The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24) 9781684483044

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The Age of Johnson

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EDITORIAL BOARD James G. Basker, Barnard College Patricia Craddock, University of Florida Robert DeMaria, Jr., Vassar College Dustin Griffin, New York University Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta Nicholas Hudson, University of British Columbia Nancy Johnson, State University of New York, New Paltz Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University Devoney Looser, Arizona State University Anne C. McDermott, University of Birmingham Karen O’Brien, University of Warwick Catherine N. Parke, University of Missouri Allen Reddick, Universität Zürich Howard Weinbrot, University of Wisconsin Richard Wendorf, The American Museum in Britain

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A Scholarly Annual Volume 24

Edited by Jac k Ly n c h a n d J .   T. S c a n l a n

lewisburg, pen nsylvania

 ISBN 978-1-68448-301-3 ISSN 0884-5816 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2021 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. 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​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

The Age of Johnson welcomes contributions on all aspects of the lit­er­a­ture, history, and culture of the period of Samuel Johnson’s literary c­ areer and primary influence, roughly the years from 1730 to 1810. Contributions should not normally exceed 12,000 words; the style of documentation should follow the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. Articles for consideration should be sent by post or email to e­ ither of the editors: Jack Lynch, The Age of Johnson, Department of En­glish, Rutgers University, 360 M. L. King Blvd., Newark, NJ 07102 (email: JackLynch00@gmail​.­com); J. T. Scanlan, The Age of Johnson, Department of En­glish, Providence College, 1 Cunningham Square, Providence, RI 02918 (email: hambone@providence​.­edu). Books for review should be sent to J. T. Scanlan at the above mailing address.

Contents

Preface ​ ​ ix

Essays

Milton at Bolt Court ​ ​ ​3 Stephen Clarke

Mimesis and Understanding in Samuel Johnson’s Notes to Shakespeare (1765) ​ ​ 15 Marcus Walsh Samuel Johnson and the Allen F ­ amily ​ ​ ​32 Matthew M. Davis “Con Amore”: Hester Piozzi’s Annotations upon Johnson’s Early Poetry ​ ​ ​63 Anthony W. Lee Johnson (and Boswell) in the Lists: A View of Their Reputations, 1933–2018 ​ ​ ​78 Paul Tankard The Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox: Conducting a Professional Literary Life in Eighteenth-­Century Britain outside the Bluestocking Circle ​ ​ ​121 Susan Kubica Howard Punitive Injustice in Caleb Williams: Godwin’s Vexed Call for Penal Reform ​ ​ ​139 Suzanna Geiser Sensibility Reclaimed: Thomas Blackwell, Robert Wood, and the “Conjectural History” of Homer ​ ​  160 Peter M. Briggs vii

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Review Essays Organ­izing a Life and the “Lives”: Samuel Johnson and the Yale Edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets ​ ​ 175 David Venturo Is Historical Fiction Still Revolutionary?: Two Novels Set in Johnson’s World ​ ​ ​191 Eric Bennett

Reviews Michael Schmidt, The Novel: A Biography ​ ​ ​199 John Richetti David Alff, The Wreckage of Intentions: Proj­ects in British Culture, 1660–1730 ​ ​ ​205 Jacob Sider Jost Aileen Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 ​ ​ ​209 Robert DeMaria Jr. Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of Amer­i­ca ​ ​ ​214 Joseph F. Bartolomeo John Phibbs, Place-­Making: The Art of Capability Brown ​ ​ 219 Heinz-­Joachim Müllenbrock Notes on Contributors ​ ​ ​223

Preface

When Gabe Hornstein, our friend and longtime publisher, died on 17 February 2017, and when AMS Press itself folded shortly thereafter, the two of us received an outpouring of inquiries from contributors and readers of The Age of Johnson. We well understood this reaction. The Age of Johnson first appeared in 1987, and since then it has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies “in the broadest sense,” as our founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eigh­teenth ­century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests. As we mourned Gabe’s death, we found it increasingly difficult to imagine Johnsonian studies without The Age of Johnson, and we w ­ ere happy, at this sad time, that perhaps ­others felt the same way. And so, ­after many months of discussions, and ­after much mollifying of concerned writers and readers, we are delighted to be able to announce, with the publication of this volume, our twenty-­fourth, that The Age of Johnson is back and on solid footing. Our annual is now u ­ nder the imprint of Bucknell University Press, with the volumes themselves to be produced by Rutgers University Press. The move to a new publisher has given us the opportunity to recommit ourselves to what we do best: pre­sent to a wide readership cant-­free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Professor Korshin was proud that The Age of Johnson was “the first port of call,” as he put it, for many young scholars, and we aspire to continue this tradition. And so we invite younger scholars and writers to submit their work to us. The Age of Johnson has also been an outlet for scholars at all stages of their c­ areers, and for writers who are not academics. We welcome all manuscripts from t­ hose who have something significant to say about Johnson, his interests, or the eigh­teenth c­ entury generally. We have also made some changes. Our editorial board has a few new members: Nancy Johnson, Devoney Looser, and Howard Weinbrot. And the size of ix

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our volumes is now more in line with most other scholarly books. We are open to further changes and welcome suggestions from our readers. This volume pre­sents a collection of articles on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen f­ amily, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. We also include articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform; Charlotte Lennox’s professional literary ­career; and the “conjectural history” of Homer in the eigh­teenth ­century. And as usual, our reviews in this volume are longer and more detailed than standard book reviews. They are essentially literary essays on Johnsonian topics. In this volume we feature two especially searching review essays, one by a first-­time contributor, Eric Bennett, who addresses two recent works of historical fiction on the eigh­teenth ­century, and another by a longtime contributor, David Venturo, who considers the three new volumes of the Lives of the Poets in the Yale edition. As always, we gratefully acknowledge ­those who have offered advice and support of vari­ous kinds: Greg Clingham, former longtime director of Bucknell University Press; Suzanne E. Guiod, current director of Bucknell University Press; the Office of the Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Newark; Professor Hugh F. Lena, provost and se­nior vice president, Providence College; and Allison Schmidt, undergraduate student intern at Providence College. JACK LYNCH Newark, New Jersey J. T. SCANLAN Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts

