues in exploring the moral and religious meanings of the Cape Ann earthquake but also modulated their exhortations with scientific explanations, hoping to prevent outbreaks of religious enthusiasm or fanat­i­cism. See Whitney Barlow Robles, “Atlantic Disaster: Boston Responds to the Cape Ann Earthquake of 1755,” New ­England Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2017): 15–16. Looking at Reverend John Fletcher’s sermons on the Buildwas earthquake of 1773—­which may have been a landslide rather than a proper earthquake—­James P. Bowen and Neil Macdonald apply the term “clerical naturalist” to churchmen who preach on the moral significance of earthquakes while also carefully attending to the analy­sis of their natu­ral ­causes. See their “ ‘A Dreadful Phenomenon Described and Improved’: Reverend John Fletcher’s Account of the Buildwas Earthquake of 1773,” Journal of Historical Geography 64 (2019): 72–84.

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11. ​See Samuel Doolittle, A Sermon Occasioned by the Late Earthquake (London, 1692), 18. 12. ​Doolittle, A Sermon Occasioned by the Late Earthquake, 19. 13. ​See Robert Fleming, A Discourse of Earthquakes (London, 1693), 9–11. 14. ​The Truest and Largest Account of the Late Earthquake in Jamaica, June the 7th. 1692 (London, 1693), 16–17. 15. ​Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South Amer­i­ca. Describing At Large, The Spanish Cities, Towns, Provinces, & c. on that extensive Continent, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1760), 2:81–82. See also 2:137 and 2:255. 16. ​De Ulloa, A Voyage to South Amer­i­ca, 2:78–79. 17. ​De Ulloa, A Voyage to South Amer­i­ca, 1:294. 18. ​De Ulloa, A Voyage to South Amer­i­ca, 1:322–323 and 2:233. 19. ​De Ulloa, A Voyage to South Amer­i­ca, 1:322–323. 20. ​C. Hallywell, A Philosophical Discourse of Earthquakes: Occasioned by the Late Earthquake, September the 8th. 1692 (London, 1693), 13. 21. ​Thomas Hunter, An Historical Account of Earthquakes (Liverpool, 1756), 60–61. 22. ​See Hunter, An Historical Account of Earthquakes, 66–67. 23. ​The incident is related in detail in Holland, Motus Medi-­terraneus, sig. B4r. 24. ​See N. N., A Brief Account, and Seasonable Improvement of the Late Earthquake in Northampton-­shire, Jan. 4 1675/6 (London, 1765/6), 5–6. 25. ​See John Bevis, The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes (London, 1757), 200–201. 26. ​See L. H., A Narrative of what Passed at Bath, upon Account of the Late Earthquake, which happened t­ here on the 18th of March last, in a Letter From A Gentleman at BATH, To His Friend at LONDON (London, 1750) (London, 1750), 9. 27. ​ A Concise Account of the Earthquake that Happened the 27th of May, 1773, at the Birches, between Coalbrooke Dale and Buildwas Bridge in Shropshire; as also of an Earthquake on the 25th and 26th of the same Month above and near Buildwas Bridge, upwards of Half a Mile from the Birches (Coalbrookedale, 1750), 1–2. 28. ​See John Forster, Reflections Physical and Moral, upon the Vari­ous and Numerous Uncommon Phenomena in the Air, ­Water, or Earth, which have Happened from the Earthquake at Lima, to the Pre­sent Time (London, 1756), 19–20. 29. ​See The Bishop’s Prophesy: Or, A Terrible Warning to LONDON. Being A very Strange and Amazing Relation of the Ghost or Apparition of a late Bishop of Bath and Wells, that appeared to an Eminent Clergy-­man of the Church of E ­ ngland, Foretelling a Dreadful Earthquake that ­will Happen the Latter End of July Next (London, 1706), 2–3, 6. The story of Samuel’s ghost occurs in 1 Samuel 28. 30. ​The 1750 London earthquake was especially productive of religious controversy as well as of offbeat publications, in part owing to Bishop Thomas Sherlock’s notorious allegation that the tremor was triggered by the publication of too many bad books. This output has been surveyed by Samara Anne Cahill in “Porn, Popery, Mahometanism, and the Rise of the Novel: Responses to the London Earthquakes of 1750,” Religion and the Age of Enlightenment 2 (2010): 277–302. 31. ​A True and Par­tic­u­lar Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake Which Happen’d at Lima, the Capital of Peru, and the neighboring Port of Callao, On the 28th of October (London, 1748), 197–199. 32. ​Nathaniel Crouch, The General History of Earthquakes (London, 1694), 67–69. Crouch continues to dilate on such aerial phenomena as the appearance of six suns in the sky over Cornwall, the showing of five moons over Normandy, and ­whole armies and navies in the sky. In a remarkable example of the durability of prodigy lore, twenty-­first ­century UFO investigators have taken an interest in ­t hese events. 33. ​See Robert Fleming, A Discourse of Earthquakes, 22. 34. ​Stephen Hales, Some Considerations of the ­Causes of Earthquakes (London, 1750), 10. A True and Exact Relation Of the most Dreadful Earthquake Which Happened in the 35. ​ City of Naples, and Several other Parts of that Kingdom (London, 1688), 12–13. 36. ​See John Ray, Three Physico-­Theological Discourses (London, 1713), 183–184.

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37. ​See The Truest and Largest Account of the Late Earthquake in Jamaica, 7. 38. ​Attribution of earthquakes to the adverse influence of Catholicism, especially to superstitious or repressive be­hav­ior that could irritate God, ran the gamut from this kind of quipping to earnest theological pamphlets to indignant speculation that the headquarters of the Inquisition was the first building to fall during the Lisbon earthquake and on to Gothic imaginations that Inquisition torture chambers persisted under­ground, immured beneath the Lisbon rubble. See Richard Hamblyn, “Notes from Under­g round: Lisbon a­ fter the Earthquake,” Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 14, no.  2 (2008): 111–114. 39. ​ A True and Par­tic­u­lar Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake Which happen’d At Lima, 103–105. 40. ​See An Account of Several Remarkable Earthquakes which have Happened in Vari­ous Quarters of the World (n.p. 1800), 11. 41. ​A True and Par­tic­u­lar Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake Which happen’d At Lima, 335. 42. ​Richard Bentley, A Full and True Account of the Dreadful and Melancholy Earthquake (London, 1750), 6. 43. ​L. H., A Narrative of What Passed at BATH, 2.

PA RT I I I

•

Personal Reminiscences

Greg Clingham as Teacher and Mentor Dominic Jermey Tonbridge to Bucknell British public schools are not known for their scholarship of Samuel Johnson. Just as Margaret Thatcher consolidated her grip on UK politics for the rest of the 1980s with an efficient defense of the Falkland Islands, a young post-­doc ventured from one bastion of British tradition to another: Cambridge University to Tonbridge School—­a dramatic shift or an evolution? Both w ­ ere cloistered, both traced centuries of tradition, but engaging the adolescent sons of the southern En­glish ­middle class with the trea­sures of En­glish lit­er­a­ture, while competing against rugby, cadets, and growing interest in the opposite sex, must surely have been one of the greater life challenges Greg has faced in his distinguished ­career. For me, Greg’s classes opened a win­dow into an unknown world, an escape from the self-­obsession of adolescence into the limitless possibilities of (eighteenth-­ century) thought. I was part of a small band, just sixteen years old, who had made an active choice for an A-­level course in En­glish lit­er­a­ture. Ready for a mercenary two-­year focus on the exam texts, we w ­ ere taken aback and then coaxed into an entirely new perspective on thinking about life and lit­er­a­ture by Greg’s passion for Johnson & Co. Acknowledging our wish to take on the world, wanting to challenge every­thing about our school, f­ amily and upbringing, Greg enabled us to gain a perspective, through what we read, on what we experienced at a time of intense change in our lives. Sometimes I was a Rasselas, casting around widely for happiness, at times a Metaphysical struggling with my faith or looking for creative articulations of love. I learned to see Swift as a companion, observing the follies of my world through his satiric prism. But most of all, Johnson burst into our world, provoking thought and debunking pretension. Discussions soon migrated to Greg’s home—­a tiny cottage more conducive than the classroom for exploring thought over coffee. As my horizons broadened, Greg enabled me to link the world I knew at Tonbridge with the world to which he belonged at Cambridge, and the possibility of pursuing lit­er­a­t ure ­t here became 229

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more than a fanciful dream. With me migrating semi-­permanently into his living room and the school timetable demanding so many hours of preparation, I cannot imagine, looking now at Greg’s bibliography over that period, how he continued to publish so ferociously. Somehow, I too managed to find time to fit in the set texts for A-­Level around the discussions in Greg’s literary salon. Greg returned to Cambridge ­after one short year at Tonbridge. Something precious ended at school. But sorrow turned to excitement when I was invited to continue the discussion ­t here, as Greg guided me t­ oward applying for a place at Clare College at Cambridge. Very much to my own surprise, and only b ­ ecause Greg had inspired me to have the audacity to ask, I found myself accepted by Cambridge just as Greg made the big shift to the United States—­Fordham where I last visited, then New York University and Bucknell. Publications, teaching, developing the Bucknell University Press with its scholarly bent ­towards the eigh­teenth ­century—in some ways, the regular hallmarks of a distinguished academic ­career. But what is it that makes Greg’s c­ areer distinctive? I would argue it is the lives his enthusiasm has enriched by unlocking the towering thinkers of the Enlightenment. Greg taught us early on a skepticism for seeing Johnson through the eyes of Boswell. But the diary entry of 14 July 1763, purporting to quote Johnson, touches on the gift Greg gave to me then and to so many since: “A man ­ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task ­will do him ­little good.” What I initially approached as a task became inclination through the inspiration of a passionate teacher.

Elaine Wood Clingham’s Literary Universe “What­ever be the reason, it is commonly observed that the early writers are in possession of nature, and their followers of art; that the first excel in strength and invention, and the latter in elegance and refinement” (from Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, chapter ten), Professor Clingham read to his class of undergraduates at Bucknell University while I was his teaching assistant in the spring, 2007. I learned quickly that the vibrant impact of Greg’s teaching style and mentorship far exceeded the reach of the classroom and that his clever sense and unique sensibilities generated admiration and awe from students, colleagues, administrations, industry professionals, and friends far beyond Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Perhaps one of the most startling and remarkable qualities of Greg as a passionate teacher is his incredibly ­humble mode of self-­presentation. It remains my distinct honor and privilege that I taught and researched alongside Professor Clingham during my master’s work at Bucknell University. Additionally, my role as his editorial assistant at Bucknell University Press across several seasons prompted my continued interest in editing de­cades l­ater. His advising my thesis on “Translating the Vision Beatific: Mary Shelley and William Blake’s

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Engagements with Milton’s Paradise Lost” led to a once-­i n-­a-­l ifetime conversational journey of discovery with Greg on subjects ranging from The Aeneid, to trips to Greek islands during my aimless twenties, Cicero’s legacy, The Hundred Schools of Thought, skepticism ­toward atonement, En­glish Old House fountains, Blakean Jerusalem, Shelleyan Amer­i­ca, Byronic parody, the Cure, gender theory, the arts of happiness, among many other diverse topics. Greg planted many seeds of inspiration realized ­later. Further, teaching alongside Greg’s Law and Lit­er­a­ture courses, learning the Wilde ­Trials and the Newgate Prison Calendar, inspired my continued interdisciplinary academic interests at the nexus of law, culture, and humanities. Joy, ­music, and beautiful gardens escaped Vauxhall and arrived in State College at Greg and Merrill’s home with their lovely d ­ aughters, cats, birds, En­glish plum pudding, and rooibos tea. Annually I welcomed the invitation to join their Chinese New Year cele­brations and fondly remember Jaia playing harmoniously on the piano with Frankie singing exuberantly alongside her s­ ister—­Greg’s sense and sensibility manifest in the diligent pianist and rambunctious vocalist! Indeed, it is with incredible gratitude that I reflect with deep nostalgia on such happy times and places. Greg Clingham is, of course, a remarkable teacher, critic, and editor. Indeed, he is the embodiment of won­der, admiration, and poise. It is our honor to be in the presence of such vibrancy.

Caroline Fassett Professor Clingham I met Professor Gregory Clingham in the first semester of my sophomore year at Bucknell University. He was the teacher of my En­glish Survey class, and he spent the entirety of the first day of class expounding about his love of lit­er­a­ture, asking my fellow classmates about their passions and ambitions, and leading us all to believe that he ­either c­ ouldn’t read a clock or that he supposed our class to exist outside the confines of time. No work was completed, no syllabus was circulated, and no doubt was formed against my newborn conviction that Professor Clingham was the most intellectual, inquisitive, and kind-­hearted person that I had ever come across, both at and beyond Bucknell University. Throughout the next few years, I spent quite a lot of time with him. I learned about his impressive education at Cambridge University and his par­tic­u ­lar expertise in Samuel Johnson; I read spectacular books that he gave to and frequently spoiled for me; and I matured from his sometimes severe but never unmerited critiques of my writing. And while I d ­ on’t know if I ever successfully a­ dopted any of Professor Clingham’s qualities ­after he took me ­under his wing, I can say with certainty that t­here was no other instructor who so im­mensely and so immutably ­shaped my undergraduate experience. Although I always knew that I wanted to

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study En­glish, it was Professor Clingham who first identified my passion for classic lit­er­a­ture and inspired me to pursue a degree in literary studies. And although I served as an editor for multiple publications on campus, it was Professor Clingham who encouraged me to help him start one of our own, an academic journal that came to be known as the Humanities Review. And, fi­nally, although I always knew that I wanted to write an honors thesis for the En­glish Department prior to graduating, it was Professor Clingham who urged me to pursue a research grant that laid the foundations for the paper and who afterward agreed to be my advisor for the formidable proj­ect. In reflecting on my friendship with Professor Clingham, I’m just now realizing that I do have one regret: I have never been able to think of a word that better epitomizes how I feel about his incredible influence upon my life than that of “gratitude.” Professor Clingham knows that, when I write, I go to excessive and often unnecessary lengths to avoid sounding too ­simple or too trite. So he knows that it must pain me a bit now to say the same tired expression that e­ very student must say to their mentor at some point in their relationship: I am grateful for you, Professor Clingham. I am grateful that you do not perceive students as mere sponges of your intellect, but as individual beings who can harness their academic interests to thrive on their own terms. For your unwavering guidance, your boundless altruism, and your incorruptible heart, I’ll forever be indebted.

Joseph McNicholas Dr. Greg Clingham Thirty years ago, in a New York City classroom, a delightfully irreverent man in round glasses burst into my life. He seemed part Chaplin, part Lennon, and part Gandhi. He had come to teach Introduction to En­glish Lit­er­a­ture: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, and he would change the course of my life, the way that only truly ­great professors can. Without his influence, I would not have studied En­glish and would not have attained a master’s degree, much less a PhD. ­Today, I relate to works of lit­er­a­ture as if they w ­ ere my friends and companions, just as he taught me. Yet, to my eighteen-­year-­old self, Dr. Gregory Clingham appeared as an emissary from another world, an avatar from the life of the intellect. His mind moved easily, cat-­like, through what seemed to me hopelessly foreign texts. In his hands, books would transform themselves from secret, foreboding runes into decipherable language, and fi­nally into b ­ earers of delightful, insightful, and precious meaning. Does this seem overstated? Perhaps. Still, cherished moments of clarity and understanding echo to me across three de­cades of my life in academics. They awaken my inner smile at a joke shared between Gregory, Geoffrey, and me from the “General Prologue” of the Canterbury Tales. For ­t here we learn that it is when

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the swich licour flows, the yonge sonne is halfway through the Ram; when the wetness pierces the roots and the sweete breeth inspires; when the shoots reach up, the roots penetrate down, the flower is engendred, and nature has pricked our hearts—­ that’s when we long to . . . ​go to church. Bawdy punchline. When I was an undergraduate, Dr. Clingham coached me to engage with lit­er­ a­ture’s libidinal economy and humor, with depictions of betrayal, terror, and madness, with narrative structures, deeply ­human characters, and with poetry. ­Later, when my studies advanced, he guided me in the theoretical, philosophical, scholarly, and historical contexts of literary works. His mastery of ­t hese ele­ments as a scholar are rightly celebrated in this volume. Likewise, his ability as a professor and mentor deserve praise. Dr. Clingham fosters awe and curiosity in his students to be sure, but his crucial gifts are the quality of his presence in the moment with us and the gentleness of his good fellowship. I often recall one par­tic­u ­lar spring class that found him seated upright on the professor’s desk, his legs swinging child-­like, before him. He beamed silently at each student who entered, and he maintained eye contact. Once we had all taken our seats and given him our attention, he turned his face ­toward the sunlit win­dows, drew in a long, easy breath, and ­gently exhaled. “Do you know” he mused, “that we often take breathing for granted?” The comment had no bearing on the day’s lesson, and, as a group, it befuddled us a bit. He inhaled again. “Let’s just take a moment to breathe. ­Shall we?” As we took that moment together, I could feel my heart and mind arrange themselves to be more receptive to the work of after­noon, to be more prepared for the journey we ­were about to undertake. As I have grown older, I still rouse myself to intellectual adventure the same way. More often than he knows, I summon my mentor, my colleague, and my friend to set out with me.

Margaret Williams Greg Clingham as Mentor and Friend One always hopes to have a teacher who inspires you, believes in you, and fundamentally affects your intellectual and professional trajectory for the better. I have been one so lucky. Greg Clingham was my Law and Lit­er­a­ture professor at Bucknell University some fifteen years ago. I was contemplating a ­career in international law and was looking for a final capstone before graduating. Law and Lit­er­a­ture seemed a perfect fit, allowing me to delve further into the intersection of law, narrative, justice, and spectacle. However, what I had not anticipated was that, through discovering Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and the like, I would also be challenged to think beyond the theoretical and into the practical impact of justice, truth, and mercy on ­people’s lives, ­whether in the eigh­teenth or the twenty-­first c­ entury.

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Professor Clingham’s excitement for his field was contagious, and his commitment to his students palpable. Through his teaching, and often with a considerable amount of patience, he committed himself to helping us better understand and reflect upon the past to appreciate its relevance and applicability to the pre­ sent. In preparing a piece for this Festschrift, I remembered our active class debates, the seemingly endless hours of writing and editing, and the steadfast energy with which Professor Clingham approached his subject and his students. He ignited our curiosity, supported our growth, compelled us to think critically, and cultivated a sense of social responsibility. Law and Lit­er­a­ture was the course that set my path and made me think differently about what I wanted to do and the impact I wanted to make. My professional pursuit of the law eventually detoured into a c­ areer in international affairs and development. Yet, I have actively taken the lessons of Law and Lit­er­a­ture with me, particularly ­t hose concerning social justice, the importance of story, and the need to always keep fighting despite, or perhaps b ­ ecause of, the ultimate fallibility of h ­ umans. Over the years, Greg has evolved from teacher to mentor to friend. I am honored to have had this opportunity to reflect upon his impact on me as a student, a professional, and a person. H ­ ere’s to you, Professor Clingham, for sticking with me, and so many ­others, in shaping who we are. May ­every student be so wonderfully fortunate.

Erin Labbie “On the ­Matter of Kicking the Stone” Readers of this book, A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture in Honor of Greg Clingham, skillfully and generously edited by Anthony W Lee, are likely familiar with the famous anecdote reported by James Boswell, in which Doctor Samuel Johnson refutes Bishop George Berkeley’s argument about the immateriality of “­matter” by kicking a stone. According to Boswell, Johnson’s response to Berkeley’s assertions regarding materiality and phenomena is to kick a stone and proclaim, “I refute it thus!” Among the many scholarly discussions of this moment as a logical fallacy or as evidence of Johnson’s misunderstanding of Berkeley’s argument, what is more in­ter­est­ing about the narrative is the perception of Boswell as a reporter who claims to document the exchange unbiasedly, even while his journals reveal his own personal interest and perspective. Johnson’s actions and statements are of interest to Boswell and to us for many reasons, not the least of which is how the precision of his statement condenses a long debate. In some ways, Boswell’s writing becomes the center of the debate about earthly materiality ­because his narrative determines our perception of the event. I learned this quickly from Greg Clingham’s ability to subtly, firmly, anecdotally, skeptically, and

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humorously address complex and paradoxical issues in his teaching, his scholarship, and his role as editor of Bucknell’s University Press. Prior to 1993, when I arrived at Bucknell University as an MA student, serendipitously (and most fortunately for me) the same year Greg Clingham arrived as a professor in the En­glish Department at Bucknell, I had not been exposed to the deep critical inquiry in its historical context, with a sense of both proximity and distance, that I would soon learn how to engage in. Greg (along with his colleagues, especially Michael Payne and Marilyn Mumford) introduced me to a world of knowledge that continues to influence and inspire my scholarship, teaching, and approach to life t­ oday. In some ways, Greg’s introduction to Bucknell was parallel to mine—we both found ourselves transplanted from larger cities to the bucolic town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; yet, he immediately became a generous guide, mentor, teacher, and friend. Greg made the hard work of bibliographic history a joy, as he shared anecdotes from his own educational pro­cess and his academic work. He taught me, among other ­t hings, to value William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (which it took me three readings to appreciate), b ­ ecause he showed me the material in its context and brought a sense of won­der to all pos­si­ble textual and historical moments. He opened my eyes not only to the work of Boswell, Johnson, Diderot, Fielding, Richardson, and Swift, but also to the likes of Charlotte Lennox, Thomas Chatterton, and Wilkie Collins. He taught me to understand the history of the rise of the novel, how to drink tea, how to shop for rare books, how to choose a piece of velvet as a desk cover, and how to appreciate the pre­sent with the full sense of the past and an openness to what­ever ­futures might exist. Additionally, Greg taught me to teach, through his actions and his mentorship. Perhaps one specific example—­culled from many—­ will illustrate this. Once, at 9 p.m. the night before an 11 a.m. class, Greg asked me to teach Middlemarch. I had never taught his class and had not yet read the novel. I stayed up all night reading and the next day taught it well, I think, b ­ ecause I did it for him and b ­ ecause of his belief in me that I could do it. As a budding scholar at the MA level, Greg offered me an opportunity to choose to study the long eigh­teenth ­century. When, instead, I searched for a dif­fer­ent historical epoch, which I found in medieval lit­er­a­ture, he had no ego invested in my choice; rather, he supported my endeavors on a transcendent intellectual plane that allowed me to continue to learn from him about the ways that literary moments encounter each other across time, and he continues to support and influence my work now. Greg’s unique valuing of the past and awareness of each moment of history and historiography are invigorating, as are his awareness of how memory, perception, and phenomena inform our understandings of ideas and m ­ atter. He has a profound ability to discuss concepts on a level that is significant and humane while speaking in a multi-­faceted manner that can reach readers, auditors, and students on vari­ous levels. In this way, to me, Greg is akin to the Rabbis (the teachers) whose discussions as recorded in the Haggadah ­were meant to reach all inquisitors: the wise, the ­simple, the skeptical (or rebellious), and the one too ­simple to yet know

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what to ask. That he is able to teach t­ hese skills while retaining his own impeccable scholarship, creative energy, and Baudelairean childlike perspective, combined with a unique ele­ment of Cartesian skepticism, is rare. I am honored to be included in this volume in honor of Greg’s work, and I appreciate his generosity of mind and time, his joyful amusement, and his astonishment with daily life. In an age during when members of humanities departments utter catch-­phrases such as “culture m ­ atters” and “always historicize,” we in are consistently are confronted with the need to defend our research and raison-­d ’être. Greg’s teaching and mentorship, as well as his manner, have been instrumental in preparing me to anticipate and learn to respond to the skeptical questions that dominate anti-­ intellectual culture. To be certain, what we confront as a crisis in the humanities ­today has in fact always been a crisis (as Friedrich Nietz­sche insisted in his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”). Albeit masochistically at times and heroically at other times, we academics benefit from the per­sis­tent need to produce work that resists criticism precisely ­because it is impeccably logical, clearly written, well-­ researched, well-­supported, and yet has the ability to conceive of worlds that do not necessarily exist in material real­ity. This paradoxical combination of reason with imagination summarizes Greg’s approach to scholarship, and it also summarizes Johnson’s view of the world (as evident in his writings, Boswell’s interpretation of them, and Greg’s perceptive analy­sis of Johnson in his historical context). Greg’s mindful and caring approach to life and work allows him to challenge establishments and ideology from within, while remaining disciplined and diplomatic. I appreciate the ways in which he has, ­whether in the classroom, at professional meetings, in his warm home with his f­ amily, or talking across distance, always been by my side, walking as a teacher and friend who is ready to kick a stone to show me a lesson, to give me a goal, or to make me laugh with won­der.

Patrick Thomas Henry ­Grand Forks, ND, December 2018 In her diary entry for 18 April 1918, V ­ irginia Woolf laments the impossibility of condensing into a journal entry an after­noon’s chat with her friend and mentor, the art critic Roger Fry: “I d ­ on’t see how to put three or four hours of Roger’s conversation into the rest of this page, for it was about all manner of t­ hings.” When Anthony W. Lee invited me to contribute a note on Greg Clingham’s mentorship, I confronted a dilemma similar to Woolf’s: How could I, in a scant space of a few pages, condense a de­cade of conversations? To have the plea­sure of Greg’s conversation for but an hour is a similar romp through so many topics. To have him as a mentor and a teacher is akin to being outfitted for a lifetime of intellectual expeditions. Unlike Woolf, I’ve only irregularly kept the habit of a journal. But my first conversation with Greg left an indelible impression: not only did it set the tenor for

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our ­f uture conversations, but it is also emblematic of what characterizes Greg as a teacher and mentor. Our first meeting was in August 2008, at the beginning of my two-­year stint in the MA program at Bucknell, where I would be Greg’s teaching assistant. Greg had arranged to meet me at the Bucknell University Press offices in the basement—or “garden level,” to use the university-­approved euphemism— of Taylor Hall. As I went to meet him at the appointed hour, I drilled myself on the research I had already done into his CV: a Johnsonian, a celebrated scholar, a director of a university press. It all seemed a rather august and quite a bit intimidating. So, when I arrived, I gave his office door a meek tap and asked, quietly, “Dr. Clingham?” At once, he said, “No, no, no. ­Don’t be so formal. You must be Pat, yes? Pat, please.” He gestured to a chair, inviting me to sit down. “Tell me, who do you most enjoy reading?” I entered his office that day a timid twenty-­t wo-­year-­old MA candidate, terrified (and a ­little thrilled) by the prospect of grad school. The moment I sat down in Greg’s office and answered his question, I knew that I had crossed the threshold into a community of scholars, in which texts and storytelling illuminate our collective humanistic values. Like Woolf on her conversation with Fry, I can only offer an inadequate list of some of the topics our conversation glanced on: Ian McEwan, Jane Austen, where to find good coffee in Lewisburg, Walter Scott, autumn by the Susquehanna River, Johnson’s tour of Scotland, the dif­fer­ent paths that had conveyed both of us to that dim room in the depths of Taylor Hall. If I ­were to choose only one lesson I’ve taken from Greg, it would be the fundamental necessity of re­spect—­for our colleagues, for our students, for the work of lit­er­a­ture—in all aspects of literary studies. This is evident in his teaching: his intense interest in his students’ ideas and internal lives has activated their imaginations and stimulated their learning. A student in Greg’s Law and Lit­er­a­ture seminar once told me that his courses expanded each person’s capacity to read, reason, and critique like nothing ­else had. Mock ­trials, Socratic discussions, book reviews, essays, one-­on-­one conferences: in each of ­t hese contexts, Greg would conduct his students through the issues and controversies of the assigned texts, while opening a dialogue with their interpretations and reactions. Without fail, the long eigh­ teenth ­century became immediate, vital, and urgent to the students (and to me, as his TA). ­Because of his attention and energy, Greg’s classroom actualizes a theory that E. M. Forster articulates in Aspects of the Novel—­t hat lit­er­a­ture is a conversation that transcends time or place, that we can imagine the novelists of all generations seated together and speaking with one another, as if at a roundtable in a British Museum reading-­room. In an era where students are drilled in professionalism and careerism, Greg’s pedagogy stands as a necessary reminder that the values of the humanities are central to any true intellectual inquiry. ­There is a passage in Greg’s own scholarship that’s worthy of mention ­here. In Johnson, Writing, and Memory, he delves into Johnson’s Lives of the En­glish Poets, where he meditates at length on Johnson’s reading of Milton’s views on politics and education. In that analy­sis, Greg extrapolates from Johnson the view that poetry

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is “an art which grows out of a deeply personal engagement with life, society, politics, and letters.” The same holds true in the study of lit­er­a­ture: criticism and scholarship are arts that build upon our personal attachments, and they are arts demanding that we—­their prac­ti­tion­ers—­attend diligently to the p ­ eople, communities, and cultures that intersect with our own lives. Greg has instilled this value in his own students, and therein lies his legacy. W ­ hether you holding this volume are his student, his mentee, his colleague, or a reader of his scholarship, you now have the chance to carry forward Greg’s generosity of spirit, his collegiality, and his capacious vision.

Adam Walker Johnsonian Mentor I met Professor Greg Clingham when I was a first-­year master’s student in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at Bucknell University. Greg could often be found on campus, talking with students, inquiring about their research, and providing insightful guidance and constant encouragement. He was known and admired by many of the students at Bucknell. My first conversation with Greg happened when I consulted him about my reading list while preparing to write my thesis. At that time, he was both a professor of En­glish and director of the university press, and I immediately found that Greg was a man of unbounded generosity. Despite vari­ous commitments with the department, the press, and his own research, Greg soon became a mentor to me during my time at Bucknell, and his guidance and wisdom would prove to be a ­great influence upon my life. Our friendship deepened as we continued to meet and I learned what a ­great storyteller and conversationalist Greg is. ­There are many raconteurs among the professors I’ve met, but I never met one so skilled in the art of both speaking and listening. Through our visits, I also learned that Greg is the most capable literary sleuth I have met. He kindly shared with me his latest archival discoveries along the trail of his research and was equally e­ ager to delight in my own small discoveries. As a skilled editor, Greg was demanding but encouraging. Anyone fortunate enough to know Greg knows that he possesses an uncompromising—­one could almost say Johnsonian—­eye for concise and eloquent writing. We would often meet to talk over my drafts at lunch on campus or in the eve­nings at the local pub. He would arrive clutching a printed draft of my writings, the contents of which he quickly eviscerated before my eyes. With a disarming smile, he would make me see the opportunity for improving my writing. His standard for scholarly writing was high, and his feedback was always what I needed, always edifying. As a student questioning my own ability to become a good writer, ­t here was nothing more encouraging than to have my work taken seriously by Greg. ­There was an implicit understanding that he held me to the high standard to which he held himself and his colleagues. For that, I ­w ill always be grateful.

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His natu­ral skill as a mentor, I believe, is rooted in his character as a h ­ uman being. The ways in which Greg has affected me as a student are significant and many, but I ­shall always be grateful for the example he set as both an excellent scholar and a whole-­heartedly generous person. I am extremely grateful for the investments he has made into my education. Through him, doors have been opened to me that, without him, would have been closed. In recalling his openhandedness, hospitality, and guidance, I am ever astounded and w ­ ill always be indebted to his guidance and friendship.

W. K. Tchou St. Catharine’s Day 2018 Princess Marie Louise Room, Oxford and ­ reat Britain Cambridge Club London, G Consulting Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the En­glish Language, one finds no specific entry for the German word Festschrift or a festival in writing. However, Johnson’s Dictionary as a book serves as a lasting monument for the En­glish language. This volume also celebrates in writing the achievements of a scholar who made lasting contributions to the study of En­glish language and lit­er­a­ture. A reader looking through this work may ask, where lies the monument celebrating Greg Clingham as both a scholar and a mentor? The answer Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice seems most appropriate. While the chapters in this book begin the festivities, the party continues beyond the last page. Look to the academic departments offering a course on En­glish lit­er­a­ture and to the cata­logues offering books and serials on eighteenth-century studies, and one ­w ill find ­there Clingham’s publications. Look to ­every library of worth and seek out recent volumes published by Bucknell University Press, and in each one the reader w ­ ill find a testament to Clingham as the director of a university press. Furthermore, look to the journeys of the mind that generations of ­t hose supervised by Professor Clingham at universities around the world, and the reader ­will find mementos celebrating him as a mentor through their travels. The mentoring between Professor and Director Clingham and me began formally in 2005, during festivities hosted by Cambridge in New York City for the launch of the Cambridge 800th Anniversary Campaign in the United States. During this alumni event, Clingham introduced me to the university’s vice-­chancellor, Dame Alison Richard, DBE, who personally welcomed me into its walled gardens. She published her first book in anthropology with Bucknell University Press in 1978 then ­u nder the directorship of Mills Fox Edgerton, who served as Clingham’s immediate pre­de­ces­sor. Overwhelmed by such an august invitation, I spent the next three years preparing myself for Cambridge by majoring in Comparative Humanities and East Asian Studies, with a minor in Biology. When I was concluding my master’s degree,

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Professor Clingham supervised me in a course entitled Bilingual Dictionary. The course took us from Johnson’s Dictionary to Robert Morrison’s A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts. Only a­ fter my own transferable skills course on how to supervise students did I realize that beginning with the spring semester of 2009 and extending to the rest of year, Professor Clingham served as my supervisor and I as his supervisee in a manner befitting Cambridge and our college—­St Catharine’s. In that year, the serendipity between us led to a series of fortuitous events. At both Bucknell and Pembroke (Oxon.), we celebrated Johnson’s tercentenary; in the Friendship Palace (Beijing); at my invitation, Professor Clingham introduced eighteenth-century studies to an audience of over four-­ hundred scholars from sixteen countries; within the same week, upon the recommendation of Professor Clingham, I became both a Mary Catherine Mooney Fellow at the Boston Atheæum and a ­middle member of St Catharine’s College (Cantab.) reading China Studies. This was just a beginning. In the years since, both fat and lean, I continued to benefit from the wisdom of Professor and Director Clingham. May his collaboration with me as a mentor and a friend continue to grow so that “all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades Forever and forever when [we] move.” May St. Catharine of Alexandria, patron saint of wisdom, continue to cast her smile on Professor and Director Greg Clingham. May the enlightenment, that turning of knowledge into wisdom that he brings to his students through his mentoring ever be a monument of his achievement as a teacher, critic, and editor.