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Milton at Bolt Court Stephen Clarke Relicks are venerable t­ hings, and are only not to be worshipped. —­Thomas Tyers, Gentleman’s Magazine 53 (December 1784)

When Johnson’s Life of John Milton was published in 1779 with the first twenty-­ two of the Prefaces to the En­glish Poets, it immediately attracted critical attention for the way Johnson balanced his reverence for much of Milton’s poetry with his distaste for Milton’s republicanism and private character. Some readers accepted that tension—­James Beattie, for example, concluded that Johnson was “more civil to Milton than I expected, though he hates him for his blank verse and his politics”—­ whereas Horace Walpole’s more unreflective Whig response was to dismiss it as mere abuse: “Johnson’s billingsgate on Milton.”1 Some attacks, such as the Reverend Francis Blackburne’s Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (London, 1780), emphasized Johnson’s po­liti­cal antipathy, while ­others, such as Robert Potter in the Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1781 and in his Inquiry into Some Passages in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (London, 1783), added to politics Johnson’s lack of sympathy with some of Milton’s poetry. But ­there was also an awareness that amidst Johnson’s astringent asides on Milton’s surly republicanism and domestic autocracy ­were passages showing Johnson’s awed re­spect for Milton’s poetic achievement, and the consequent honoring of Milton the writer. One ele­ment of this is shared between Johnson and Milton. Johnson rec­ords that “I cannot but remark a kind of re­spect, perhaps unconsciously, paid to this g­ reat man by his biographers: e­ very ­house in which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it w ­ ere an injury to neglect naming any place that he honoured by his presence.”2 Boswell quotes that passage, adding that “I had, before I read this observation, been desirous of shewing that re­spect to Johnson, by vari­ ous inquiries. Finding him this eve­ning in a very good humour, I prevailed on him to give me an exact list of his places of residence, since he entered the metropolis as an authour, which I subjoin in a note.”3 And in that note, the last of seventeen entries is 8 Bolt Court. 3

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Johnson moved to Bolt Court in March 1776 and lived ­t here ­until his death on 13 December 1784. Sir John Hawkins describes the establishment as follows: About this time, Dr. Johnson changed his dwelling in Johnson’s court, for a somewhat larger in Bolt court, Fleet street, where he commenced an intimacy with the landlord of it, a very worthy and sensible man, some time since deceased, Mr. Edmund Allen the printer. B ­ ehind it was a garden, which he took delight in watering; a room on the ground-­floor was assigned to Mrs. Williams, and the ­whole of the two pairs of stairs floor was made a repository for his books; one of the rooms thereon being his study. ­Here, in the intervals of his residence at Streatham, he received the visits of his friends, and, to the most intimate of them, sometimes gave, not inelegant dinners.4

Hawkins’s ­daughter Lætitia-­Matilda, in her Memoirs, says that the domestic economy of Bolt Court “always exceeded my expectations, as far as the condition of the apartment into which I was admitted, could enable me to judge. It was not, indeed, his study, among his books, he prob­ably might bring Magliabecchi to recollection; but I saw him only in a decent drawing-­room of a ­house not inferior to ­others in the same local situation, and with stout old-­fashioned mahogany chairs and ­tables.”5 Boswell on 18 April 1778 adds the comment that “He shewed me to-­ night his drawing-­room, very genteelly fitted up” (Life, 3:316).We have no detailed image of the interior of the h ­ ouse at Bolt Court, though a ­later engraving by E. Finden of Johnson and Boswell in Johnson’s sitting-­room was based on a sketch by J. Smith that shows an old-­fashioned, paneled room, presumably on the first floor. ­There are views of the exterior by George Shepherd (1784–1862) in the collection at Dr. Johnson’s House at Gough Square, and a generally similar engraved view, but with figures in the foreground, ­after J. T. Smith, as published in Johnsoniana (London, 1836). The back room on the first floor, where Johnson died, was subsequently taken into the adjoining premises of Bensley the printer (who had acquired them from Edmund Allen), following a fire at Bensley’s ware­house, variously given as 1807 and 1819; in 1837 it was said that nothing then remained of the h ­ ouse.6 One t­ hing we do know of the interior comes from a letter from Johnson to Reynolds’s ­sister Frances. On 19 October 1779 he wrote to her: “You ­w ill do me a ­great favour if You w ­ ill buy for me the prints of Mr. Burke, Mr. Dyer, and Dr. Goldsmith, as You know a good impression. If any of your own pictures be engraved buy them for me, I am fitting a l­ ittle room with prints.”7 We do not know what prints Frances Reynolds may have procured, though some of her own paintings w ­ ere engraved, in par­tic­u­lar Elizabeth Montagu as engraved by Charles Towneley and John Hoole as engraved by Anker Smith, and it is pos­si­ble that ­t hese images may have hung at Bolt Court—­and in the case of Elizabeth Montagu very pos­si­ble. The sale cata­logue of Johnson’s library lists some sixty-­one framed and glazed portrait prints along with his books, together with eighty-­five further portrait prints. ­There ­were prints of Garrick and Reynolds, and the final lot, 662, included a framed and glazed print of Elizabeth Montagu.