Greg Clingham and Bucknell University Press Gary Sojka Greg Clingham as Director It should come as no surprise to anyone that when an administrator is asked to write about another practitioner of the craft, the piece w ­ ill begin with lamentations on the frustrations and challenges faced in a thankless job requiring decisions that may significantly affect ­others’ lives and c­ areers. Th ­ ose familiar with the task of directing a university press know to expect an even more anguished pre­ sen­ta­tion. It is a difficult time for all academic publishing. Directors of university presses are tasked not only with helping authors hone and refine their writing, but must often take on the added responsibility of “academic gatekeeper,” since their decision to accept a junior faculty member’s first book for publication is frequently the de facto make-or-break point in determining w ­ hether that person w ­ ill be tenured and/or promoted. It is a fortunate university, indeed, that can attract and convince a properly prepared individual to take on the job of directing its press. Bucknell University has been one of ­t hose institutions. It is hard to imagine a person better suited to this demanding assignment than Greg Clingham. By nature, he is a scholar and a man of letters. He is the beneficiary of the finest educational opportunities in his field. His sense of style and form, depth of scholarship, and feel for the relevance of topics are exceptional. Such a constellation of skills is most advantageous in one tasked with leading an academic press. But in this era, the director must also have a keen business sense and be able to deal with numerous contractual and informal relationships in an effort to position his or her press within an appropriate number of specific fields. In Greg’s case, leadership of Bucknell University Press was a significant personal sacrifice. ­After he assumed the directorship, the workload began to increase for a number of reasons, many of them good, but the support in terms of finances and personnel appeared to be inelastic. Greg tried e­ very honorable form of entreaty to 241

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the university administration to secure a more realistic bud­get and a support staff large enough to meet the needs of managing a press that was dealing with the volume of work Greg’s leadership generated. In nearly e­ very case, Greg persuaded the academic leaders of the university to improve the situation. However, in the pre­sent era, the real­ity is that although university presses are highly valued and appreciated for their contributions to the visibility, reputation, and status of the university, such academic pursuits often fare poorly in the “rough and tumble” bud­getary competition attending the distribution of scarce-­to-­inadequate funds. Other parts of a university can make a stronger case that the failure to adequately support them would lead to financial or ­legal exigency, loss of enrollment, reduced ability to attract and retain outstanding faculty, and a diminution in the ability to raise essential extramural funding. Despite ­t hese commonly experienced prob­lems, Greg admirably led the press through the tenure of numerous Bucknell presidents and provosts. He developed an excellent working relationship with all of ­t hose who ­were and are placed above him on the university orga­nizational chart. Undoubtedly that must have meant that he frequently had to stifle his true feelings and soldier on with what resources could be allocated for the operation of a press to which he had dedicated a major portion of his working life. In his time as director, Greg has worked with three dif­fer­ent publishers, each with its own set of objectives and methods of operation. He has had to negotiate contracts and the shared expectations attendant upon all of them. Working effectively with his editorial board, he has established Bucknell University Press as a preferred place for scholars in several fields to submit their manuscripts. The best mea­sure of the effectiveness of any administrator is a comparison of the strengths and reputation of the unit led from the start to the finish of his or her tenure as leader. Th ­ ere can be l­ittle doubt that the Bucknell University Press has more impact and is better regarded ­today than it was at the time that Greg assumed its leadership. He has provided the necessary insight, vision, tenacity, and knowledge to guide the press through numerous snares and past several pitfalls. The press is a better regarded enterprise t­ oday b ­ ecause of his skills as a leader and an administrator. It should also be noted that while engaged in the press’s primary role as an academic publisher, he has also overseen the production of some fine trade publications, several of which are notable for their aesthetic appeal. Of course, all of ­t hese accomplishments have come with a cost, and it is Greg who has born the bulk of that expense. He has often had to choose between his own scholarly interests and the welfare of the press. The commitment of time and energy needed to guide, operate, and advance a university press at this time of g­ reat change in the acad­emy prob­ably far exceeded what Greg expected at the outset. Yet he took the honorable, if not outright altruistic, route and put the needs and well-­being of the press ahead of his own interests. It is good to know that his days of making such decisions are coming to an end while he still possesses the energy and desire to attend to his own scholarly pursuits. As the administrative door closes

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on an outstanding effort, the best of Greg’s contributions to the world of letters may yet lie ahead.

Nina Forsberg Greg Clingham’s Bucknell University Press Panic was starting to set in. A manuscript we needed had seemingly dis­appeared. “Do you know what they would do in E ­ ngland right now?” Greg asked me, with a glint in his eye, “They would have a cup of tea.” Many scholars working within the long eigh­teenth ­century w ­ ill already be acquainted with the name Greg Clingham, and upon hearing it, the name Bucknell University Press ­w ill likely soon come to mind. Alongside his teaching and research in the Bucknell University En­g lish Department, Greg served as director of the university press for twenty-­two years, producing about thirty-­five books annually with his telltale pleasantry and wit. For two of ­t hose years, I worked closely with Greg as publishing man­ag­er. ­Those years proved to be eventful ones at the very least, as I watched Greg deftly keep the press publishing some of the most exciting scholarship in its chosen fields, while navigating it through a precarious period of uncertainty. Bucknell University is a private liberal arts institution with heavi­ly modern leanings, known for its school of engineering, old buildings kept looking new, and at its center a library with a focus on digital information technologies. In contrast, its continued support for its university press gives hope that the book itself still has a place in modern contexts and discourses. With each book produced by its press, a liberal arts institution makes tangible the humanistic values on which it is based. Yet, an academic press at a private liberal arts institution is a rarity, and it cannot take its place for granted. Though it was h ­ oused in basement offices at the time and working with l­imited resources, Greg could not let the press quietly and complacently do its work below ground. He strove to bring it up into the daylight of campus life. The fortieth anniversary cele­bration year, which was my first year with the press, lent Greg the opportunity to make a case for the tactile beauty and importance of books themselves through lectures and displays. Greg also set out to honor the contributions of every­one who had formed the press before him by conducting and recording a series of interviews with each living former director to preserve their recollections and voices. In more recent years, he has brought Bucknell students in touch with the press’s work by creating a popu­lar internship named ­after the press’s early associate director, Cynthia Fell, whose contributions Greg held in high regard. Greg’s manner of ­running the press was jovial and lighthearted, though the task at hand was the se­lection, cultivation, and production of works of serious scholarship. He had an unwavering conviction in the impor­tant work the press was ­doing, yet had a way of making routine procedures both enjoyable and memorable. He asked press advisory board member and former Bucknell president Gary Sojka to

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host one board meeting in his picturesque country home. Newborn lambs ­were being cared to just outside, adding an extra ele­ment of excitement to the meeting. Greg was also not willing to let the book-­design pro­cess become all too routine. Given bud­get and time constraints, only a few books at a time could go to the local design group that he preferred. Th ­ ere, each manuscript was meticulously studied before being transformed into a visually compelling book. The select few books to get that treatment served to showcase the value Greg placed on a book’s aesthetic appeal. As the press’ fourth and most-­longstanding director, Greg was handed a h ­ ouse with an established strength in Hispanic studies, and during his tenure the press would also become an indispensable outlet for eighteenth-­century studies. U ­ nder Greg’s creative directorship, t­ hese two fields would be allowed to merge. His openness to novel approaches and unexpected collaborations was part of his commitment to ensuring that the press would continue to thrive and evolve, with the needs of the academic communities it served ever in mind. He made numerous adaptations over the years to keep the press relevant by contributing a steady stream of innovative scholarship in its areas of strength. One notable example is the interdisciplinary series Aperçus that he created to replace the longstanding Bucknell Review in 2004 and that takes a revisionist look at the way historiography, text, and culture interact in the humanities. During my time with the press, Greg de­cided to close his original eighteenth-­century series and, in its place, created Transits, which takes a less traditional, transnational approach to the field. I sat across from Greg in the office as he was at work naming his new series, trying to understand how we could possibly capture all that he intended the series to encompass. ­After settling on the name Transits, he chose an image of two Cook expedition ships sailing past icebergs, reinforcing the adventuresome approaches authors ­were welcome to exhibit in their submissions. Authors responded with manuscripts that answered the call and kept breathing fresh life into the press’s fields of focus. Greg applied the same creativity he brought to the se­lection of material for the press to the more logistical and practical m ­ atter of ensuring its f­ uture. I witnessed him steer the press past one impor­tant juncture, the necessary ending of its association with the publishing consortium that had produced, marketed and distributed the press’s books since the beginning of its existence. Greg entertained vari­ous options, some clever and unconventional, for the next phase of the journey. In the end, he secured a new partnership that would allow the press to continue its work uninterrupted, an arrangement that lasted for the next ten years. This was a moment in the press’s history that many in the eighteenth-­century community followed with drawn breath, for its health mattered to this community of scholars. Its prominence as one of a few outlets for scholarship in this field was on full display to me when Greg sent me to represent the press at a conference in Barcelona dedicated to the eigh­teenth ­century and Spain. I could not have been prepared for the affectionate reception I received as a representative. The BUP ­table shared with just a few other organ­izations a spacious balcony overlooking an open-­a ir courtyard, illustrating for me firsthand the press’s role as a vital resource and outlet for

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scholars working in this par­tic­u­lar area. Greg felt a sense of responsibility to scholarly communities such as ­t hese, which kept it satiated with new material, served as manuscript readers, and ensured an audience for the finished books. Greg’s scholarly friendships also created a network of goodwill that helped it get past difficult crossroads along the way. Most recently, in 2017 he transitioned the press once again to a new publishing partnership. Greg concludes his directorship with the press as it embarks on its fiftieth anniversary. May Bucknell keep its press r­ unning for many more de­cades, and may Greg’s unique mark on it and on the scholarly communities it serves not fade, but be written into its evolving legacy.

Daniel ­Little Greg Clingham: Intellectual and Conversationalist Like the luminaries of the eigh­teenth ­century who hold so much fascination for Greg Clingham, Greg is both an intellectual and a conversationalist. As an intellectual he is fascinated by the task of untangling the threads of ideas that are at once familiar and strange, ­whether in Samuel Johnson or in Sir George Macartney’s diplomacy in China. But like an Enlightenment conversationalist, he is willing to take up a remarkable range of topics and test out ideas as they develop. ­These qualities have served him well as a scholar and writer. They are also an exceptionally favorable foundation for the work he has long done as director of Bucknell University Press. His literary and historical imagination and curiosity have allowed him to bring exciting new ideas to light through the press and to pre­sent to the academic world works of literary theory, history, and cultural studies that possess an excellence quite rare. ­These qualities of imagination and originality are evident in Greg’s published works, which have indeed made a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century studies. But they are all the more evident in the agora of the small, high-­quality liberal arts university where Greg has spent the larger part of his ­career. The intellectual life of such places is a delicate concoction. It requires the willing engagement of the scholars and professors of the university to interact with their colleagues and their students on a wide range of topics, often well beyond their par­tic­u­lar areas of expertise. It is this willingness to broach and combine diverse disciplines and fields of knowledge that makes a liberal-­arts university especially transformative for its inhabitants. And this engagement takes both ­great energy and substantial amounts of courage. The engaged professor needs to be willing to listen with an open mind to the ideas of ­others and to express his or her own ideas with humility, energy, and a willingness to be wrong. Greg has shown himself willing to engage in exactly ­these ways, and the intellectual environment of his university is the richer for it. I have a very clear memory of a visit to Bucknell University by the distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt interacted with small groups

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of faculty as well as a large audience of students. What was most striking about his visit was the originality of his thinking and his willingness to take up topics that ­were very distant from the life of Shakespeare. One of Greenblatt’s central themes was the question of “racial memory” and ethnic lit­er­a­tures—­essentially the question of ­whether an ethnic group might have memories beyond the life experiences of the individuals who make up this group in the pre­sent. Is t­ here such a ­t hing as an African or a Jewish racial identity affected in the pre­sent by the historical experiences of slavery and Holocaust? And are certain bodies of lit­er­a­ture perhaps part of the b ­ earers of such memories (Irish lit­er­a­ture, Latin American lit­ er­a­ture)? In general Greenblatt was highly skeptical about the idea, and his provocative views led to lively, extended, and transformative conversation. This is the kind of intellectual and conversational engagement that strikes me as the most valuable contribution pos­si­ble to the intellectual life of a college or university. I think of Greenblatt in the context of the pre­sent volume ­because Greg’s own intellectual qualities often mirror ­t hose of Greenblatt. He is willing to try out his ideas and to follow the logic of a conversation to its end, with all participants somewhat changed, even transformed, by the experience. The qualities of intellectual openness and willingness to take risks at the pos­si­ ble cost of one’s own amour-­propre are also key to the success of a truly transformative publisher or editor. University presses can be a central ave­nue through which academic insight and knowledge pro­gress; but they can also be stodgy and conservative. The best editors are t­ hose who can see the value of new approaches to familiar topics and can quickly discern the potential value of new definitions of the topics of the field altogether. Sometimes t­ hese judgments turn out to be wrong or misguided—­even Max Perkins made m ­ istakes—­but the vitality and the excitement of new ideas that t­ hese qualities can create are well worth the risk. H ­ ere, too, Greg has proven himself to be an exceptional midwife for new ideas and new approaches through his editorial direction of the Bucknell University Press. So, I am pleased to participate in this cele­bration of the many facets of intellectual work that Greg Clingham has offered us throughout his ­career. And ­those contributions include the publications Greg has authored, the many volumes of scholarship he has helped to birth through Bucknell University Press, and the contributions he has made to a vibrant intellectual life in the universities in which he has resided.

James Rice A Provost’s Perspective For most of the twenty-­odd years that Greg Clingham served as director of Bucknell University Press, I was responsible for providing administrative “oversight” of the press from within the university’s Office of the Provost. While that duty required very ­little effort on my part, it did provide me with a close view of Greg’s work and accomplishments as a publisher.

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Greg inherited a small university press that enjoyed a middling reputation based on two areas of study—­Irish lit­er­a­ture and Spanish “golden age” culture. In addition, the press produced a journal that, to put it generously, attracted more interest as a scholarly venue for internal faculty than from the outside world. Upon taking the directorship, which had languished as a kind of sinecure within the En­glish Department, Greg immediately began to transform ­every dimension of the press’s operation and output: changing publishers (from an eccentric family-­ run publishing operation to a large international ­house), updating and improving the composition and work of the editorial board, commissioning editors, and revamping and strengthening the peer review pro­cess. The most striking changes, however, ­were in the quality and diversity of authors, the broadening of series’ themes, and a quantum improvement in graphic quality. As many know, university presses are notorious for their reputations as budget-­ bleeding and staff-­heavy appendages within the typical academic orga­nizational structure. Amazingly, Greg recruited and managed a growing number of authors, editors, manuscript reviewers, publishing ­house administrators, and graphic designers—­basically singlehandedly—­a ll the while learning the mores and vagaries of con­temporary publishing—­from manuscript solicitation and review through printing, marketing, and distribution—­from the ground-up. His transformation of the press in all ­these areas was truly striking and accomplished within a remarkably compressed time frame. At the end of the day, however, Greg’s most salient achievement can be found in his crafting of a sharper and more refined identity for the press as a provider of leading-­edge scholarship in the arts, humanities, and humanistically oriented social sciences. Greg created new series in Iberian, Latin American, Irish, and his own area of eighteenth-century studies. He was always open, with a discerning eye, to new ideas and perspectives as he broadened the press’s list with essay collections, memoirs, and poetry. Fi­nally, no appreciation of Greg’s publishing work would be complete without a recognition of his value as a colleague: welcoming, fair, and preternaturally patient in his dealings with the menagerie of notoriously prickly and sensitive egos found in all sectors of the publishing enterprise. That said, for me, Greg’s most enduring legacy is the confidence he instilled in o ­ thers by establishing and staying true to a rigorous and nuanced standard of quality—­a legacy that can be seen in the press’s list ­today.

John Rickard Greg Clingham as Colleague and Friend It was my plea­sure and honor to work with Professor Greg Clingham for over twenty-­ five years at Bucknell. During ­those years, Greg distinguished himself as a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, and a scholar. Greg’s deep expertise in eighteenth-­century

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British culture and lit­er­a­ture enabled him to offer a variety of courses in that area, as well as related classes in Law and Lit­er­a­ture, Landscape and Lit­er­a­ture, Gothic Lit­er­a­ture, Enlightenment Exotica, Sense and Sensibility: Augustine to Austen, and many ­others. Greg was able to bring his scholarly work to bear on his teaching in ways that often encouraged his students to go on to further study in the field: he mentored many undergraduate and gradu­ate students who went on to earn PhD degrees. During his years at Bucknell, Greg achieved ­great distinction as a scholar, earning many awards, including research fellowships at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, among ­others. Bucknell recognized his excellence as a scholar by awarding him both the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair and the John P. Crozer Chair in En­glish. Of course, Greg also distinguished himself as director of the Bucknell University Press, and as a member of its advisory board, I had many opportunities to appreciate his discernment as an editor and publisher, as well as his thoughtful and caring approach to dealing with individual authors. On both a personal and professional level, I came to value Greg’s knowledge, both wide and deep, his love of lit­er­a­ture, and his keen sense of humor as we worked together over the years. I was impressed by his concern about the quality and level of scholarly contributions made by each submitted manuscript we considered, but also by his deep interest in the authors’ work—­especially ­t hose in the early stages of their ­careers. Greg’s remarkable knowledge of the world of academic publishing and his ability to place submitted works from a wide variety of fields into an overall picture of the identity and goals of the press made him the most engaged and effective director of the press I encountered during my twenty-­nine years of ser­v ice at the university. Greg Clingham’s varied and deep contributions to our university in general and its press in par­tic­u ­lar made him a unique and irreplaceable scholar, teacher, and editor, and I am honored and inspired to have served along with him during his years at Bucknell.

Commemoratory Poems

“It is rowing without a port.” Notes by Lady Anne Barnard while in South Africa Antjie Krog to escape the Black Broth of Sparta I was often seated at the t­ ables of men by men for men to be presented exhibited set out as stuffs for wealthy spouses in bids to blend my blood with barons & they came the highnesses stampeded like stags & though my heart was worthy, my head was bewildered (older men used the double entendre which I was meant not to understand but not to resent) yet I learnt I learnt quickly & managed to rise to rid the shy of timidity to coquette the vain lure the hesitant destabilize the confident thrill the witty de-­harm the offensive outwit the master therefore was ready when the ­really Big Man arrived for dinner in the House of the Eaterati the Ursa Major the Colossus the ­Great Cham being placed opposite him much to the left I could have my fill of the famous profile—

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a mountain of scrofula deformity & disgust his colour sallow his motions paralytic his manner self-­sufficient his sentences pronounced as if to be repeated he was ­silent for the first hour & a half till he had fed the animal part which he conducted nastily of course by then I already knew what the heat of his mind had written how his vocabulary could velvetize could explicate the splendid could fur could darken could aggravate the awful the ugly the dread I knew how he perplexed his work with princi­ple how he understood mutual frailty mutual forbearance how never softened by beauty nor awed by status he held me captive to a nobler cognizance I found grace in his deformity with all its stratagems to surprise & enchain attention so I waited then roused the Lion by raising a question which streaked kingfisher-­blue across the ­table he slowly turned ­towards me squinting thro’ the curls of his bushy wig assessing my worth while flourishing a knife awkwardly in his hand having stirred the sulky beast I wished a ­little flattery on him & used his giftedness to wipe his lowly birth “would not the Son have excused the Sin, Doctor?” asked I the dose took & he became excessively agreeable I ­haven’t thought about that eve­ning ­until now —­here in Africa beside a waterfall-­fed pool the colour of beer it has rained last night & the pool, ah the pool’s overflow rushes headlong down the valley’s lush— have actually forgotten my slight exasperation at the fuss around t­ able arrangements, food, the after-­dinner concert & how men always entered somewhat irritated faintly impatient in their manners ­ oman & how as a w one cleaved one’s senses to determine: what would he like? what would enthrall him? what would impress one’s uniqueness upon him? what would make him not turn his back on one? what would make him make eye-­contact? what is it that makes men so easily twirl planets on their fingertips? I ­haven’t thought about that eve­ning ­until now

C o m m e m o r at o r y P o e m s very alone and abandoned among large yellowwood, fynbos, guineafowl & olive thrush a malachite sunbird pendants among pincushions I try to encompass the Old Bear cling to his fullness but no avail hope has departed I get up & enter the pool like a last continent alert of the end in this rose-­coloured siltstone basin above me one blue-­imbued cliff fits into the other I bend my knees & give the w ­ ater my weight I slowly go ­under enclosed by an effervescing basal-­bedded silence my mouth becomes w ­ ater my elbows loam from my eyes maroon mud wrings I nestle on the stream-­bed embracing the boulder like a barque hold me! have me! drown me! so that this swirling with waste & wanting with sting with surrender can end can darken into final restriction . . . . . . ​ohdeargodspearing up bursting the surface in fear in fury my voice roaring across the ­water t­ owards finch nests swaying like sobs Sources: Stephen Taylor, Defiance—The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard Alice Oswald. Dart, River

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Francis Towne Lake District Watercolours, 1786 Kieron Winn Congenial sage and blue-­grey mountain forms, Some capped by sunlight, mass and interlink, ­Free of all mists or storms, Each lineament defined with india ink. ­ ere is a wood of green and umber trees. H Schematic outer fo­liage waves and bends In a warm gustful breeze, The blown-­together leaves like groups of friends. Cascades have ample space to do their rushing. Cumbersome fells are lightened at his look: Never sublimely crushing They fit the vision, and a hand-­held sketchbook.

C o m m e m o r at o r y P o e m s

An Ode: Alexander Pope Reciprocally Writes an Encomium for Samuel Johnson Emily Grosholz Happy the man whose wish and care A vast repository claim, Of recollections that restore The past to fame. Whose thoughts with art, whose power of mind, Whose flocks of memory supply The power of truth and evidence Which s­ hall not lie. Blest, who retrieves the useful ways That active, sweet, constitutive, Reflective princi­ples bring peace, And fill the hive. Commemoration lends its forms, Memorial an art of stone, The monumental writ that saves Man from oblivion. Thus let him live, remembered, known, Praised for the way his books entwine History, consciousness, renown, The knots of time.

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­Mother Johnson For Greg Harry Thomas Small, hardboiled, and as brittle As an egg shell, she was Already middle-­aged When she gave birth to Samuel, Her first son, who seemed dead. Milkless she had to send him To a wet nurse to be fed. That ­woman’s year-­old son Contracted scrofula (TB of the lymph nodes), A condition commonly Known as the King’s evil. It’s called that in Macbeth. A case could end in death, Or a child grow up blind. When it came Samuel’s time To be afflicted, the doctor, An eminent man, opined That they should go to London (According to John Wain, She paid for a stagecoach), For the Queen’s healing touch. The f­ uture essayist And lexicographer, Poet and biographer Lost one eye’s sight forever. He told his friend, Mrs Thrale, His ­mother’s talk was all Complaint, fear, and suspicion. The complaint was his want Of any self-­discipline. It was precept, precept, precept. Such mothering made him Physically inept. ­ ere times he gave But ­t here w Back as good as he got. One day, when she was angry,

Personal Reminiscences

C o m m e m o r at o r y P o e m s She taunted him as puppy; He asked her if she knew What we call a puppy’s m ­ other. He ­didn’t go to see her, Despite his many prayers, For nearly twenty years. The Abyssinian tale He wrote in a week of nights To disencumber her debts And cover the cost of her funeral.

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Greg Clingham and I share a love of poetry: reading it, hearing it read aloud, memorizing and recalling favorite bits. One of the most memorable experiences from my time working as an editorial associate at the Bucknell University Press was assisting Greg in the production of a beautiful, slim volume of poems by Yves Bonnefoy, Début et fin de la neige [Beginning and End of the Snow], translated by Emily Grosholz. Despite my having previously spent time in France, Bonnefoy’s poems w ­ ere entirely unknown to me, and in the two months or so that we w ­ ere intensively at work on the proj­ect, Greg would often read short bits of them aloud to me, his delighted voice resounding across the library that joined our offices in the basement of Taylor Hall. A testament to Greg’s extraordinary ability to make, and maintain, close relationships with his collaborators is the stunning commemorative composed by Grosholz just for this occasion and featured in ­t hese pages. But indeed, any tribute to Greg would be incomplete without the resounding call of the poetic, without the rustling of art within even critical language, without the literary coming alive in some way. Also included h ­ ere, “­Mother Johnson”—­a particularly lovely poem that, of course, says more about Johnson than it does about his ­mother—­struck me as a most appropriate meditation on Greg’s life and work. In this delicate and winding account of the tumultuous and combative relationship between Samuel Johnson and his ­mother, Harry Thomas recalls one of the eigh­teenth ­century’s most famous biographies through the eyes of his “small, hardboiled . . . ​/ Already middle-­aged” ­mother, who nursed him through an early illness that partially blinded him. We learn (obliquely) that Johnson is politic, sharp, in his dealings with her (“. . . ​­t here ­were times he gave / Back as good as he got”) but that, a­ fter her death, he is achingly dutiful, even remorseful: “The Abyssinian tale / He wrote in a week of nights / To disencumber her debts / And cover the cost of her funeral.” Johnson looms large in this poem, and we learn about both persons through the lens of their vexed love for one another, through the relationship that bound them together despite adversity and the combative clash of difficult, strong-­willed, personalities. 257

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Similarly, I learned about Johnson not from Johnson himself (for a dix-­huitièmist, I’ve still only read an embarrassingly short list) but from Greg, and—­more specifically—­from Greg’s relationship to him. And—if I may be permitted a small confession—­I still find the Johnson of Greg Clingham much more exciting, more meaningful, and more memorable than the Johnson of my own, often awkward, solo encounters. To hear Greg talk about Johnson—­indeed, to hear Greg talk about anything—is to see him come alive in the most quirky and in­ter­est­ing pos­si­ble way; to watch Greg living the maxims of mentorship and relationship that he has cultivated from Johnson’s writing both inspires and intrigues. The Johnson I know, I know mostly obliquely, through long conversations, off-­hand comments, and the observation of another’s inspired scholarly life. Greg has cultivated a friendship with Johnson, a dedicated relationship, just as he has with so many authors, both living and dead. As his former student Joseph McNicholas so aptly describes in this volume, in his classes Greg encourages students to treat literary texts as “friends and companions,” not as self-­enclosed volumes. In this almost scriptural way Johnson was one of Bucknell University Press’s most influential friends, mentors, and guides. From my earliest days at the press I was initiated into its inspired culture of goodwill, generosity, and sociability. Greg had a reputation for welcoming all proj­ects—­even ­those in early stages—­with open arms. He was exceedingly fair and magnanimous in his treatment of authors, always offering encouragement, support, and the advantage of his vast social network, even when it was clear that BUP would not be the best home for their work. He kept in mind the smallest but most significant details: for example, the pressures of tenure clocks on assistant professors, notes of encouragement to authors who ­were diagnosed with illnesses or lost ­family members, and a ­running bibliography in his head of newly published critical works authors might find helpful to consult. And, though I never once saw him compromise the rigorously high standards of the press, he also never ­stopped believing authors might meet them. In my two years as the BUP editorial associate and then again in my five years as a coeditor of the Transits series, we only outright rejected a handful of manuscript proposals in eighteenth-century studies. Greg was very fond of the revise-­and-­resubmit option. “Let them surprise us,” he would say to me over a cup of coffee and a tofu sandwich. “It’s always pos­si­ble they w ­ ill.” They often ­didn’t, but of course, that was beside the point. Treating authors hospitably, as friends of the press, meant our door must always be open. And this meant that even t­ hose authors who ultimately took proj­ects elsewhere never forgot Greg’s generosity and kindness. During my time at BUP I was often asked how we managed to build such an expansive and impressive cata­log despite a tiny bud­ get, meager staff, and the then-­looming academic publishing crisis that would eventually shutter so many of our colleagues and competitors. In truth, it was an extraordinary feat: Greg was technically only “half-­time,” supported by one full-­ time editorial staff person, and yet he produced volume upon volume of impor­ tant, field-­shaping scholarship, particularly in eighteenth-century studies, which led admirers such as Jonathan Lamb to note in his annual review “how deeply

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faculty specializing in the Enlightenment are indebted to Bucknell University Press and its editor Greg Clingham” for being “so ready to publish a wide list in reasonably priced hardbacks, including first monographs of young scholars, all produced to a high level of finish with regard to the covers, illustrations, paper and print.”1 Greg built the press on a foundation of lasting relationships with the colleagues he trusted and admired, to whom he was fiercely loyal. For example, for years the stunning, eye-­popping covers of the Transits: Lit­er­a­ture & Culture, 1650–1850 series ­were designed by Connie Timm, a local Lewisburg artist and creative director with whom Greg maintained extremely close ties. He would insist on hiring Connie for any impor­tant design work despite im­mense pressure to keep design in-­house at the university. She reciprocated his loyalty by producing truly stunning work that set Transits apart and played no small role in attracting many authors to the series when the covers w ­ ere displayed at conferences and other venues. Greg is remembered, fondly, by his Bucknell University colleagues as a director who deftly chartered the press through challenging fiscal and po­liti­cal ­waters. James Rice, associate Provost at Bucknell University, characterizes university presses as “notorious for their reputations as budget-­bleeding and staff-­heavy appendages within the typical academic orga­nizational structure.” Greg understood this clearly, and in response cultivated a network of “authors, editors, manuscript reviewers, publishing ­house administrators, and graphic designers—­basically singlehandedly” upon whom he could rely to “transform” the press in a manner truly striking and accomplished within a remarkably compressed timeframe. But the press did not simply survive against the odds; it thrived, despite them. To have such a robust and successful university press still operating ­after fifty-­plus years at a primarily undergraduate institution is a remarkable feat. As Nina Forsberg, the press’s former editorial associate observes, Greg strove to bring the press up into the daylight of campus life, to have it be an active and vital hub of intellectual life at the institution, not simply an “appendage.” This often came at g­ reat personal cost, as both former Bucknell University President Gary Sojka and Chancellor of University of Michigan–­Dearborn Daniel ­Little acknowledge in their remarks. Faced with the inevitable consequence of dedicating his scholarly life to press work, Greg often had to “choose between his own scholarly interests and the welfare of the press.” True to character, Greg often turned adversity into an art form, with hard personal choices often resulting instead in stunning collaborations. The current volume offers recent, exciting contributions from several distinguished Bucknell University Press authors, including Martine Brownley, Kevin Cope, Anthony W. Lee, and Philip Smallwood—­many of whom worked closely with Greg in the production of field-­shaping scholarship. Greg mobilized his wide-­ranging and deep knowledge of the broad field of eighteenth-century studies into commissioning cutting-­edge scholarship, often well ahead of trends, with notable collections such as Mark Blackwell’s The Secret Life of Th ­ ings: Animals, Objects and It-­Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (2007) and monographs such as Kathleen Lubey’s

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Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain (2012) bordering on trade popularity. But, as the scholarship included in this volume also attests, Greg was also deeply committed to preserving a humanistic tradition of letters that brought lit­er­a­ture, history, art, philosophy, and culture together to brilliant effect. The Festschrift genre can border on the tawdry, or fluffy—as Greg would be the first to tell you—­but while reading and engaging with the essays gathered h ­ ere, I was reminded more of a salon than of a cele­bration, as though I ­were witness to a conversation always unfolding and never quite finished. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the section of essays on Johnson and his circle, in which dialogue and conversation, fittingly, serve as threads drawing together the disparate proj­ects. Phillip Smallwood brings together two unlikely fellows: Johnson and Shakespeare, considering the overlaps in their work while acknowledging some true, and unassailable, differences. His fantasy of a “dialogue of the dead” between Johnson and Shakespeare recounts the same salon-­like atmosphere of Greg’s office or his classroom: what emerges when two (or more) authors are brought into close proximity, and even affinity, with one another. David Hopkins’ essay, “The General and the Par­tic­u­lar: Paradox and the Play of Contraries in the Criticism of Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds,” also explores unexpected resonances in the thought of Pope, Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, identifying a consistent aesthetics joining poetry, criticism, and painting that helps elucidate Johnson’s views on art—­ particularly, on the judicious use of significant details, the “prominent and striking features” that serve to ignite and inspire resemblances in a reader/viewer’s mind. And Anthony W. Lee’s essay proposes a new way of looking at Johnson’s two major scholarly accomplishments (The Dictionary and The Shakespeare Edition) “as amalgamated glossaries and concordances of writers Johnson esteemed ­great,” including an affinity for Spenser that has been largely overlooked in Johnsonian criticism. Additional essays on Johnson and failure, Smollett and law, Thomas Cumming and sociability, and James Boswell’s theater, unfurl the complexities and resonances of Johnson’s scholarly influence. At their core, all t­ hese essays explore relationships, the lasting bonds of ­human affinity, in a way that beautifully reflects Greg’s own commitment to his fellow scholars in eighteenth-century studies. Greg fostered other sorts of relationships just as deeply. As his former students testify in this volume, Greg is a teacher earnestly committed to students’ professional success, opening doors for them by connecting them to his own elite professional networks, on many occasions, assisting students in obtaining coveted positions in highly competitive doctoral programs. But he is also, they frequently note, an exacting and rigorous editor, teaching both undergraduate and gradu­ate students the value of strong academic voice, concision, and clarity. Still another portrait emerges of a glowing, vibrant conversationalist, marked by “the quality of his presence in the moment with us and the gentleness of his good fellowship,” as McNicholas writes, whose hospitality—­inviting students into his home, out to the pub—is second only to the wide and impressive range of subjects on which he engages them in conversation. All of ­t hese many roles distinguish a pedagogue whose commitment to the humanities extends well beyond the classroom. Patrick

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Henry describes how the salon-­like atmosphere of Greg’s classes “actualizes a theory that E. M. Forster articulates in Aspects of the Novel—­t hat lit­er­a­ture is a conversation that transcends time or place, that we can imagine novelists of all generations seated together and speaking with one another, as if at a round ­table in a British museum reading-­room.” Indeed, he continues, “In an era when students are drilled in professionalism and careerism, Greg’s pedagogy stands as a necessary reminder that the values of the humanities are central to any true intellectual inquiry.” My own experiences, as Greg’s former student, have much the same tint: he was always at the ready with kindness, thoughtfulness, savvy, wit, and rigor, regardless of ­whether we ­were deploring department politics over beers or poring over my job applications for the ump-­teenth time. I’m deeply grateful to Tony for thinking of me to write the coda for this wonderful volume of work. I’m an unusual choice for all sorts of reasons: I’m still very much a ju­nior scholar, not a Johnsonian, working almost exclusively with ­women authors (in both the eigh­teenth ­century and as a commissioning editor), although it’s true that—­like pretty much every­one e­ lse in the field—­I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Greg Clingham. But in the end, t­ hose ­t hings mattered very l­ ittle to Greg. He was not looking to discover himself in my work. He always treated me as an equal in every­t hing, never above getting his hands dirty and helping me with the endless bureaucratic tasks of r­ unning the press office, reor­ga­niz­ing and reshelving to fit ever more books in our too-­tiny space, helping to clear usable, beautiful spaces for our “garden-­level office.” Though I was, from a university perspective, ­little more than an administrative assistant, Greg transformed my role into an intellectual and professional apprenticeship, encouraging me to act as the point of contact for many of the press’s impor­tant correspondences, and netting me many new friends and connections in the pro­cess. When I left the press for a tenure-­track job in 2012 and then was invited to serve as the coeditor of the Transits series in 2015, I had no doubt that all of this was pos­si­ble only b ­ ecause—­for what­ever fortunate reason—­Greg believed in me. It’s hard to put into words what Greg has done for me, for my ­family, and for my ­career. Perhaps that’s why t­ here are so very many of Greg’s former students and colleagues clamoring for space, for a chance to say “thank you,” in this volume celebrating both a most distinguished scholar of eighteenth-century studies, and a magnificent person who w ­ ill always leave his door open for you, the tea ­kettle boiling, and an extra chair pulled up to the desk.

note 1. ​Jonathan Lamb, “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eigh­teenth ­Century,” SEL Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900 53, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 667.

Greg Clingham’s Publications

forthcoming “Diplomacy, Debate and Diversion in the Rus­sian Enlightenment: Sir George Macartney at the Court of Catherine the ­Great.” In Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment: The Genius of ­Every Place, edited by Kevin L. Cope. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2022. Enlightenment and Enterprise: The Life, Writings and Art of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard. “Ghostly Presences in Johnson’s and Boswell’s Life Writing.” 1650–1850: Ideas, Issues, & Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era 28 Samuel Johnson’s Interests: Essays on Life, Lit­er­a­ture, and Limits. Editor. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” 1791–2021: Book, Biography, Criticism.

books Editor. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Editor with Bärbel Czennia. Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. Editor with Philip Smallwood. Samuel Johnson ­after 300  Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 2012. James Boswell: “The Life of Johnson.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 2008. Editor. Sustaining Lit­er­a­ture: Essays on Lit­er­a­ture, History and Culture, 1500–1800, Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey. London: Associated University Presses, 2007. With Jennifer Brady, David Kramer, and Earl Miner. Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2006. Johnson, Writing, and Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 2005. Editor. New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of “The Life of Johnson.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 1993, 2005. Editor. The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 1999. Chinese edition, 2001. Editor. Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eigh­teenth ­Century. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Editor. Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-­Century Culture. London: Associated University Presses, 1998.