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The portrait prints formed the last twelve lots on the final, fourth day of the sale. They are generally listed simply as portraits, but the subject of one other is known. This is a print of Milton, a copperplate engraving by Jacobus Houbraken in 1741. It appears to have been taken from the portrait now at the National Portrait Gallery, which was mentioned by John Aubrey as being in the possession of Milton’s ­widow; the artist is unknown.8 Houbraken (1698–1780) was a Dutch portrait engraver, the son of the painter and writer on art Arnold Houbraken. The print had been published in the first volume of Thomas Birch’s Heads of Illustrious Persons of ­Great Britain, Engraven by Mr. Houbraken, and Mr. Vertue: With Their Lives and Characters (London, 1743). The volume consisted of eighty copper-­engraved portraits, mostly of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century subjects; a second volume followed in 1752 with an additional twenty-­eight plates, which included such early eighteenth-­ century figures as Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, and the theologian Samuel Clarke. This example of the print, which has been darkened by exposure to light, shows the young Milton (who, Johnson rec­ords, had “the reputation of having been in his youth eminently beautiful”) in an oval frame above a grouping of lyre, serpent, book, and scroll, and was engraved from the painting, then in the possession of Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons (Lives, 1:273). It is contained in an eighteenth-­century frame of what appears to be fruit-­wood veneer over a pine carcass, and now resides at Dr. Johnson’s House (figure 1.1). How it  arrived ­there is explained in three inscriptions on the back of the frame (figure 1.2). The first is written in an eighteenth-­century italic hand on a paper label pasted to the center of the pine back-­piece to the frame. It reads: formerly in the possession of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Beneath that is the second, longer inscription, written in ink directly onto the wood: This engraving of Milton hung up in Dr Johnson’s study. At his death, it was purchased by John Hoole, who wrote the above label on the back. From him, it came to his Son, Rev. Samuel Hoole, & from him to his Son, Rev. John Hoole. J. H. [new hand] by whom it was given to William F. H. Attwood—3d March 18 [date obscured] [further hand] ­After W.F.H. Attwood’s death, it passed to his ­sister, Charlotte (Mrs Arnold Toynbee), who gave it to her niece, Margaret Ruth Toynbee, Christmas 1924)

Figure 1.1. ​John Milton by Jacobus Houbraken, copperplate engraving. Courtesy of Dr. Johnson’s House, London.

Figure 1.2. ​Reverse of the frame.

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The final brief inscription is on a slip of paper pasted to the passe-­partout paper round the edge of the frame back. It reads: This engraving is bequeathed to DR JOHNSON’S HOUSE TRUST 1 [sic], Gough Square Fleet Street, E.C.4 Margaret R. Toynbee 17/3/1952 ­These notes provide an unusually complete provenance, and invite a narrative that begins with John Hoole (1727–1803), translator of Tasso and Ariosto and ­long-­standing friend of Johnson. “Good Mr. Hoole” (as he is at least four times described in Frances Burney’s Journals) was the son of Samuel Hoole, a successful Moorfields mechanician and watchmaker, who also assisted in creating the machinery for John Rich’s Covent Garden Theatre.9 Boswell rec­ords that in 1783 Hoole explained to Johnson that he was educated initially by his u ­ ncle, drawing the reply, “Sir, I knew him; we called him the metaphysical taylor. He was of a club in Old-­ street, with me and George Psalmanazar, and some o ­ thers” (Life, 4:187). John Nichols rec­ords that “the fondness of this benevolent Poet for lit­er­a­ture shewed itself when he was a boy, so as to make him a favourite with his schoolmaster, while his harmless and gentle disposition caused him to be beloved by his schoolfellows.”10 Hoole was a natu­ral linguist, and, ­after learning Latin, French, and some Greek at school, he taught himself Italian; he also acquired a good clear italic hand, which is consistent with the handwriting of the short inscription on the label on the back of the Milton frame. He inherited a taste for the theater from his ­father’s involvement, and despite a ­career in the East India Office, where he was advanced to the auditors’ office and worked ­until his retirement, he wrote tragedies for the stage: Cyrus (1768), Timanthes (1770), and Cleonice (1775), all produced at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. But before that he had made his reputation as a translator, with Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1763), Metastasio’s Works (1767), and ­later Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1783). In 1757 he married Susanna Smith (ca. 1730–1808), “the handsome Quakeress,” and through her ­family met John Scott of Amwell, whom he introduced to Johnson. Hoole had himself been introduced to Johnson by John Hawkesworth in 1761, and Johnson wrote dedications and made other contributions to his works. Johnson was fond of him; affectionate letters from Johnson to him survive from 1773, 1775, and 1776, and again from Johnson’s last visit to Ashbourne in 1784.11 His profile was recorded by George Dance in 1793 and was e­ tched by William Daniell in 1810. Hoole was a habitué of Charles Burney’s ­house in St. Martin’s Street, and ­t here are repeated references to him in Boswell’s Life as attending or hosting dinners where Johnson was pre­sent—­t hough he is rarely recorded as an active participant in the conversation. Some de­cades ­later Lady Louisa Stuart recalled in a letter to Sir Walter Scott that “he once fell in my way near thirty years ago. He was a clerk in the India House, a man of business of that ancient breed, now extinct, which used to be as much marked by plaited cambric ruffles, a neat wig, a snuff-­coloured

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suit of clothes, and a corresponding sobriety of look, as one race of spaniels is by the black nose and silky hair,” and in 1797 the young Charles Lamb found him “more vapid than small beer, ‘sun-­v inegared.’ ”12 Boswell himself reflected in 1776 that “I could not help wondering to­night to think that Hoole had written tragedies, when I perceived so l­ittle fire in his conversation, and indeed so l­ittle imagery or genius of any kind.”13 But Johnson saw him as a ­brother author, and Boswell rec­ords that Johnson would say to him “Let you and I, Sir, go together, and eat a beef-­steak in Grub-­street” (Life, 4:187). It was Hoole who was instrumental in creating the Essex Head Club in 1783, ­toward the end of Johnson’s life, and it is Hoole who has provided us with the most detailed and sympathetic account of the last three weeks of Johnson’s life. The account was not printed ­until 1799, when it appeared in the Eu­ro­pean Magazine, but it had already been used by Boswell in the Life. Its detail and its sympathy have made it much quoted, with the result that Hoole has become a sort of gatekeeper to Johnson’s last days.14 Hoole’s narrative covers the period from Saturday 20 November to Johnson’s death on 13 December and reveals Johnson’s fervent belief and desire that ­t hose about him should take heed of his situation as a d ­ ying man and consider their own salvation. It shows Hoole as a close and valued friend of Johnson, and on a number of visits shows him accompanied by his son Samuel. Samuel Hoole (1757/8–1839) appears to have had something of his f­ ather’s easy social manner, though ­there is one critical comment on him from Boswell; in 1776, when Samuel was about seventeen, he walked with his parents, Boswell, and Dr. Percy in the Mall (“The number of beauties ­today was enchanting,” noted Boswell), and Boswell recorded that, although Mrs. Hoole was a good-­humored, talkative ­woman, he thought that “young Hoole” was “an obstinate lad, so that he displeased me.”15 Frances Burney does at one point in 1797 suggest to her b ­ rother James that Samuel was a trifle serious (or “rather too much in the dumpus way” as a candidate for matrimony, as she put it), but Samuel had by then not only published some poetry, but also been ordained. His Aurelia: or, The Contest: An Heroi-­ Comic Poem (1783) had included praise of Car­ter, Chapone, More, Montagu, and Burney herself (to whom he sent a copy of the poem), for her muse’s ability to “lash unfeeling wealth, & stubborn Pride,” and he was in o ­ rders by September 1784.16 He was with his f­ ather a regular visitor to the Burney h ­ ouse­hold, and though he may once have displeased Boswell, he did not displease Johnson, who in November 1783 tried to secure him a place as reader to the Inner and ­Middle ­Temple, and in January 1784 sought the help of Bishop Percy in trying to get him a fellowship at Dulwich College. And so it was that in late November and early December 1784 Hoole ­father and newly ordained son attended the ­dying Johnson. It is not the purpose of this essay to repeat Hoole’s account of Johnson’s last weeks, but some ele­ments of it point to Hoole’s sense of awe before the failing Johnson—­a Johnson, moreover, who challenged him on his faith and his need to pray and to read and meditate on the Bible. As Hoole explained to the young William Bowles (1755–1826) of Heale House, Wiltshire, to whom he wrote five letters

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between 30 November and the day a­ fter Johnson’s death, “I never passed such hours, so solemn and so affecting as I have now experienced with him. Oh my dear Sir! You know his greatness you know his goodness and w ­ ill easily conceive what a friend must feel to be daily witness to the decline of such a man.”17 On Sunday, 21 November, Johnson had given Hoole a copy of Fleetwood on the Sacrament. On 27 November, while seeking relief for his breathing in temporary lodgings in Islington, Johnson made his w ­ ill, dictated by Hawkins and written by Hoole. On 28 November Johnson took by the hand Hoole’s wife (to whom he had stood as godfather when she was baptized into the Church of E ­ ngland) and gave her his blessing. On Sunday, 5 December, when Hoole’s son was of the com­pany, Hoole recorded that Johnson “had looked out a Sermon of Dr. Clarke’s ‘on the shortness of life’ for me to read to him ­after dinner but he was too ill to hear it.”18 Johnson had asked that Hoole’s son should come and read him the Litany, and ­after a delay caused by a consultation with physicians, this took place on Wednesday, 8 December, in the presence of Hoole and his wife and John Nichols. Both Hoole and Nichols have left accounts of how Johnson urged the young clergyman to pray louder so that he could hear; Croker rec­ords that Samuel Hoole confirmed that, when he visited Johnson the next day, Johnson apologized for his peevishness (Boswell, Life, 4:409 and n2). On Friday, 10 December, Samuel Hoole read prayers to Johnson; on Saturday John Hoole received Johnson’s affectionate blessing. He visited Johnson again on the eve­ning of Sunday, 12 December, and the following morning; that eve­ning, news of Johnson’s death was brought to ­father and son as they ­were having supper. When Johnson’s ­w ill was read, both Hoole and his son ­were among ­t hose who ­were allowed to take a book of their choice from his library. We do not know what title ­either of them might have selected—­but we do know what Hoole se­nior acquired when Johnson’s library was sold by James Christie two months ­later, on 16 February 1785 and the three following days. The Beinecke Library copy of the sale cata­logue is one of two copies that rec­ord all the buyers’ names and prices paid.19 This shows Hoole as the successful bidder for six lots, as follows: 242 8 Clarke’s sermons, &c. 6s. 6d., 253 5. Publ. Pap. Statii opera, not. var. L.B. 1671 14s. 264 2. Lewis’s history of the En­glish translations of the bible, &c. 7s. 6d. 439 Baretti’s Italian dictionary, 2 v. 1760 1.1.0 507 6. P. Ovidii Nasonis, 3 v. notis variorum, L.B. 1663, &c. 12s. 552 3. Aristotelis opera, &c. 4s. It is surely no coincidence that Hoole should have bought the set of Clarke’s sermons, one of which Johnson had asked him to read to him ­little more than ten weeks before. As a translator from the Italian, he would have found Baretti’s Italian dictionary a useful text, and the other titles are editions of Ovid, Aristotle, and Statius, and the Reverend John Lewis’s history of translations of the Bible into En­glish, first published in 1731.

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As for the print of Milton, we have already seen Hoole’s inscription on its back; his name does not appear as one of the buyers for the framed and glazed prints that formed the last nine lots of the sale, but that part of the second inscription on the back of the frame that is written and initialed by his grand­son the Reverend John Hoole clearly identifies him as purchaser of the print, stating that “this engraving of Milton hung up in Dr. Johnson’s study. At his death, it was purchased by John Hoole, who wrote the above label on the back.” It is relevant ­here that three of t­ hose last nine lots, consisting of twenty unspecified portraits, appear to have been bought by the trade, ­under the customary name of “Money,” and it may be that Hoole purchased the print from its unknown trade buyer—­t hough another possibility is that he may have taken one of the eight framed portraits bought by his friend Burney as lot 657. This is not the full extent of Hoole’s acquisitions from Johnson’s study. Thomas Tyers, the son of the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, in his Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1784, wrote that Johnson had a large, but not a splendid library, near 5,000 volumes. Many authors, not in hostility with him, presented him with their works. But his study did not contain half his books. He possessed the chair that belonged to the Ciceronian Dr. King of Oxford, which was given him by his friend Vansittart. It answers the purposes of reading and writing, by night or by day; and is as valuable in all re­spects as the chair of Ariosto, as delineated in the preface to Hoole’s liberal translation of that poet. Since the rounding of this period intelligence is brought that this literary chair is purchased by Mr. Hoole. Relicks are venerable ­t hings, and are only not to be worshipped.20