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journals Editor with Stuart Gillespie and Robert Cummings. Translation and Lit­er­a­ture, vols. 1–4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992–1995.

articles and book chapters “The Hidden Hand: The Editor in Eighteenth-­Century Studies.” In Constructing the Eigh­ teenth ­Century: Essays on Poetry and Publishing in Memory of Donald C. Mell, edited by Sandro Jung. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2022. “Law.” In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, edited by Jack Lynch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. “Con­temporary Johnson.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. “The Archive of Lady Anne Barnard, 1750–1825,” Tulsa Studies in ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture. Special issue: “­Women and the Archive” 40, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 373–385. “The Book in Johnson’s Pocket,” Johnsonian News Letter 70, no.  2 (September  2021): 27–31. “Lady Anne Barnard, Burke the Lion, Johnson the Bear, and the Cape Baboon,” Johnsonian News Letter 72, no. 2 (September 2021): 32–35. “Lady Anne Barnard on Johnson: Two Notes,” Johnsonian News Letter 72 no. 2 (September 2021): 36–39. “Cosmology and Commerce on Lord George Macartney’s Embassy to China, 1792–1794.” In Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century, edited by Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, 190–220. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. “Global Johnson: Foreword.” In Johnson in Japan, edited by Mika Suzuki and Kimiyo Ogawa, ix–­x viii. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. “Johnson and Borges: Some Reflections.” In Johnson and Modernity, edited by Anthony W. Lee, 189–212. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019. “Anecdotes of Bishop Thomas Barnard.” Johnsonian News Letter 70, no.  1 (March  2019): 23–44. “John Opie’s Portraits of Dr. Johnson.” Harvard Library Bulletin 28, no. 2 (2017): 57–80. [pub. 2019] “Johnson and China: Culture, Commerce, and the Dream of the Orient in Mid-­Eighteenth-­ Century ­England.” 1650–1850: Ideas, Issues, & Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era 24 (2019): 178–242. “ ‘I Stole His Likeness’: An Unknown Drawing of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.” Burlington Magazine 161 (March 2019): 220–222. “Lady Anne Barnard: Remnants and Renewal.” Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 73, no. 2 (December 2019): 167–178. “Playing Rough: Johnson and ­Children.” In Revaluation: New Essays on Samuel Johnson, edited by Anthony W. Lee, 145–182. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018. “Lady Anne Lindsay Meets Dr.  Johnson: A (Virtually) Unknown Episode in Johnson and Boswell’s Scottish Tour.” Johnsonian News Letter 68, no. 2 (2017): 25–39. “Cultural Difference in George Macartney’s An Embassy to China 1792–1794.” Eighteenth-­ Century Life 39, no. 2 (2015): 1–29. “Delirious God: Reflections on the Text, the Book, and the Library.” In Textual Studies: Precision as Profusion and the Enlarged Eigh­teenth ­Century, edited by Kevin  L. Cope and Robert C. Leitz III, 249–268. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012.

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“Hawkins, Biography, and the Law,” In Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’ “Life of Johnson,” edited by Martine W. Brownley, 137–154. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011. “[Johnson’s] Critical Reception since 1900.” In Samuel Johnson in Context, edited by Jack Lynch, 54–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; paperback, 2014. “Translating Memory: Dryden, Oldham, and Friendship.” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 18 (2011): 233–254. “The Enlightenment Encyclopedia and the Dream of Comprehensiveness: The Example of Samuel Johnson.” International Journal of the Humanities 8, no. 4 (2010): 163–176. “Johnson, Ends, and the Possibility of Happiness.” In Samuel Johnson a­ fter 300 Years, edited by Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, 33–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. “Finding Time.” In Sustaining Lit­er­a­ture: Essays on Lit­er­a­ture, History and Culture, 1500–1800, Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey, edited by Greg Clingham, 11–19. London: Associated University Presses, 2007. emy,’ Knightly Chetwood’s ‘Life of Roscommon,’ and Dryden’s “Roscommon’s ‘Acad­ Translation Proj­ect.” Restoration: Studies in En­glish Literary Culture, 1660–1700 26 (2002): 15–26. “Knightly Chetwood’s A Short Account of Some Passages of the Life & Death of Went­worth Late Earle of Roscommon: A Transcription and Introduction,” Restoration: Studies in En­glish Literary Culture, 1660–1700 25 (2001): 117–138. “Resisting Johnson.” In Johnson Re-­Visioned: Looking Before and A ­ fter, edited by Philip Smallwood, 19–36. London: Associated University Presses, 2001. “Translating Difference: The Example of Dryden’s Last Parting of Hector and Andromache.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 33, no. 2 (2000): 45–70. “History between Text and World.” In Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-­Century Culture, edited by Greg Clingham, 9–15. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. “Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction and Enlightenment Historiography.” In Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eigh­teenth ­Century, edited by Greg Clingham, 57–85. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. “Thomas Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd and the Fiction of Eighteenth-­Century Historiography,” in Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-­Century Culture, edited by Greg Clingham, 35–57. London: Associated University Presses, 1998, “The Question of History and Eighteenth-­Century Studies,” in Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eigh­teenth ­Century, edited by Greg Clingham, 11–17. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. “Life and Lit­er­a­ture in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, 161–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Double Writing: The Erotics of Narrative in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.” In James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations, edited by Donald J. Newman, 189–214. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. “Eighteenth-­C entury Studies,” In A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, edited by Michael Payne, 162–165. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. “Another and the Same: Johnson’s Dryden.” In Literary Transmission and Authority, 121–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. “Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations and the ‘Stolen Diary Prob­lem’: Reflections on a Biographical Quiddity.” Age of Johnson 4 (1991): 83–96.

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“Truth and Artifice in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.” In New Light on Boswell, edited by Greg Clingham, 207–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. “Johnson, Homeric Scholarship, and the ‘Passes of the Mind.’ ” Age of Johnson 3 (1989): 113–170. “Himself That G ­ reat Sublime: Johnson’s Critical Thinking.” Études Anglaises 41 (1988): 165–178. With N. Hopkinson, “Johnson’s Copy of the Iliad at Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk,” Book Collector 37 (1988): 503–522. “Johnson’s Criticism of Dryden’s Odes in Praise of St. Cecilia.” Modern Language Studies 18 (1988): 165–180. “The Inequalities of Memory:’ Johnson’s Epitaphs on Hogarth.” En­glish 35 (1986): 221–232. “Johnson In Memoriam?” Review of Samuel Johnson (The Oxford Authors), edited by Donald Greene, in Cambridge Quarterly 15 (1986): 77–84. “Dryden’s New Poem.” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985): 281–293.

keepsakes, reviews, and notes “The East India Com­pany and the Arts of the Orient,” Review Essay: William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Com­pany, Corporate Vio­lence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Com­pany, edited by William Dalrymple, in 1650–1850: Ideas, Issues, & Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era 27 (2022). “I Stole His Likeness:” Lady Anne Lindsay’s Drawing of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, 1773. Keepsake: Samuel Johnson Society of the West. Ojai, CA: Classic Letterpress, 2022. Review of Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces and Ghost Writings, edited by Robert de Maria and O M Brack Jr., in 1650–1850: Ideas, Issues, & Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era 26 (2021): 243–251. “An Epitaph for Barbarie Themilthorpe.” Eighteenth-­Century Intelligencer 35, no.  1 (March 2021): 9–14. “Johnson Subito.” Johnsonian News Letter 72, no. 1 (March 2021): 18–22. “ ’Freshly in Love’: Johnson’s Literary Power.” Johnsonian News Letter 70, no. 2 (September 2019): 51–52. Review of Stephen Taylor, Defiance: The Choices of Lady Anne Barnard, in 18th-­Century Scotland 31 (Spring 2017): 34–36. Review of Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-­British Cultural Relations, edited by Peter J. Kitson and Robert Markley, in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 30, no. 2 (2017): 300–302. “The J. D. Fleeman Archive at the University of St. Andrews.” Johnsonian News Letter 66, no.1 (March 2015): 18–25. Two Talks on Publishing at Emory University: (1) “The Serendipity of Scholarly Publishing” and (2) “The Monograph, Open Access, and the ­Future of Scholarship in the Humanities.” Eighteenth-­Century Intelligencer 29, no. 1 (March 2015): 6–16. Review of “Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets.” Vols. 21–23 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by John Middendorf. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Review of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by Thomas Keymer, in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 23, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 449–451. “Scarce Books and Elegant Editions at the Weinberg Memorial Library.” Johnsonian News Letter 61, no. 1 (March 2010): 43–48.

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“Sir John Hawkins at Emory.” Johnsonian News Letter 61, no. 1 (March 2010): 42–43. “A Johnsonian in Japan.” Johnsonian News Letter 60, no. 2 (September 2009): 37–40. “Anna Williams’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse at the Houghton Library.” Johnsonian News Letter 59, no. 1 (March 2008): 44–45. “Johnson at Bucknell.” Johnsonian News Letter 59, no. 1 (March 2008): 30–32. “Letters to Headmaster Busby.” The Scriblerian 40, no.1 (Autumn 2007): 102–105. Review of Howard D. Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson, in Biography 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 645–649. “Samuel Johnson, Another and the Same.” Review of Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, edited by Roger Lonsdale, in Essays in Criticism 57, no. 2 (2007): 186–194. “The ­Future of Book Reviewing” East Central Intelligencer n.s. 19, no. 2 (February 2005): 16–18. Review of Peter Martin, The Life of James Boswell, in 18th- ­Century Scotland (Spring 2001): 32–33. Review of The Works of John Dryden, vol. 20: Prose, 1691–1698, edited by A. E. Maurer and George R. Guffey, in The Eigh­teenth ­Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 15 (1997; for 1989): 321–322. “Dryden’s Numbers.” Review essay of the Longman Edition of the Poems of John Dryden, edited by Paul Hammond, in Essays in Criticism 46 (1996): 258–266. Review of Charles  H. Hinnant, “Steel For the Mind”: Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse, in Age of Johnson 7 (1996): 480–485. Review of Longman Edition of the Poems of John Dryden, edited by Paul Hammond, in Review of En­glish Studies 47 (1996): 417–419. “Boswell’s Historiography.” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th ­Century 307 (1993): 1765–1769. “Arts of Memory.” Review essay on The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Bruce Redford, in Essays in Criticism 43 (1993): 253–257. “Pope’s Bolingbroke and Dryden’s ‘Happy Man.’ ” Notes & Queries 5th  series, 36 (1989): 56–58. Review of James Winn, John Dryden and His World, in Eighteenth-­Century Studies 22 (1989): 602–606. Review of Reed Whittemore, Pure Lives: The Early Biographers, in Biography 12 (1989): 156–159. Review of Augustan Reprint Society Text, “Remarks on Cla­r is­sa (1749),” by Sarah Fielding, introduction by Peter Sabor, in British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 10 (1987): 235–236. Review of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”: New Questions, New Answers, edited by John  A. Vance, in En­glish 36 (1987): 168–178. Review of Isobel Grundy, Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness, in Review of En­glish Studies 38 (1987): 394–396. “A Minor Source for Johnson’s ‘Life of Pope.’ ” Transactions of the Johnson Society of London (1986–1987 issue): 53–54. “Bolingbroke’s Copy of Pope’s Works 1717–1735  in Tonbridge School Library.” Notes & Queries 5th series, 33 (1986): 500–502. Review of Augustan Reprint Society Text: “Essay on the Style of Johnson (1787),” by Robert Burrowes, introduction by Frank Ellis, in British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 9 (1986): 248–249. “Johnson’s Use of Two Restoration Poems in His ‘Drury-­Lane’ Prologue (1747).” New Rambler (1985–1986 issue): 45–50. “Johnson’s Use of Oldham in His Version of Horace Odes IV, vii.” Notes & Queries 5th series, 32 (1985): 242–243.

Acknowl­edgments

The editor wishes to thank the current Bucknell University Press director, Suzanne E. Guiod, managing editor, Pam Dailey, and Sherry Gerstein, production editor for Westchester Publishing Ser­vices, for their enthusiastic and encouraging support of this book. Without them, it would not have gone to press, and ­were it not for their patient and expert advice, it would not be the ­great book I believe it to be. My thanks also go out to the anonymous readers solicited by Bucknell University Press—­their comments and suggestions for improvement ­were quite helpful. The contributors to this volume ­were extraordinarily professional in getting their work submitted in a timely fashion. And of course, I am grateful to Greg Clingham for his advice and suggestions—as well as a friendship of many years, dating back to an MLA convention at New Orleans, where I first saw him speak. His hair was rather longer back then when compared to that in the frontispiece to this volume. Has the Young Turk become an Elder Statesman? Perhaps to some degree. But he yet retains the fire and vigor we associate with youth, leavened by wisdom accumulated only through seasoned experience. I, like most of the contributors to this book, am fortunate to call him a friend. Let us give the last word ­here to the writer who has drawn so many of the contributors of this volume together. “A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” —­Samuel Johnson

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­Will, Frederic. “Blake’s Quarrel with Reynolds.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13 (1957): 340–349. Wimsatt, William K., Jr. Philosophick Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948. Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism. New York: Vintage. Wollaston, William. “Memoirs Compiled by William Wollaston, Esq. in 1709, relating to himself and ­Family.” In Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eigh­teenth ­Century, edited by John Nichols, 1: 169–210. London: Nicholas, 1817. Woolf, D. R. Reading History in Early Modern ­England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Worden, Blair. “Introduction.” In A Voyce from the Watch Tower; Part Five: 1660–1662, edited by Edmund Ludlow. London: Royal Historical Society, 1978. Words­worth, William. Words­worth’s Literary Criticism. Edited by W. J. B. Owen. London: Routledge, 1974. Wright, Nicole M. “ ‘A More Exact Purity’: L ­ egal Authority and Con­spic­u­ous Amalgamation in Early Modern En­glish Law Guides and the Oxford Law Lectures of Sir Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson.” University of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2013): 864–888. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir. New York: Riverhead, 2009. Youngren, William. “Generality in Augustan Satire.” In In Defense of Reading, edited by Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, 206–234. New York: Dutton, 1962. —­—­—. “Generality, Science and Poetic Language in the Restoration.” En­glish Literary History 35 (1968): 158–187. Zachs, William. “Gilbert Stuart (1743–1786).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. doi​.­org​/­10​.1­ 093​/­ref:odnb​/­26704. —­—­—.“John Murray and the Dublin Book Trade 1770–93.” Long Room 40 (1995): 26–33. —­—­—. Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.

Notes on Contributors

Martine Brownley is Goodrich C. White Professor of En­glish at Emory University and the founding director of Emory’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. In Eighteenth-­Century Literary Studies, she is the author of Clarendon and the Rhe­toric of Historical Form, an edition of Clarendon’s Dialogues, the edited collection Reconsidering Biography, and numerous articles. In women’s and gender studies she has published Deferrals of Domain: Con­temporary ­Women Novelists and the State, two edited essay collections, and articles on ­women writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Christina Rossetti. Kevin L. Cope is Adams Professor of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and a member of the comparative lit­er­a­ture faculty at Louisiana State University. The author of Criteria of Certainty, John Locke Revisited, and In and ­After the Beginning, Cope has written scholarly essays on topics ranging from the early modern fascination with miracles to colossalism in modern culture. He edits the annual journal 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era and served for over a de­cade as the general editor of ECCB: The Eighteenth-­Century Current Bibliography. He has edited numerous essay collections on topics such as imaginative science in the long eigh­teenth ­century and, most recently, Enlightenment ideas and repre­sen­ta­tions of distance. A former member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors and now secretary of the National Council of Faculty Senates, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and tele­v i­sion news and talk shows. Bärbel Czennia has served as associate professor of En­glish at McNeese State University and as se­nior lecturer of En­glish lit­er­a­ture at Georg-­August-­Universität Göttingen, Germany. She has published essays on literary translation, nation-­ building, the exploration of the South Pacific, eighteenth-­century meteorology, sociability, libertines, female eccentrics, fireworks, animals, world citizenship, and gardening. Bärbel is the author of a monograph (in German) on literary transla291

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tion, editor of Celebrity: Idiom of a Modern Era, and coeditor, with Greg Clingham, of Oriental Networks. She is currently writing a book on eighteenth-­century gardens. Caroline Fassett is currently a reporter for NJ​.­com and the Star-­Ledger. Nina Forsberg holds an MA in En­glish as well as an MEd in secondary education from the University of Oregon. Before serving as the publishing man­ag­er of Bucknell University Press, she taught En­glish at an international baccalaureate high school and served as managing editor of MELUS: Multiethnic Lit­er­a­ture of the United States. The multicultural thread ­running through her work stems from her immigrating to the United States from Sweden as a child. She recently returned to Stockholm, where she is raising two d ­ aughters with her husband. She works as an assistant editor for the Journal of Internal Medicine, located at Karolinska University. Emily Grosholz is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, African American Studies, and En­glish at Pennsylvania State University, where she has worked for forty years. She has translated Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et fin de la neige and has published a book of philosophy, Starry Reckoning: Reference and Analy­sis in Mathe­matics and Cosmology, which won the Fernando Gil International Prize for Philosophy of Science; a book of poems, The Stars of Earth: New and Selected Poems; and a poetic philosophy book, G ­ reat Circles: The Transits of Mathe­matics and Poetry. Aaron Hanlon is an associate professor of En­glish and director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Colby College. His first book is A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism. His most recent journal articles have appeared in ELH, Modern Philology, Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, and New Literary History. His journalistic writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, The Atlantic, and ­others. Clement Hawes holds a joint position in history and En­glish at the University of Michigan. He specializes in British lit­er­a­ture and history, 1660–1800, and writes broadly about the prob­lems of periodizing the Enlightenment and more closely about such authors as Jonathan Swift, Christopher Smart, and Samuel Johnson. His publications include the monographs Mania and Literary Style: The Rhe­toric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart and The British Eigh­teenth ­Century and Global Critique and several edited volumes. Among the latter, coedited with Robert Caserio, is The Cambridge History of the En­glish Novel. He has also written about early modern travel narratives. Patrick Tho­m as Henry is the fiction and poetry editor for Modern Language Studies. His criticism has appeared in Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review, Response, Mas­ sa­chu­setts Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Clarion, Passages North, Longleaf Review, LandLocked, and Best Microfiction 2020, among ­others. He