So Hoole was given two books by Johnson, one shortly before his death and one in his ­w ill, and bought six more at his sale, as well as obtaining the Milton print and Johnson’s chair. But if we turn to Hoole’s ­will, ­t here is more, as he left to his son Samuel “all my prints pictures and drawings framed or other­w ise . . . ​likewise . . . ​ the writing desk that formerly belonged to my dear and most respected friend Dr Johnson.”21 Hoole venerated Johnson, and that re­spect seems to have been shared by his descendants, as in 1901 they presented to the Birthplace Museum at Lichfield Johnson’s desk and chair, a mourning ring with a lock of Johnson’s hair, and the two books chosen by Hoole and his son ­under Johnson’s ­will. John Hoole had chosen a Lucretius (Leiden, 1725) and Samuel had chosen Terence’s Comedies (The Hague, 1726). The inscription in John Hoole’s book consists of an extract from the relevant passage of the w ­ ill concluding “This edition of Lucretius chosen by John Hoole”; Samuel’s inscription is similar. As for the Milton print, Hoole presumably kept it at his ­house at 56 ­Great Queen Street, where he wrote up his notes for the Narrative of Johnson’s last days, and where in 1783 Frances Reynolds had lodged with his ­family; in that year the engraving ­after her portrait of him appeared as the frontispiece to his translation of Orlando Furioso.22 Hoole retired from the India House late in 1785, and in April 1786

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removed with his wife and son Samuel to the parsonage at Abinger in Surrey. The next tenant of the h ­ ouse in G ­ reat Queen Street was none other than Boswell, to whom Edmond Malone had written on 1 February 1786, “I have seen Hoole’s h ­ ouse, and tho’ it is old, it has some advantages, and I think ­w ill suit you for one year at least. Th ­ ere is an excellent drawing room, and a study formed exactly for writing the life of Dr. Johnson.” The next day Boswell noted in his journal “heard all about Hoole’s h ­ ouse, which I inspected; and though I found it old-­fashioned and part of it dark, resolved to fix it. Rev. Mr. Hoole went with me to Mr. Bang’s in Lyon’s Inn, the attorney who was to let it.”23 Samuel had a curacy at Abinger Wootton, and the following year published the sentimental tragedy of Edward; or, The Curate. In 1791 he married Elizabeth, the second ­daughter of Arthur Young (a ­great friend of Burney, to whom he was related by marriage), but Elizabeth was to die of consumption three years l­ ater. John Hoole himself had moved to Tenterden in Kent, and in 1803 died on a visit to Dorking. That same year Samuel was appointed the rector of Poplar Chapel in Middlesex, and in December married Catherine Wainford of Dorking. They had a son, John, who, ­after studying at Oxford, became in 1827 his f­ ather’s curate at Poplar; this is the Reverend John Hoole who annotated and initialed the inscription on the back of the frame of the Milton print. His ­father, Samuel, from whom he inherited it, died aged eighty-­one in Tenterden in 1839. The inscription then notes that the Rev. John Hoole gave the print at an unspecified date to William F. H. Atwood, a­ fter whose death it passed to his s­ ister Charlotte (1841–1931). She was the indomitable wife of Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), the social reformer and po­liti­cal economist, who was eleven years her ju­nior. She was for many years honorary ­house trea­surer of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford’s first ­women’s college, and was a passionate educationalist, with strong views on welfare and the local heritage, though her natu­ral conservatism did not allow her to support ­either the idea of ­women taking the Oxford BA or ­women’s suffrage. Her nephew, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), wrote of her with due deference that “her heart was always kind, but her personality was commanding.”24 As recorded on the inscription, Charlotte at Christmas 1924 passed the print to her niece Margaret Ruth Toynbee (b. 1900), one of the s­ isters of the historian. Margaret never married, and in ­later life lived in Oxford with her elder ­sister Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee (1897–1985), who had been the Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge. As recorded on the slip of paper glued to the back of the frame, it was Margaret who bequeathed the print to Dr. Johnson’s House in 1952. We should not be surprised that Johnson chose to hang a portrait print of Milton in his h ­ ouse, despite his having accused Milton of malignity, self-­interest, petulance, and pride—­and having claimed he would, but for Paradise Lost, have ranked among only the minor poets.25 As Christine Rees has shown in Johnson’s Milton, he was immersed in Milton’s poetic achievement.26 For all his abhorrence of Milton’s politics, his criticism of Milton’s Latinate diction, his lack of sympathy for blank verse, and his distaste for Milton’s domestic character, Johnson’s admi-

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ration for Milton the poet breaks through again and again. As with his equally controversial Life of Gray, unmeaning over-­praise was as much his target as the status of the poet himself, and Milton’s reputation was above any intemperate criticism; as he concluded Rambler 140, “The everlasting verdure of Milton’s laurels has nothing to fear from the blasts of malignity.”27 At dinner at Topham Beauclerk’s ­house on 30 April 1773, Johnson acknowledged that “I think more highly of him now than I did at twenty. Th ­ ere is more thinking in him and in Butler, than in any of our poets” (Life, 2:239). Milton is copiously quoted in the Dictionary, and in its preface Johnson claimed that “I ­shall not think my employment useless or ignoble . . . ​if my ­labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.”28 It was also long believed that Johnson himself kept a relic of Milton, being a lock of his hair, once owned by Addison and ­later by Leigh Hunt and Robert Browning.29 If, as Johnson suggested, none ever wished Paradise Lost longer than it is, his Life of Milton nonetheless concludes with the resounding acclamation that as an epic “it is not the greatest of heroick poems, only ­because it is not the first”—­and of Milton himself, asks “what other author ever soared so high, or sustained his flight so long?” (Lives, 1:290, 295, 292). The portrait of such an author fittingly belonged on the walls at 8 Bolt Court, as now it fittingly belongs at 17 Gough Square.

notes I would like to thank Celine Luppo McDaid, the Curator of Dr. Johnson’s House, for introducing me to Johnson’s copy of the print of Milton and making it available for study. Epigraph: Gentleman’s Magazine 53 (December 1784), repr. in O M Brack Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1974), 89; and in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 2:380–381. 1.  Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie LL.D., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1806), 2:49; The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1937–1983), 29:84. 2.  Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 2006), 1:262. 3.  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 3:405. 4.  The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. By Sir John Hawkins, Knt, ed. O M Brack Jr. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009), 319. 5.  Lætitia-­Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions, 2 vols. (London, 1824), 1:208. 6.  Graphic Illustrations of the Life and Times of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1837). Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, 6 vols. (London, 1873–1878), 1:114, suggests that the ­house survived and was converted into a school, but that the first floor back room had been pulled down by Bensley to make way for a staircase. This is, however, contradicted by the entries in Notes & Queries 5, no. 123 (6 March 1852): 232–333, and 9th ser., 27 (2 July 1898): 71–72. 7.  The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1992–1994), 3:192. The original letter is in the collection of Loren Rothschild. 8.  John Aubrey, Brief Lives with an Apparatus for the Lives of Our Mathematical Writers, ed. Kate Bennett (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), 1:662.

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9.  The Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, ed. Stewart Cooke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018), 1:146 (7 December 1784); The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3:56 (27 April  1794) and 103 (1 May  1795); The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, 5 vols. (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s Univ. Press, 2012), 5:225 (26 December 1782). See also John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eigh­teenth ­Century, 8 vols. (London, 1812–1815), 2:404–407n. 10. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 2:404. 11.  Letters, 2:27–28, 267, 358–359; and 4:363–364, 394–395, and 403–404. 12.  Both quoted in Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2:145. 13.  Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1963), 332. 14.  Eu­ro­pean Magazine, and London Review 36 (September 1799): 153–58. See also O M Brack Jr., ed., Journal Narrative Relative to Doctor Johnson’s Last Illness Three Weeks before His Death Kept by John Hoole, 1784 (Iowa City: Windhover Press, 1972), and John Hoole: Five Letters and a Dream of Johnson, ed. Gordon Turnbull (privately printed for the Johnsonians, 2010). 15.  Boswell: The Ominous Years, 115. 16.  Burney Journals and Letters, 4:31; The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 5:370–71. 17. Turnbull, John Hoole, 11. 18. Brack, Journal Narrative, 27. 19.  The Beinecke copy of the sale cata­logue, formerly belonging to Col­o­nel Isham, was reproduced in facsimile by A. Edward Newton and published by the booksellers Elkin Matthews in 1925; more recently it has been reproduced again in Sale Cata­logues of the Libraries of Samuel Johnson Hester Lynch Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi) and James Boswell, introd. Donald D. Eddy (New ­Castle: Oak Knoll Books, 1993), 19–46. Sir Thomas Phillipps’s copy, now at Harvard, was reproduced by J. D. Fleeman as En­glish Literary Studies Monograph no. 2 (Victoria, BC: Univ. of Victoria, 1975). 20.  Gentleman’s Magazine 53 (December 1784). 21.  John Hoole’s ­w ill, 3 September 1803, National Archives, Kew, PROB 11/1398/165. 22.  See Elizabeth Montagu to Frances Reynolds, 28 July 1783, in Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp, “A Blue-­Stocking Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Reynolds in the Prince­ton Collection,” Prince­ton University Library Chronicle 41 (Spring 1980): 197–198. 23.  Peter Baker, Thomas W. Copeland, George M. Kahrl, Rachel McClellan, and James Osborn, eds., The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone (London: Heinemann, 1986), 294; and Boswell: The En­glish Experiment, 1785– 1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1986), 32 and n4 (which adds that the ­house was once owned and occupied by Sir Godfrey Kneller). 24.  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Charlotte Maria Toynbee. 25. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, 1:255, 252, and 276; and Boswell, Life, 4:99n1. 26.  Christine Rees, Johnson’s Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). 27.  Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, eds., The Rambler (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 4:383. 28.  Johnson on the En­glish Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 110. 29. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, 1:402n157; but Rees notes that John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the F ­ amily: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1993), 25–26, makes a convincing case that this is a fabrication (Johnson’s Milton, 237).

B

Mimesis and Understanding in Samuel Johnson’s Notes to Shakespeare (1765) Marcus Walsh

It has generally and reasonably been considered that Samuel Johnson’s preface is the overwhelmingly distinctive achievement of his 1765 edition of Shakespeare. The preface is not only Johnson’s theoretical justification of the Bard as the ­great poet of nature, but also, with such key texts as the tenth chapter of Rasselas and the discussion of biography in Rambler 60, Johnson’s major exploration and exposition of his central and informing belief in the relation of imaginative lit­er­a­ture to general, experienced, nature. Much less has been said about Johnson’s notes to the plays. Indeed, Johnson’s 1765 notes are, in contrast to the r­ unning annotations especially of the editions by George Steevens (1773, 1778, 1793) and Edmond Malone (1790), relatively few and relatively thin. They draw to a surprisingly ­limited extent on the burgeoning Shakespearean contextualizing scholarship and increasingly sophisticated scholiastic methodologies of mid-­eighteenth-­century editing. The notes draw to a similarly ­limited extent on Johnson’s own firsthand researches, for his Dictionary, into the language of Shakespeare’s time.1 Discursive though they are, Johnson’s notes have not generally been thought of, in their own time or since, as adding up to a coherent and consistent discourse. Edward Tomarken, for one, opines that “for Johnson, the Preface represents his attempt to theorize about his practical findings in the notes.”2 In a previous essay, to which the pre­sent article is intended to be a companion piece, I have argued that “Johnson was not fully invested in the methods . . . ​of the new editorial approach and methodology,” and that even his longer notes tend less to the particularly hermeneutic than “to the literary critical, the generalizing, and the moral, not to the strictly text-­critical or exegetical.”3 In the pre­sent article I ­shall expand on the generalizing, and the moral or ethical, aspect of Johnson’s notes to Shakespeare. I ­shall argue that Johnson’s notes are the product of a consistent and carefully considered theoretical position 15