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is a teaching assistant professor and coordinator of creative writing at the University of North Dakota. David Hopkins is an emeritus professor of En­glish lit­er­a­ture and se­nior research fellow at the University of Bristol. He is the author of books on Dryden and Milton’s Paradise Lost and of Conversing with Antiquity, a collection of studies of the reception of the Greek and Roman classics by En­glish poets of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. He was coeditor of The Poems of John Dryden in the Longman Annotated Poets series (five volumes), of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (five volumes), and of Volume 3 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in En­glish. His latest publication is a study of Pope’s translation of The Iliad of Homer. Dominic Jermey is an international conservationist and diplomat. Currently director general of conservation science nonprofit Zoological Society of London ZSL, Dominic was previously British ambassador to Af­ghan­i­stan, where he led one of the UK’s largest government teams overseas, focused on combatting terrorism, building accountable Afghan government institutions, and providing humanitarian assistance. At ZSL, Dominic is positioning the organ­ization as a force for international wildlife conservation, undertaking conservation and science proj­ects in over fifty countries, engaging nearly two million visitors in its world-­class zoos and wildlife-­related issues, and carry­ing out wildlife science at ZSL’s Institute of Zoology. Dominic’s par­tic­u­lar focus is on deepening engagement with the economics of biodiversity and on zoonotic disease management in wildlife populations to halt transmission to p ­ eople. Dominic was also British ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, led UK trade negotiations with China and India, and has an extensive background in conflict resolution in a wide range of war zones. Dominic has been a trustee of international development NGO Catholic Agency for Overseas Development for over a de­cade. Antjie Krog is a poet, nonfiction writer, and professor at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. One of her twelve volumes of Afrikaans poetry is an epic poem about the life Lady Anne Barnard led at the Cape of Good Hope from 1797–1801. This received Afrikaans’s prestigious Hertzog Prize. Krog published three nonfiction books: Country of my Skull, on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; A Change of Tongue, about the transformation in South Africa ­after ten years, and Begging to be Black, about learning to live within a black majority—­t he first two texts placed among the ten most impor­tant books written in ten years of democracy. Krog received most of the prestigious awards for poetry, nonfiction, journalism, and translation available in Afrikaans and En­glish, as well as the Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation, the Open Society Prize from the Central Eu­ro­pean University, and the Dutch Gouden Ganzenveer. Erin Labbie is a professor of En­glish at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Lacan’s Medievalism, co-­editor of Beholding Vio­lence, and has published

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several articles on medieval studies and psychoanalysis. Her work on temporality is influenced largely by her studies with Greg Clingham. Anthony W. Lee’s research interests center on Samuel Johnson and his circle, mentoring, and intertextuality. He has published more than forty essays on Johnson and eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and culture, and six books, including most recently New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, and “Modernity Johnson”: Samuel Johnson among the Modernists. Anthony has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Mary­land University College, where he also served as director of the En­glish and Humanities Program. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Arkansas Tech University. Daniel Little is a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan–­ Dearborn and professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Michigan–­A nn Arbor. His most recent book is A New Social Ontology of Government. Other recent books include New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, and The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty. He served as chancellor of the University of Michigan–­ Dearborn from 2000 to 2018 and as vice president for academic affairs at Bucknell University from 1996 to 2000. Joseph McNicholas is the director of research opportunities at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Joseph earned a PhD in En­glish at the University of Texas at Austin, a BA and an MA in En­glish at Fordham University, and an MBA at the University of Redlands. He has published on William S. Burroughs, on undergraduate research, and on management in higher education. Kate Parker is an associate professor and chair of En­glish at the University of Wisconsin–­La Crosse. She has published essays on D. A. F. Sade, James Thomson, Eliza Haywood, and the intersections of feminism and translation studies in the eigh­teenth ­century, and has co-­edited two volumes: Eighteenth-­Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, with Courtney Weiss Smith, and Sade’s Sensibilities, with Norbert Sclippa. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Bucknell University Press series Transits: Lit­er­a­ture, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850, of which she was coeditor from 2015 to 2020. Her current work centers on social justice pedagogy and teaching the long eigh­teenth ­century. Cedric D. Reverand, George Duke Humphrey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of En­g lish at the University of Wyoming, specializes in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century En­g lish lit­er­a­ture. He has published extensively in the area, especially on Dryden and Pope, but also on art, architecture, and m ­ usic in the period. He is also the editor of one of the leading journals in the field, Eighteenth-­ Century Life. His hobbies include playing m ­ usic (jazz on the piano, baroque m ­ usic on the harpsichord), as well as photography.

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James Rice was associate provost and dean of gradu­ate studies at Bucknell University. He has written and continues to work within the areas of East Asian and comparative literary studies. John Richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of En­glish (emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his most recent books are The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography, A History of British Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture, and The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe. John Rickard is an emeritus professor of En­glish at Bucknell University. He has published essays on modern Irish and British lit­er­a­ture, as well as Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. He also edited a collection of essays on Irishness and (Post)Modernism and co-­edited Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, a volume devoted to the work of Peter Brooks. Adam Rounce is an associate professor of En­glish lit­er­a­ture at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on vari­ous seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century writers, including Dryden, Pope, Churchill, and Johnson. He is co-­editing two volumes for the ongoing edition of the writings of Jonathan Swift, as well as writing a separately published chronology. He is the author of Fame and Failure, 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life. Philip Smallwood is an emeritus professor of En­glish at Birmingham City University and an honorary fellow and se­nior associate teacher in the En­glish Department at Bristol University. He has published widely on Dryden, Pope, and Johnson and on the history of literary criticism, and is coeditor of the critical and cultural manuscripts of the British phi­los­o­pher R. G. Collingwood. His latest study, with Min Wild, is Ridicu­lous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment. Both this volume and Smallwood’s Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment gained “Choice” outstanding academic title awards. Gary Sojka received his PhD from Purdue University, specializing in microbial biochemistry, and did postdoctoral work in cellular bioenergetics at Indiana University. He has served as chairman of the Biological Sciences Department and dean of Arts and Sciences at Indiana, president of Bucknell University, and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Universities. He holds honorary doctorates from Purdue University, Bucknell University, and Lycoming College. A longtime lover of poetry, he supports the Sojka Poets Program at Bucknell with his wife, Sandra. He and Sandra presently operate a livestock-­breeds conservancy farm in Pennsylvania. W. K. Tchou is a member of St. Catharine’s College (Cantab) reading China studies u ­ nder the supervision of professor Hans van de Ven. His research focuses on the military engagements of the United Kingdom, the United States, and China during the Qing Dynasty. He began this line of inquiry in a Bucknell University course titled Bilingual Dictionary supervised by professor and director Greg Clingham. He went to Bucknell from a c­ areer in the U.S. Navy, where he graduated

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from the Defense Language Institute with a Certificate of Academic Achievement. His honors include Joint Ser­v ice Achievement Medal awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense; Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal and Good Conduct Medal awarded by the U.S. Department of the Navy; Letter of Commendation awarded by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; as well as a Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship at the Boston Athenæum. His publications include China and the Humanities: At the Crossroads of the H ­ uman and the Humane. Harry Tho­m as’s most recent books are Haiku (a ­l imited edition has also been published with translations into Japa­nese), a translation, with Marco Sonzogni, of The Occasional Demon: Thirty-­Six Poems by Primo Levi, and Poems about Trees, an anthology. Gordon Turnbull served as general editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell from 1997 ­until termination of the proj­ect in June 2021. ­Under his direction, nine volumes in the Yale Research Series appeared, most recently the fourth and final volume of the manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, edited by Thomas F. Bonnell, and The Correspondence of James Boswell and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, edited by Richard B. Sher. He has taught in the En­glish Departments of the University of Newcastle (New South Wales), Yale University, and Smith College; is the author of numerous scholarly and critical essays on Boswell, Johnson, and their circle; has lectured widely on t­ hese authors; and is a regular featured speaker at the annual Boswell Book Festival held at Dumfries House, Ayrshire. He holds the honorary position of patron of the Johnson Society of Australia. His edition of Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, the first re-­editing of this diary since Frederick A. Pottle’s worldwide bestseller of 1950, has been twice reprinted. Adam Walker is a PhD candidate in the Department of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at Harvard University. His dissertation investigates how theology and religious language inform the poetry of En­glish Romanticism. Robert G. Walker is the author of Eighteenth-­Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson’s “Rasselas” and the coeditor of Swiftly Sterneward: Studies on Laurence Sterne and His Times. His essays and notes on eighteenth-­century writers (Johnson, Boswell, Sterne, Swift, Richardson) and modern writers (Ford, Koestler, Malaparte, Waugh, Hemingway, Welty, Borneman, Wain) have appeared in over twenty dif­fer­ent journals, including the Age of Johnson, Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, Sewanee Review, and 1650–1850, as well as in several collections. He is currently a contributing editor to the Scriblerian and a se­nior research fellow at Washington & Jefferson College. Margaret Williams is a published international affairs professional with over ten years of experience in partnerships; policy and programming; research, and advocacy. Her background includes sustainable development, peacebuilding, youth empowerment, and state-­society relations. From global to local levels, she has

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worked with the UN, governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector. Based in New York, she has lived and worked in Tunisia, Palestine, Cyprus, and Greece, with additional experience in Georgia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Timor-­ Leste. She holds a Master of Arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a bachelor’s from Bucknell University. Kieron Winn was educated at Tonbridge School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot. He has published a collection of poetry, The Mortal Man, as well as many poems in magazines such as Agenda, Ag­ni, the Dark Horse, the Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, the London Magazine, the New Criterion, New Statesman, Oxford Magazine, Poetry Review, the Rialto, the Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement. Se­lections of his poems have been featured in anthologies including Christopher Ricks’s Joining M ­ usic with Reason, and he has read his poems on BBC TV and radio. He has twice won, in 2007 and 2013, the University of Oxford’s most valuable literary award, the En­glish Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize. He has been artist in residence at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and is the first person to be appointed poet in residence at Rydal Mount, Words­worth’s final home. Elaine Wood specializes in ­human rights and international and comparative law. She serves as the code of conduct ombudsperson for the International Flann O’Brien Society. Holding a PhD in En­glish and Gender and ­Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, a JD from the University of Miami School of Law, and an LLM from UCLA School of Law, she focuses on gender rights, immigration, and refugee advocacy in her research and her teaching. Prior to her academic appointment as a lecturer of ­Women’s and Gender Studies affiliated with the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender at Bucknell University, she served as a law clerk for the United States Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Index

Addison, Joseph, 14, 27, 55, 186; Cato, 14. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Addison” Aesop, 177–178 Africa (Africana), 246, 250 Akenside, Mark. See Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Akenside” Alexander the G ­ reat, 5, 179 Anderson, Benedict, 5, 7 Anglesey, Earl of (Arthur Annesley), 129–130; Letters, 130 Ann, Lady Fanshawe, 128 Anne, Lady Halkett, 125 Anne, Queen, 124, 167, 171, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182n15, 189 Arbuthnot, John, 150, 156, 165 Armenia, 186, 195 Arne, Thomas, Artaxerxes, 105 Arnold, Matthew, 55; “The Study of Poetry,” 6 Asia, 185, 186, 193, 199, 202, 203n4 Auchinleck (in Ayrshire), 103, 105 Augustine, of Hippo, 128, 248 autobiography, 49, 76, 121–122, 128, 132, 134–136, 139n68; secular vs. spiritual, 121 Bacon, Sir Francis, 39, 43, 44, 47, 79, 122, 125, 126, 162, 210 Bakhtin, M. M., 128 Barber, Francis, 74 Barnard, Lady Anne, 249 Barnett, Louise K., 180 Barthes, Roland, 52n33 Bate, Jonathan, 8, 9 Bath (En­glish city), 217, 221–222 Bath Abbey, 143 Bathurst, Allen Lord, 156 beast fable, 45

Bede, 123, 126 Beggar’s Opera. See Gay, John Bell, Charles, 71 Bengal/Bengali, 187 Bentley, Richard, 221 Berkeley, Bishop George, 11, 234 Berkeley, John, 128 Bevan, Bryan, 174 Beyle, Marie-­Henri (Stendhal), “Du Romanticisme dans les Beaux-­Arts,” 19 Bishops’ Wars, 124 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 55, 63–64; Alfred, 63, 64; Creation, 63; Eliza, 63; King Arthur, 63; Prince Arthur, 63. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Blackmore” Blackstone, Sir William, Commentaries on ­ ngland, (1765), 74 the Laws of E Blackwell, Mark, The Secret Life of ­Things: Animals, Objects and It-­Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 259 Blair, Hugh D. D., 105, 109, 116n12, 116n13 Blake, William, 230–231; works: Annotations on Reynolds’s Discourses, 23–24, 25–26. See also Reynolds, Sir Joshua Blenheim, ­Battle of (1704), 171, 175, 204n19 Blenheim Palace, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176; Park and Gardens, 188, 189, 204nn19–20 Blount, Martha (“Patty”), 149, 156 Bodin, Jean, 125 Bogliasco Foundation (in Italy), 248 Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount (Henry St. John), 155–157, 159, 161–163, 167, 174, 181; and Pope. See Pope, Alexander Bolton, Edmund, 125 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 179, 181 Bonnefoy, Yves, Début et fin de la neige (Beginning and End of the Snow), 257

299

300 i n d e x Boothby, Hill, 70n15 Borsay, Peter, 184–185 Boswell, Alexander (Lord Auchinleck) (­father of Boswell), 105 Boswell, Euphemia, (née Erskine) Lady Auchinleck (­mother of Boswell), 105 Boswell, James, 8, 21n27, 31, 75, 90, 99, 103–117, 230, 234; printers: Adam Neill, 99; Alexander Donaldson, 99; Edmond Malone, 22–23; relationships: f­ ather of (see Alexander Boswell); Johnson, 8, 9, 15, 31, 54, 111, 115n2, 116n13, “Louisa,” 111, 115n2; m ­ other of (see Euphemia Boswell); works: “Ébauche de ma vie” (“Sketch of my “Life”), 105, 115n10; The Edinburgh Chronicle, 117n28; The Hypochondriack, 115n2; Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 91, 95, 105; The Journal of his Swiss and German Travels, 1764, 115n10, 116n11; Journals, 99; Letter to Lord Braxfield, 99; Life of Johnson, 7, 8, 81, 95–96, 100n3, 111, 115n2, 115n7, 153, 258, 267; London Journal, 103–117; “Prologue spoken at the Opening of the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh,” 105; “Prologue” to The Discovery, 117n19; A View of the Edinburgh Theatre (attrib.), 117n28 Boyle, Richard (3rd Earl of Burlington), 156 Braun, Theodore E. D., 222n1 Britain (and ­Great Britain), 73, 94, 106, 162, 171–174, 176, 180, 185–188, passim, 190, 194, 199, 201, 202–203 British Empire, the, 172, 187, 194, 203 British Isles, 186, 202, 207 Brower, Reuben, 152n16 Brown, Lancelot (“Capability”), 186, 204n19 Browne, Sir Thomas, 39, 50n3 Brownley, Martine, 121, 259 Bucknell University, 229, 230, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 247, 248, 257; East Asian Studies, 239 Bucknell University Press, 230, 235, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 255, 256, 257; Apercus, 244; Bucknell Review, 244; Transits: Lit­er­a­ture & Culture, 244, 258, 259 Buffon, Comte de (Georges-­Louis Leclerc), 47, 208 Burgundy (place), 215 Burke, Edmund, 23–24, 31, 36n6, 190 Burnet, Gilbert, 121, 124, 128, 130 Burnet, Thomas, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 40–41, 51n10 Burney, Charles, 31, 100n3 Burney, Frances, 2, 108; Cecilia, 108; Evelina, 108 Burton Ale, 97–98

Bute, 3rd Earl of (John Stuart), 110, 111, 113 Butler, Samuel: Hudibras, 14, 21n20. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Butler” Cahill, Samara Anne, 224n30 Calcutta, 186, 190 Caliban, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49, 51n23, 52 Callao (place), 213 Calvinism, 104–105, 106, 107, 114–115 Cambridge Club, 239 Cambridge University, 229, 230, 231, 239, 240, 248; Clare College, 230; Sherlock Library, ix; St. Catharine’s College, ix Camden, William, 125 Carlton House and Garden, 202 Carriage House Fire, 96 Cartesian. See René Descartes Catholics/Catholicism, 92, 129, 171, 172, 220, 225n38; Irish Catholics (see Ireland) Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 72, 76 Chambers, Sir Robert, A Course of Lectures on the En­glish Law Delivered at Oxford University, 1767–1773, 74 Chal­mers, George, 98 Chandler, David, 172, 177 Chapman, George, 72 ­ ngland), 22, 128, 130, Charles I (King of E 133. See also Herbert, Sir Thomas, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of Charles I Charles II (King of ­England), 104, 165 Charles XII (King of Sweden), 14 Chatham, 179 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 41, 44–45, 140, 141, 232; Canterbury Tales, 44–45, 232–233; “General Prologue,” 44–45, 232–233; “The Nun’s Priest Tale,” 45 Chesterfield, 4th Earl of (Philip Stanhope), 62, 63 Child’s Coffee­house, 110 Chile, 213 Chimborazo (volcano), 215 China (country), 196, 205n24, 212, 240, 245 china (porcelain), 16 Chipping Norton, 189 Chiswick House, 189, 201 Christian, Chris­tian­ity, 14–15 Churchill, Charles, 110, 113; The North Briton, 110. See also Wilkes, John Churchill, Sarah, 170, 172, 173, 180, 181–182, 183 Churchill, Winston, 177, 179 Cibber, Colley (“Old”), 103–120; The Careless Husband, 114; The Lady’s Last Stake, 113; Love’s Last Shift, 113; The Provoked Husband, or, A Journey to London, 109, 111; The Provoked Wife, 113,

index 117n29; Sir Francis Wronghead of Bumper Hall, 109–110 Claramount House and Garden, 196 Clark, Peter, 102n33 Clifford, James, 152n16 Clingham, Greg, 2, 13, 55, 77, 231, 233–248; Johnson, Writing, and Memory, 237; law and lit­er­a­ture, 231, 233, 234, 237, 248; as mentor, 229 Clive, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey (Robert), 193 Close, Anthony, 75 clubbable, unclubbable, 2, 90, 92, 100n3, 234 clubs: The Ivy Lane Club, 90; and Johnson: The Essex Head Club, 90, 100n3; The Kit-­Cat Club, 97, 102n33; The Literary Club, 90; Musical Society of Lodge St. Giles, 92; social, 93, 95, 97, 102n33; The Tuesday Club, 92, 97. See also The Peacock Coalbrooke or Coalbrooke Dale, 215–216, 218 Cockerell, Sir Charles, 188, 189, 193, 197 Collins, Williams. See Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Collins” Commines, Philippe de (French memoirist), 124, 129 Concepción (city), 213 Conduct of the Allies, The. See Swift, Jonathan Congreve, William, 141 contracts, military, 173 Cope, Kevin, 207 Cotswolds, 197, 204n20 Courtney, William Prideaux, 97–100, 102n30 Couser, G. Thomas, 134, 135, 138n63 Coustos, John, 92 Covent Garden (London neighborhood in the parish of St. Martin in the Fields), 221; ­Will’s Coffee House, 140 Coventry, 209 Cowley, Abraham, 42; “Hymn to Light,” 58. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Cowley” Cowper, William, 222 Cox, James M., 121 critics, their ridiculousness, 7 Croker, John Wilson, 95–96, 101n23 ­Cromwell, Henry, 132 ­Cromwell, Oliver, 104, 170 Crouch, Nathaniel, 218–219, 224n32 Cumming, Thomas, 90–102; and Johnson, 89–92, 94, 95, 96, 96 Dalrymple, Hugh, Rodondo: or, The State Jugglers (1763), 179 Damrosch, Leopold, 78, 89n33 Daylesford Estate, 197