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on poetry in general and Shakespeare in par­t ic­u ­lar. I s­ hall identify and outline some appropriate, primarily mimetic, theoretical perspectives for Johnson’s thinking and procedures in his notes. In presenting my thesis I s­ hall make no concessions to the disappointingly common view that Johnson’s critical princi­ples “do not cohere into a consistent w ­ hole.”4 For Johnson, famously, “It is the task of criticism to establish princi­ples, to improve opinion into knowledge, and to distinguish ­those means of pleasing which depend upon known c­ auses and rational deduction.”5 Th ­ ose princi­ples, for Johnson, are not arbitrary rules: what Johnson identifies as the known first ­causes of lit­er­a­ture’s means of pleasing are cognitive and mimetic. “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just repre­sen­ta­tions of general nature.”6 Truth is every­t hing: lit­er­a­ture must be “true” or “agreeable” to experience “common in real life.” It must be “drawn from nature.” It must offer a “true” or “just” or “natu­ral” picture. The poet must be like Imlac an observer, familiar with the entire ­human and physical world. He is an examiner and a depictor not of the par­tic­u ­lar, but of the general: “He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recal the original to ­every mind” (Yale Works, 16:43). The literary truth that gives plea­sure is not local or time-­bound. This is true for Johnson both of events and of characters. Boswell reports Johnson as insisting that “the value of ­every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture e­ ither of an individual or of h ­ uman nature in general: if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.”7 In one of the fundamental theoretical statements of the preface, we are told that Shakespeare’s characters are universal, common, and familiar, not par­tic­u­lar, unusual, or esoteric. They “are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world ­will always supply, and observation w ­ ill always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of ­those general passions and princi­ples by which all minds are agitated, and the w ­ hole system of life is continued in motion (Yale Works, 7:62). It is precisely b ­ ecause Shakespeare’s characters act and speak according to shared and recognizable passions and princi­ples that his plays may serve as the basis of moral instruction: “It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived . . . ​and it may be said of Shakespeare that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeco­nom­ical prudence” (Yale Works, 7:60). The plea­ sure and instruction that such writing can give depends on its evoking in the reader a sense of recognition. In the Life of Dryden Johnson states as a general princi­ple that the mind, in reading or in watching a play, “can be captivated only by recollection, or by curiosity.” The poet must “awaken ­t hose ideas that slumber in the heart.”8 In the Life of Gray, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is celebrated for its abundance of “images which find a mirrour in e­ very mind, and . . . ​ sentiments to which ­every bosom returns an echo” (Lives, 4:184). ­There are suggestions ­here of a more democratic—­“­every bosom”—­approach to the pro­cess of reading than such editorial successors as Malone, with his insistence on the professional expertise required to understand lit­er­a­ture belonging to a distant cultural and linguistic past, would allow.9 ­There might seem to be hints, too, of a more passionate and sensible approach to reading. In the meta­phor “images which find a

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mirrour in e­ very mind” Johnson appeals, familiarly, to the sense of sight, and uses a figure long and regularly used in mimetic theory. In the parallel meta­phor “sentiments to which ­every bosom returns an echo,” Johnson appeals to the sense of sound. In his appeal h ­ ere to the echoing sentiments of the “bosom,” as in his demand that the poet “awaken ­t hose ideas that slumber in the heart,” Johnson resorts to a figure, and an organ, that for many contemporaries was associated with sensibility. In Johnson’s usage, however, “sentiment” h ­ ere refers primarily to thought rather than feeling; the first and fourth editions of his Dictionary offer only the senses “1. Thought; notion; opinion. 2. The sense considered directly from the language or t­ hings; a striking sentence in a composition.” Th ­ ese resonant phrases in Johnson’s lives of Dryden and Gray speak not of solipsistic and individual relevance, but of perception and recollection of general and shared h ­ uman experience; the sentiments to which ­every bosom returns an echo are shared and general ­human thoughts. Johnson has in mind not an aeolian harmony of hearts sentimentally in tune, but a pleas­ur­able pro­cess of universal recognition. Johnson’s mimetic and epistemological conception of the princi­ples and pro­ cesses of poetic plea­sure and instruction ­were not of course ­either new or unfamiliar. They belong to a developed and developing understanding of lit­er­a­ture’s cognitive, mimetic, and ethical nature and function. Johnson had certainly read ­earlier French and En­g lish critics. He could have found in their writings much about the relation of lit­er­a­ture and nature. He would have found less that resembled his own articulation of the concept of general nature, and strikingly ­little about the cognitive and recognitive ele­ments of the literary experience that are so central to his own critical understanding. The French critics preferred an ideal to a general repre­sen­ta­tion of nature, rejecting (in Molière’s words) “la faible vérité” of common experience in f­ avor of a corrected and selected nature, “[le] beau vrai, . . . ​ la belle nature.”10 An anticipation of Johnson’s distinction between the imaginative, on the one hand, and the false on the other, might be found in the writings of Bouhours, a critic he knew and admired: “Tout ce qui paroist faux ne l’est pas, et il y a bien de la difference entre la fiction et la fausseté: l’une imite et perfectionne en quelque façon la nature; l’autre la gate, et la détruit.”11 Bouhours evidently makes the distinction h ­ ere, however, on the basis that literary art imitates la belle nature.12 In his Art of Poetry, Boileau makes classic statements of the importance of decorum in character construction. The tragic dramatist must keep “each man,” Agamemnon or Aeneas, to “his proper character,” “covetous and proud” or piously “austere”; the comic dramatist must know how to paint the comic types: the Jealous Fool, the fawning Sycophant, A Sober Wit, an enterprising Ass, A humorous Otter, or a Hudibras.13