301 Defoe, Daniel, 169; The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, 134 Deism, 124 Delaney, Paul, 121 delegitimation, 169, 171, 176, 179 Delhi (Red Fort of), 192 Derby House, 132 Derbyshire, 210 Derrida, Jacques, 50n7 Descartes, René, 6; Cartesian skepticism, 236 Devonshire, 5th Duke of (William Cavendish), 189 Digges, West (actor and man­ag­er), 103, 106–107, 109, 113, 117n21, 117n29 domestic politics, 29, 178 Donaldson, Alexander, 99 Doolittle, Samuel, 212 Dorset, 6th Earl of (Charles Sackville), 65. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Dorset” dramatic, the, 11–13 Drury Lane (theater), 105, 116n13, 117n29 Dryden, John, 6, 14, 39, 43, 46, 55, 61, 63, 65, 125, 140–168; Absalom and Achitophel, 140–142; Aeneid, 148, 146; Alexander’s Feast, 141, 151n8; All for Love, 19–20, 145–146; “Baucis and Philemon,” 143; “Ceyx and Alcyone,” 143, 147; “Cinyras and Myrrha,” 144; The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (Malone ed.), 23–24; distressed w ­ omen, 142–146; Essay on Dramatic Poetry, 14, 30, 141, 220; Fables, Ancient and Modern, 41, 141–142, 143; “To Her Grace the Dutchess [sic] of Ormond,” 143; Heroides, 143, 151n4, 152n16; Mac Flecknoe, 140, 142, 151; Metamorphoses, 143, 148; “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,” 140; “The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady,” 143; Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day, 140; Preface, 41; “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” 144–145; “Theodore and Honoria,” 141; translations, 141–144. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Dryden” Dublin/Dubliners, 95, 101n21, 194, 195, 199, 200 Dugdale, Sir William, Monasticon, 131 Duke, Richard, 59. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Duke” Dun, Rev. John, 105 Dutch: anti-­Dutch theme, 181; “Dutchification” of Britain, 176; nation, 176; painting, 22, 26, 33–34 Dyer, John, Grongar Hill, 58. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Dyer” Dylan, Bob, 19

302 i n d e x Eakin, Paul John, 135, 139n68 ECCO, 142 Ec­ua­dor, 210, 213 Edinburgh, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103–114; Arthur Seat, 108; Cannongate [sic] (street), 107; Canongate Church, 105, 116n12; Canongate Concert Hall, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 117n30; Holyrood Palace, 104 EEBO, 142 Eglinton, 10th Earl of (Alexander Montgomerie), 115n2 Egypt, ­Grand Cairo, 49 Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 235 Eliot, T. S., 7, 37n13 Émïn, Joseph, 186–187, 190, 191, 195 Empson, William, 27, 28 ­England, 45, 81, 104, 106, 121, 123, 124, 128, 134, 135, 162, 167, 169, 179, 186, 187–188, 189, 193, 196, 203n4, 210, 212, 215, 219, 243 En­glish Midlands, 9, 210 Erasmus, Desiderius, 16 Erskine, the Hon. Andrew, 111–112 Eugene, Prince, of Savoy–­Carignano, 181 fable: apologue, 45, 122, 174, 177–178; plot, 11 Fairer, David, 152n16 Fairfax, Edward, 41, 129, 130; Godfrey of Bulloigne, 41; Memorials, 129–130 Falkland Islands, 229 Fath-­A li Shah Qajar, 187 Faulkner, George (Peter Paragraph), 95, 96, 101n21 Fenton, Elijah, 56–57 Ferguson, Rebecca, 149 Ferry, David, “What Johnson Means to Me,” 10, 19, 21n28 Festschrift, 1, 234, 239, 260 Fisher, Michael H., 187 Fleeman, J. D., 52n25 Fleming, Robert, 212, 219 Fletcher, Rev. John, 223n10 Florio, John, Essayes of Montaigne, 16 Forsberg, Nina, 259 Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, 237, 261 Fowler, Alastair, 134 France, 11, 124, 162, 172, 177, 180, 181, 187, 199, 215, 219, 257 Franklin, Benjamin, 91 Freemasons / Masons, 91–97, 101n12, 101n16, 189. See also David Murray Lyon Freud, Sigmund, 52n33 Fuller, Thomas, History of the Worthies of ­England, 127 Gainsborough, Thomas, 26, 35–36 Garden of Eden, 191, 196, 202

Garrick, David, 9, 12, 16, 107, 113, 117n29 Garth, Samuel, 141 Gay, John, 51n8, 103, 165, 167; The Beggar’s Opera, 103, 106, 115n2, 116n18; 8 Jan. 1723 letter to Swift (mistakenly attributed to Swift by Johnson in Dictionary), 72 general nature, 14–15 Genette, Gérard, 126 Gentleman, Francis, 110 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 106, 116n17, 223n3 ­ ngland), 175 George I, (King of E George II, (King of ­England), 92, 162 George III (King of ­England), 111, 188, 193 Gildon, Charles, Laws of Poetry, 28 Gillray, James, 7, 71 Glasgow, 92, 109, 113, 141; Theatre Royal, 105, 107, 109, 117n29 Gloucester, Duke of (Prince William), 59 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, 235 Goldsmith, Oliver, 97; Citizen of the World, 187 Gordon, Peter. See Smollett, Tobias Gothic, the, 145, 149, 248; imagination, 225n38 ­Grand Accuser the Greatest of All CRIMINALS, The (1735), 180 Gray, Thomas, 55, 58, 67; Pindaric Odes, 58, 66. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Gray” Greenblatt, Stephen, 245–246 Greene, Donald J., 49 Greenland, 214 Gregory, (Pope), 220 Groom, Edward. See Smollett, Tobias Grosholz, Emily, 253 Guardian, The, 198 Guildi, Joanna, 72 Gulf of Mexico, 214 Hafiz (Xāwje Shams-­od-­Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-­e Shīrāzī) (Persian poet), 192 Hales, Stephen, 219 Halifax, 1st Earl of (Charles Montagu), 60–61. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Halifax” Hallett, Mark, 22–23 Hallywell, C., 214 Hals, Franz, 34 Hamilton, Alexander, (editor), 95–96; work: Town and Country Magazine, 93, 95–96, 98–99, 100 Hamilton, Dr. Alexander (author) (Tomacumingo, satirical name of, 96), 92–93, 95; and History of the Ancient and Honourable Tuesday Club, 92, 95. See also clubs Hamilton, 1st Duke of Scotland (James), 128

index Hamilton, 2nd Duke of Scotland (William), 128 Hamilton, William (traveler and diplomat), 222 Hammond, James, 62–63; Love Elegies, 62–63. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Hammond” Hampton Court, 131, 198 Hanoverian royalty, 55, 162, 167, 168n11 Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (Robert), 170, 173, 176, 178, 180–181 Harris, Frances, 173 Harvard University, 248 Hassan (Khan), (Mirza) Abul (Persian traveler), 186–188, 191, 192–194, 195–197, 201–202, 205n24, 205n28 Hastings, Warren, 197–198 Hawkins, Sir John, 2, 8, 90, 100n3 Hegel, Georg Friedrich: world-­historical individuals, 178; World-­Spirit, 179 Henry, Patrick, 236, 260–261 Henry III (King of France), 124 Henry VII (King of ­England), 126 Herbert, Sir Thomas, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of Charles I, 130–133 heroic plays, 33, 19–20, 145–146 Heron, Robert. See John Pinkerton Herschel, William, 208 Hindoostan. See India history/historiography, 122, 132; the chronical, 122, 123; the Classical period, 126; po­liti­cal history, 122 History of the Tuesday Club. See Hamilton, Dr. Alexander H. L. (anonymous satirist), 215, 222 Hobbes, Thomas, 123 Holinshed Raphael, 8 Holles, Denzil, 129–130, 133, 134, 138n52 Holyrood, Palace of. See Edinburgh Home, John, Douglas, 105 Homer, 6, 140, 141; Iliad, 143; Odyssey, 143 Hopkins, David, 22, 260 Hudibras. See Butler, Samuel Humanities Review, 232 Hume, David, 11 Hunter, J. Paul, 134 Hunter, Thomas, 214–215 Hyde Park, 191, 202 idée fixe, 68 Imlac, 33, 35. See also Johnson, Samuel: Rasselas implied reader, 66 India, 179, 186–187, 191, 195, 197, 200, 205n24, 205n31; Hindoostan, 198; Kashmir, 192, 196

303 india ink, 252 intertextuality, 39–53, 52n33, 130; intertextual dyad, 46–47 Ireland, 92, 95, 96, 121, 132, 143, 167, 169, 175, 185, 187, 194, 195, 200–201; Irish Catholics, 129; Irish lit­er­a­ture, 247; Kilkenny, 196, 200. See also Dublin/Dubliners Isocrates, 128 Italy, 146, 210, 212, 218, 248 I’tesamuddin, (Mirza) Sheikh (Bengali traveler and diplomat), 186, 187, 190–193, 195, 197–199 Jack, Ian, Augustan Satire, 142; The Rise of the Novel, 23 Jacobite, Jacobitism, 55, 90, 162 Jaffe, Nora Crow, The Poet Swift, 164 Jamaica, 210, 212, 223n6 James, Henry, 122 James I (King of ­England), 104 James II (King of ­England, ­earlier the Duke of York), 104, 171 James VI (King of Scotland), 104 Jenyns, Soame, 50n3; ­Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, 11 Johnson, Samuel, 2, 5–21, 22–38, 39–53, 54–70, 73–75, 77–81, 89–92, 94, 95, 96, 129, 140, 153–154, 155, 160, 163, 207, 229, 252–253, 258; on actors and acting, 16–17; biographies by (see Lives of the En­glish Poets); biographies of (see Boswell, Life of Johnson); James Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, 100n4; J. W. Krutch, 20n2; Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings, of Dr. Samuel Johnson, 70n15; John Wain, Samuel Johnson, 253; conversation, 8–9; as a critic, 12, 14–16, 18, 20n6, 25, 31–35, 40, 53n45, 54–70; “­father of Romanticism,” 19; “genealogies of sentiment”/pedigrees,” 40–41, 44, 45, 48, 51nn9–10; and his circle, 2, 258; and neoclassicism, 7, 10; nicknames: Caliban of lit­er­a­ture, 39; enfant terrible, 50; ­Great Cham of lit­er­a­ture, 50, 249; harmless drudge, 52n33; Dr. ­Johnson’s House (Gough Square museum), 2; and pastoral, 18, 53, 62–63, 67; as poet, 51n16; reading, 52n33; relationships: Cumming (see Thomas Cumming); ­mother (see Sarah Johnson), Pope (see Alexander Pope); Reynolds (see Sir Joshua Reynolds); and scrofula, 250, 252–253; Shakespeare (see William Shakespeare); Smollett (see Tobias Smollett); works: Dictionary of the En­glish Language (1755), 23, 39, 40, 41–42,

304 i n d e x Johnson (continued) 51n8, 72; “Diffugere nives,” 45; Idler, 13, 22, 129; Johnson on Demand, 90; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 21n21, 89n33; letter to Reynolds, 31; Lives of the En­glish Poets, 10, 13–14, 17, 18, 21n20, 40–42, 54–70, 153, 163, 237; “Life of Addison,” 55; “Life of Akenside,” 67; “Life of Blackmore,” 55, 63–64, 67; “Life of Butler,” 14, 21n20; “Life of Collins,” 55, 67; “Life of Cowley,” 25, 55; “Life of Dorset,” 65; “Life of Dryden,” 41, 55; “Life of Duke,” 59; “Life of Dyer,” 58; “Life of Gray,” 55, 58, 66–67; “Life of Halifax,” 60–61; “Life of Hammond,” 62–63; “Life of John Philips,” 42; “Life of King,” 60, 65; “Life of Lyttelton,” 67–69, 70nn15–16; “Life of Milton, 10, 14, 42, 54; “Life of Otway,” 17, 63; “Life of Pomfret,” 55; “Life of Pope,” 10, 18, 55, 153–154, 155; “Life of Rochester,” 57–58; “Life of Roscommon,” 56–57; “Life of Rowe,” 55; “Life of Savage,” 15, 16–17, 19, 53n41, 55, 66; “Life of Sheffield,” 60–61; “Life of Smith,” 55; “Life of Swift,” 13–15, 58, 163, 173; “Life of Thomson,” 33, 66, 67; “Life of Walsh,” 59–60; “Life of Watts,” 55; “Life of Yalden,” 55, 58–59, 67; London, 53n41; “On a Daffodill [sic],” 45; personalization of, 52n33; “rhyme,” 41–41; Plan of an En­glish Dictionary, 39, 48, 239; Preface to Shakespeare Edition, 12, 14, 18–20, 32–33, 34, 37, 39, 48; Preface to the Dictionary, 40, 42, 48; Rambler, 13, 16, 21n22, 47, 49, 51n8, 57, 73–88, 89n33; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 7, 11, 15–16, 33, 229, 230, 253; Review of ­Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, 11 (see also Soame Jenyns); Shakespeare Edition, 15, 40, 41, 43, 48; The Vanity of ­Human Wishes, 10, 14–16, 56; The Works of the En­glish Poets (1779–1781), 62 (see also Sir Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the En­glish Law); scholarship, 39, 42–44, 46–49, 50. See also Lives of the En­glish Poets; Preface to Dictionary; Preface to Shakespeare Edition; Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (see Samuel Johnson: Lives of the En­glish Poets) Johnson, Sarah (Samuel’s ­mother), 252–253, 256 Jones, J. R., 181 Jonson, Ben, 8–9, 17, 19, 97, 107; ­Every Man in His Humour, 107; Timber or Discoveries, 8; “To the memory of . . . ​Mr. ­W ILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,” 8, 19 Julius Caesar, 179

Jupiter (my­t hol­ogy), 143 Jupiter (planet), 210 Juvenal, 10, 56, 59, 65, 140 Kenwood House and Garden (Hampstead), 196, 205n28 Kidder, Dr., Bishop of Wells and Bath (Richard), 217 King, William (poet), 60, 65. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of King” King’s evil. See Johnson, Samuel: scrofula King William’s War, 170 Knapp, Lewis, 73 Knellwolf, Christa, 149 Knox, John, 105 Kolb, Gwin, 51n16 Korshin, Paul, 78, 79, 89n33 Kristeva, Julia, 52n33 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 20n2 Lake District, 251 Lamarck, Jean-­Baptiste, 208 Lamb, Jonathan, 256 La Rochefoucauld, 164 Latacunga (Ec­ua­dor­ian city), 214, 215 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, Essays on Physiognomy (1789, 1804), 71 Lavoisier, Antoine, 208 Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), 76 Leavis, F. R., 6, 10, 20n2, 36n1, 50 Lee, Anthony W., 21n27, 50n3, 51n8, 234, 236, 257, 258, 259 Lee, John (actor and theater man­ag­er), 107 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 210 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 123, 127, 135–136 Lewis, Paul (highwayman), 106–107, 114 Lichfield, 9, 52n32 Lima, 217, 218 Linnaeus, Carl, 47, 208 Lintot, Bernard (Barnaby), 61 Lisbon, 92 Lisbon earthquake, 207, 207, 215, 218, 220, 223n1, 225n38 literary history, 20; major forms of, 6, 7 ­Little, Dan, 245 Lloyd, David, Memoires (of the En­glish Royalists), 126–127 Locke, John, 5, 52n25 London, 9, 15, 49, 71, 74, 84, 91, 93–96, 99, 100, 104–114, 131, 187–194, 197, 199–202, 207, 217, 239, 253; for the poem London. See Johnson, Samuel: works Lonsdale, Roger, 70n5, 70n18; The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-­Century Verse, 23 Love, James (actor), 107 Lubey, Kathleen, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 259–260

index Lucretius, 15, 63, 140 Ludlow, Edmund, Memoirs, 130; A Voyce from the Watchtower, 130 Lynch, Deidre, 77 Lynch, Jack, 50n1, 66 Lyon, David Murray, 91–92; History of the Lodge of Edinburgh, 92 Lyttelton, 4th Baron (George Lyttelton), 67–69; “Advice to Belinda,” 67; Dialogues of the Dead, 67–68; History of Henry the Second, 68–69; “Pro­gress of Love,” 67. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Lyttelton” Macartney, Sir George, 245 Macfarlane, Elizabeth (“Lady Betty”), 112–114 Macfarlane, Laird of, (Walter), 112–114 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 122 Mack, Maynard, 140, 148, 152n13, 154–155 Mackenzie, Norman H., 132 Major, J. C., 134 Malone, Edmond, 23–24, 31; works: The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, 23, 24, 31, 36n6 Malplaquet, ­Battle of (1709), 171 Manchester, 211 Manning, Susan, 77 Mansfield, 3rd Earl of (David William Murray), 196 Marclay (Hill), 215 Marcus, Laura, 121, 135 Marlborough, 1st Duke of (John Churchill), 168n11, 169–184, 189 Marseilles, 106 Masham, Abigail, 172–173, 178, 182n15 Mason, H. A., ix, “The Perfect Critic” anonymously quoted, 27, 37n21 Maurice, Thomas, 98, 102n31 Mayer, J. J., 134 Mayer, Robert, 134 McKeon, Michael, 134 McNicholas, Joseph, 232, 258, 260 Memoir, the, 121–139, apologia, 128, 130, 134; res gestae, 130 mentor (protégé), 50n6, 51n11, 51n18, 156, 159, 163, 173, 187, 190, 228–240 Mercury (my­t hol­ogy), 45, 143 Messier, Charles, 208 Metaphysical poets, 7, 55 Michelangelo, 6 ­Middle Passage, the, 181 Miller, Nancy, 135 Milton, John, 6, 10, 16, 39, 41–42, 46, 55, 63, 69, 126, 157, 231, 232, 237–238; and Johnson, 10, 21n22, 41–42, 63; and Pope, 69, 181–182; works: Comus (A Masque), 14; Lycidas, 42, 66; Paradise Lost, 143, 231;

305 Samson Agonistes, 14. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Milton” Modena, Mary of (wife of James II), 104 Montagu, Elizabeth (writer and Bluestocking socialite), 67, 70n16 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 148–149 Montaigne, Michel de, 8, 11, 12, 14; Essayes, 16 Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu), 187, 192; Lettres Persanes, 187 Monument, The, 108–110 More, Hannah, 67 Morier, James Justinian, 187 Moritz, Karl Philip (German author), 185 Morris, David B., 160 Morrison, Robert, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts, 240 Moses, 217 Môtiers (Switzerland), 105 Moyne, Pierre Le, 125 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 6 Mudge, Zachariah, 36n6 Mughal (Mogul), 196 Murphy, Arthur, Essays on Shakespeare, 1753–1754, 16 Murray (Macmurray), John (bookseller), 95 Nawab Mir Zafar Ali Khan (Arabian general), 193 Nawab Siraj-­ud-­dowla (Bengali ruler), 193 Neill, Adam, 99 Nelson, 1st Viscount of (Horatio), 181 neoclassic, 1, 10, 26, 27, 32, 47, 53n34, 199, 201, 220 New, Melvyn, 50n3, 100n2 Newgate (prison), 106–107, 116n18, 231 Newton, Isaac, 5, 159, 169, 210 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 236 North Briton, The, 110, 113 Nunnery, David, 60 Nussbaum, Felicity, 135 Oakleaf, Davis, 175 observation, 10, 14 Oriental (-­ism), 187, 191, 192, 196 Ormond, Duchess of (Mary Butler), 143 Ormond, 2nd Duke of (James Butler), 143, 166 Osborne, Sir Frances, Advice to a Son, 124; Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, and King James, 127, 133 Ottoman Empire, 168 Otway, Thomas, 17, 59, 63; Poet’s Complaint of his Muse, 63. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Otway”

306 i n d e x Oudenarde, ­Battle of (1708), 171 Ouseley, Sir Gore (En­glish ambassador), 187, 192, 196, 201, 206n32 Overton, Captain Richard, 214–215 Ovid, 8, 15, 59, 140, 143–144, 146, 174; works: Ars Amatoria, 141, 143–144; Epistles, 141, 147, 149, 151n4; Metamorphoses, 141; “Sappho and Phaon,” 147 Oxford, town, 199; Pembroke College, 9, 244; University, 9, 65, 74, 76, 166, 199, 210, 223n6 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, The, 27 Oxfordshire, 210 Pagliano, Harold E., 152n16 Palermo, 210 Parker, Alice, 74 Parker, Elizabeth (prostitute), 113 Parker, Fred, 57, 62 Parker, Kate, 257 Peacock, The (at Gray’s End Lane), 97–98, 100, 102n30. See also clubs; pubs / inns Peak District, the, 212 Pepys, William Walter, 70n16 Percy, Bishop of Dromore (Thomas), 70n16 Perrault, Claude, Memoires for the Natu­ral History of Animals, 133 Persia/Persian, 186–188, 191–192, 195–197, 202 Petty, Sir William, 169 Philips, John, 42; Cyder, 42. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of John Philips” Phoenix Park (Dublin), 195 Pinkerton, John (Robert Heron) (antiquarian), 39 Piozzi, Hester (Mrs.). See Thrale, Hester Pitt, the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham (William), 166, 179 Plassey, ­Battle of, 193 Plato, 34 Plutarch, 8; Parallel Lives, 14 Pole, Miss (Emily Harriet Wellesley-­Pole), 196 Pomfret, John. See Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Pomfret” Pope, Alexander, 6, 9, 14, 22, 24–25, 34, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62, 63, 67, 69, 72, 97, 102n29, 140–168, 152, 160, 186, 252; distressed ­women Pope, 146–149; ruling passion, 160; relationships: Bolingbroke, 155–156, 159, 161–163; Dryden, 6, 14, 50n5, 51n8, 55, 61, 62, 63, 142, 139–152, passim, 169–184, 186, 259; Johnson, 21–35, 37n30, 72, 198, 152, 153–154, 155; Milton (see John Milton); Reynolds (see Sir Joshua Reynolds); Swift (see Jonathan Swift); works: Correspondence, 27, 102n29; An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, 150, 156; Elegy

to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 146–147, 148–149; Eloisa and Abelard, 18, 146–147, 148–149; Essay on Criticism, 6, 25, 26–30, 32–33, 34, 154; Essay on Man, 11, 18, 146–147, 148–149, 153–163; Horatian imitations, 142; Moral Essays, 148 (see also Pope’s Epistles to: Burlington, to Cobham, and to A Lady (Blount)), Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, 156; Of the Use of Riches (To Cobham), 156; Of the Use of Riches (To Burlington), 156; Rape of the Lock, 142, 148–149; Belinda, 149, 150; Cla­ris­sa, 149, 150; To a Lady. Of the Characters of W ­ omen (To Blount), 149, 156; Atossa, 150–151; and wit, 24–25, 28–29; Preface to The Iliad, 72. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Pope” Porteus, Bishop Beilby, 211 Portman Square (London), 197, 200, 202 Pottle, Frederick, 106, 115n7 Powell, L. F., 94 Powell, Manushag, 78 Presbyterianism, 103, 104–105, 113–114 Protestant, 171, 172 pubs / inns, 77, 97–98, 238, 258. See also The Peacock Pythagoras, 15 Quakers/Quakerism, 90–96 “Queen’s and the Duke of Ormonde’s New Toast, The,” 177 Queensberry, 3rd Duke of (Charles Douglas), 111 Quinby, Lee, 121 Quito, 213–214 Radner, John, 223n1 Rak, Julia, 121 ­ attle of (1706), 171 Ramillies, B Rawson, Claude, 17, 155, 183n44 Ray, John, 208 Redford, Bruce, 52n32 Reid, Andrew, 68 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn), 34 Repton, Humphry (landscape designer), 186 Reresby, Sir John, Memoirs, 130 Restoration, the (En­glish), 32, 103, 104, 106, 113, 121–135, passim, 151n9 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 23–26, 31; and Blake, 23–24; and Gainsborough, 35–36; and Johnson, 25, 26–35, passim, 37n30, 258; and Pope, works: Discourses on Art, 22–23, 25, 35, 36; Idler, 32; Works, 31 Rice, James, 257 Richard, Dame Alison, DBE, 239 Richardson, Samuel, Cla­ris­sa, 149

index Richmond Park, 201 Ricks, Christopher, 19, 25, 295 Robles, Whitney Barlow, 223n10 Rochester, 2nd Earl of (John Wilmot), 56–57. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Rochester” Romanticism, 8, 16, 19, 202 Roscommon, 4th Earl of (Went­worth Dillon), 56, 57, 58; Essay on Translated Verse, 56. See also Samuel Johnson: “Life of Roscommon” Ross, David (theater man­ag­er), 105 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 105, 128 Rowe, Nicholas, 19, 32–33, 55; “she tragedies,” 149 Royal Acad­emy of Arts, 23, 36 Ruddiman, Thomas, 98 ruling passion. See Pope, Alexander Rumbold, Valerie, 152n16 salon, 258 Sanders, Robert, 69 Savage, Richard, 66; The Bastard, 15. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Savage” Sayer, Robert F., 135 Schadenfreude, 164 Schellenburger, Betty, 70n16 Scotland, 15, 81, 92, 94, 98, 99, 103, 104, 105, 111, 114, 187, 237, 248 Seisincot (Sezincote House and Garden), 189, 204n20 Seven Years’ War, 75, 91, 93, 179 Seward, Anna, 51n16 Shaftesbury, 1st Earl of (Anthony Ashley-­ Cooper), 128–129 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley-­ Cooper), 121, 154 Shakespeare, William, 5–21, 32–35, 39, 42, 46, 48–49, 51n24, 53n41, 65, 68, 145, 245, 246; biographies of, 7–8, 9, 17; and Johnson, 5–21, 32–35, 48–49, 54, 55, 61, 258; “mingled drama,” 16; Stratford, 9; “Swan of Avon,” 19; works: Antony and Cleopatra, 145; Hamlet, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21n27, 54, 115n2, 154; Henry IV, Part 2, 9; Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, 15; Henry V, 5; Henry VIII, 14; King John, 18; King Lear, 11, 13; Macbeth, 12, 252; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 9; Prospero, 16, 45–46, 51n23 (see also Caliban); The Tempest, 43–44, 45–46, 47, 48, 49, 51nn23–24, 52n33; Troilus and Cressida, 12, 49. See also Johnson, Samuel: Preface to Shakespeare; Shakespeare Edition) Sheffield, John, Duke of Buckingham, 61, 130; Essay on Satire, 61. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Sheffield”

307 Sheridan, Francis, 107; The Discovery, 107 Sherlock, Bishop Thomas, 224n30 Sigaud de la Fond, 211 skepticism, 5, 11, 16, 202, 230, 231, 236 Smallwood, Philip, 56, 257, 258 Smith, Edmund. See Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Smith” Smollett, Tobias, 69–89, passim, 91, 93, 96, 100n6, 221, 258; relationships: Edward Groom, 74–75; Peter Gordon, 74–75; Johnson, 73–75, 86–88, 89n39, 96; the “Knowles Affair,” 75; and the law, 73–88, 88n9, 258; and Peter Gordon, 74–75; and the Rambler, 77, 78–81, 85–88; works: The British, Magazine, 73; Continuation of the Complete History of ­England, 75, 91, 100n6; The Critical Review, 74; Don Quixote (translation), 73, 75–76; Ferdinand Count Fathom, 75; The History and Adventures of an Atom, 89n30, 100n6; Humphry Clinker, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81, 82, 89n30, 89n39; Launcelot Greaves, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81, 88, 89n30 Sojka, Gary, 243–244, 257 Somerville, Thomas, 99, 102n33, 104, 115n7 Somerville, 12th Lord of (James), 104, 115n7 South, Robert, “Sermon on Prevention of Sin,” 72 South Africa, 249 South Amer­i­ca, 213–214, 215 Spanish “golden age” culture, 247 Spectator, The, 27, 78–81, 188 Spencer, Charles, 172 Spenser, Edmund (also “Spencer”), 6, 39, 41–45, 46, 47, 49–50, 268; and Johnson, 39, 41–45, 46, 50, 51n24; works: The Faerie Queene, 6, 44, 51n24; and Johnson, 44–45; Prosopopoia, or ­Mother Hubberd’s Tale, 43–50, 52n33 Staffordshire, 209 St. Andrews, University of, 248 Statius, 51n8 Steen, Jan, 34 Stendhal. See Beyle, Marie-­Henri Sterne, Laurence, 92 Stewart, Charles, 198 St. George’s Hall, 132 Stillingfleet, Edward, Origines Britannicae, 127 St. James’s Palace, 131 St. James’s Park, 113, 190, 191, 195, 197 Stourhead Gardens, 185 Stowe Gardens, 185, 189, 204n20 Stow-­on-­t he-­Wold, 204n20 Stuart, Gilbert, 97–102, passim, 102n30 Stuart, John. See Earl of Bute Stukeley, William, 208

308 i n d e x Swift, Jonathan, 13–14, 61, 72, 92, 163–167, 169–184, 229, 235; “fictional Swift,” 61; as poet of Schadenfreude, 271–272; relationships: the Duke of Marlborough, 69–184, Johnson, 13–14, 58, 163, 169–184, Pope, 69, 153–168, 169–184, Robert Walpole, 179; works: The Conduct of the Allies, 176; “A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind,”169; “Directions for a Birthday Song,” 168n11; The Examiner, 170, 175–178, 180, 181; “The Fable of Midas,” 174; “A Fable of the ­Widow and Her Cat,” 177–178; Gulliver’s Travels, 170, 179–180; The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, 180, 182; Journal to Stella, 176; A Modest Proposal, 169–170, “On Poetry: A Rhapsody,” 168n11; “A Satirical Elegy on a Late Famous General,” 168n11; Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, 153–168,“Verses to Bernard Lintot’s New Miscellany,” 61, “The [W]hig’s Litany,” 173. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Swift” Sydney (place), 210 symbolic mentors, 41, 51n11 Tacitus, 122 Taleb (Khan), (Mirza) Abu (Ira­nian traveler), 186–189, 193–195, 197–201, 204n19 Tatler, The, 134, 188 Taylor, Charles, 48 Teignmouth, 1st Baron of (John Shore) Irish Peer and General-­Governor of India, 197, 202, 206n32 ­Temple, Sir William, 126 ­Temple, Viscount Cobham (Richard), 156, 204n20 Tennyson, Sir Alfred, 7 Teresa of Jesus, ­Mother, 217–218 Thatcher, Margaret, 229 Theatre Royal (En­glish). See Glasgow Theobald, Lewis, 68 Thomas, Harry, 255 Thomson, James, 66–67; Liberty, 66; The Seasons, 66. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Thomson” Thrale, Henry, 94 Thrale, Hester (Mrs. Piozzi, née Salusbury), 8, 21n25, 70nn15–16, 94, 95, 254 Thucydides, 122 Timm, Connie, 259 Toland, John, 130, 133 Tonbridge School, 229, 230 Tonson, Jacob, 141, 147, 149, 151n4; Miscellany Poems (1684), 141; Ovid’s Epistles, 147–148

Tory, Tories, 124, 130, 167, 170, 172–175, 177, 181 Towers, Joseph, “An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings, of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” 70n15 Town and Country Magazine, 93, 95–96, 97–99, 100, 101n21. See also Hamilton, Alexander Towne, Francis, 252 tragedy, conditions for, 14 ­Triple League, the, Turkey, 179 Trowbridge, Hoyt, 152n16 Tuchet, 3rd Earl of Castlehaven (James), 129, 130 Tuesday Club. See clubs; Dr. Alexander Hamilton Tyburn (gallows), 106, 108, 116n18 Tyers, Thomas, 55 Tytler, William, 104, 115n9, 116n13 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von (German traveler), 185 Ulloa, Antonio de, 213–215 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 113, 177; A Journey to London, 109, 113 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 22 Vauxhall (London plea­sure garden), 193, 195, 231 Vilayet (Turkish administrative district), 195 Virgil, 140. See also Dryden: Aeneid Voltaire, François-­Marie Arouet, 11, 16, 192, 207, 210, 223n3; Candide, 210 Wagner, Richard, 6 Wain, John, 254 Wales, Prince of, 189, 202 Walker, Robert G., 100n2 Wall, Cynthia, 108, 110 Waller, Edmund, 41 Walmsley, Gilbert, 55 Walpole, Horace, 186, 188 ­ astle of Otranto, Walpole, Robert, 162, 179; C 149 Walsh, William, 59–60. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Walsh” Warburton, Bishop William, 17, 27, 102n29, 208, 211; edition of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, 27; edition of Shakespeare, 17 Warwick, Sir Philip, 128; Memoires of the ­Family of the Stuarts, 128 War of the Spanish Succession, 170, 176, 181 Warton, Joseph, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 6, 141 Watkins, W.B.C., 43 Watt, Ian, The Rise of the En­glish Novel, 23

index Watts, Isaac, 55. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Watt” Weinbrot, Howard, 38n34, 152n12 Wellington, 1st Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 181 Wells (place), 217 Wesley, John, 211, 223n3 West-­Brummidge, 209 Whigs, Whiggish, 55, 63, 66, 124, 130, 167, 172–173, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181–182 Whiston, William, 211 Wilkes, John, 74,115n2; North Briton No. 45, 110, 113 Wilks, Robert, 16 William III (King of ­England, formerly Prince of Orange of the Dutch Republic), 171, 175 ­Will’s Coffee House. See Covent Garden Windsor C ­ astle, 131–132 Windsor Park and Gardens, 188 wit, 24–25, 28–29 Wollaston, William, 129

309 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 14 Woolf, ­Virginia, 236, 237 Worden, Blair, 130 Words­worth, William, 6, 29–30, 141–142, 202 Wright, Nicole M., 74 Xerxes, 14 Yagoda, Ben, 134 Yalden, Thomas, 58–59; “Hymn to Darkness,” 58–59; The ­Temple of Fame, to the Memory of the Most Illustrious Prince William Duke of Glocester [sic], 59. See also Johnson, Samuel: “Life of Yalden” Yale University, 248 Youngren, William, 26 Zachs, William, 95, 97, 102n30, 102n36; Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786, 97, 102n30, 102n34