This is a notion of character mimesis entirely at odds with Johnson’s cele­bration of Shakespeare’s understanding “that kings love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natu­ral power upon kings” (Yale Works, 7:66). In his early Essay of Dramatic Poesy, John Dryden, speaking through the voice of Neander, is doubtful about

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French dramatic applications of la belle nature: “For the lively imitation of Nature being in the definition of a Play, ­those which best fulfil that law ­ought to be esteem’d superior to the o ­ thers. ’Tis true, t­ hose beauties of the French-­poesie are such as ­will raise perfection higher where it is, but are not sufficient to give it where it is not: they are indeed the Beauties of a Statue, but not of a Man, b ­ ecause not animated with the Soul of Poesy, which is imitation of humour and passions.”14 Much ­later in his ­career, however, in his preface to his translation of Du Fresnoy, Dryden strikes a markedly more conservative and Francophile note: “Since a true knowledge of Nature gives us plea­sure, a lively imitation of it, e­ ither in Poetry or Painting, must of necessity produce a much greater: For both t­ hese Arts . . . ​are not onely true imitations of Nature, but of the Best nature, of that which is wrought up to a nobler pitch.”15 The second couplet of Alexander Pope’s famous four lines on “true wit” perhaps hints at the recognitive nature of mimesis on which Johnson lays such stress: “Something, whose Truth convinced at Sight we find, / That gives us back the Image of our Mind.” Pope’s poetically compressed statement, however, is inevitably under-­ articulated, compressed, and arguably internally contradictory, and pos­si­ble analogues and sources of its concluding line suggest the familiar thought better said, as much as the truth recognized.16 I would suggest that, however much he might have learned from En­glish and Eu­ro­pean sources, Johnson’s thinking on mimesis, in its contents and its methods, and especially in its cognitive and recognitive emphasis, is to some impor­ tant degree both immediately and distinctively Aristotelian.17 Explic­itly or implicitly, Johnson judges poets by Aristotelian mimetic princi­ples. He begins one of his most significant critico-­t heoretical enterprises, the discussion of metaphysical poetry in the Life of Cowley, with a direct appeal to Aristotle: “If the ­father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry τεχνη μιμετικη, an imitative art, ­t hese writers w ­ ill, without g­ reat wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated any t­ hing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of ­matter, nor represented the operations of intellect” (Lives, 1:200).18 Aristotle begins, “in the natu­ral way, with first princi­ples.” He states at the start of the Poetics that the forms of poetry “are all, taken as a ­whole, kinds of mimesis”:19 “Poetry in general can be seen to owe its existence to two ­causes, and ­these are rooted in nature. First, ­there is man’s natu­ral propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic activity (. . . ​t hrough mimesis [he] takes his first steps in understanding). Second, t­ here is the plea­sure which all men take in mimetic objects . . . ​as they contemplate them, they apply their understanding and reasoning to each ele­ment (identifying this as an image of such-­and-­such a man, for instance)” (Poetics, 34). Our plea­sure derives from and depends on our recognition of the object of mimesis as corresponding to something we already know: “If it happens that one has no previous familiarity with the sight, then the object ­w ill not give plea­sure qua mimetic object but ­because of its craftsmanship, or colour, or for some other such reason” (Poetics, 34). The point crucially relates to Aristotle’s insistence that poetry deals not with par­tic­u­lar events or historical indi-

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viduals but with “the sort of ­t hings which w ­ ere or are the case; the sort of ­t hings men say and think to be the case; the sort of ­t hings that should be the case” (Poetics, 61). History for Aristotle speaks of particulars, poetry of universals: “A ‘universal’ comprises the kind of speech or action which belongs by probability or necessity to a certain kind of character. . . . ​A ‘par­tic­u­lar,’ by contrast, is (for example) what Alcibiades did or experienced” (Poetics, 41).20 Thus Aristotle bases his mimetic theory on (as he sees it) a small set of fundamental epistemological givens: that we take plea­sure in “mimetic activity”; that through mimetic plea­sure we “take our first steps in understanding”; that in contemplating mimetic objects we apply our understanding; and that we take plea­ sure in the recognition that the mimetic object is indeed a repre­sen­ta­tion of something familiar to us. The last point is also made in Aristotle’s Rhe­toric. In an instance of mimesis, a painting, a statue, or a poem, our plea­sure does not derive solely from what is imitated: “instead t­ here is an inference that ‘This is that,’ so that the result is our coming to understand something.”21 Artistic plea­sure derives not only from cognition of a par­tic­u ­lar object, but also from our recognition or recollection of what we already know of universals—in Johnson’s phrase, from “images which find a mirrour in ­every mind.” I have offered only a brief account of Aristotle’s mimetic theory in the Poetics, a work that has itself been considered a condensed and sometimes obscure theoretical statement. The Poetics raises many questions, not least about the dif­fer­ent kinds of imitative activity and recognition that Aristotle discusses u ­ nder the term “mimesis.” Clearly Johnson’s critical arguments and ideas cannot be described as straightforwardly Aristotelian. Notably, where Aristotle emphasizes action, Johnson is much more concerned with discourse. Nevertheless, ­there are significant correspondences of method and thought between the Poetics and Johnson’s published criticism, and in par­t ic­u ­lar the preface and (as it is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate) the notes to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare. Both Aristotle and Johnson insist that literary art must be based on the repre­sen­ta­tion of nature, and particularly of ­human nature. Both understand literary art as relating and referring to the world. Both articulate theories that may be characterized as essentially epistemological. They base their mimetic theories on the plea­sure ­human beings take, on the basis of their experience of the world, in their recognition of similarity between the art object and the h ­ uman or physical world the art object mimics. Lit­er­a­ture represents, or should represent, not the par­tic­u­lar and idiosyncratic, the accidents of historical time and place, which can be known to few, but the general and universal, which are part of shared h ­ uman experience and may be recognized; not the historically “real,” but what we take as probable and credible. It is b ­ ecause lit­er­a­ture represents universals that it is capable of enlarging our understanding of the world. Such a mimetic conception of art has been powerfully influential, in its essentials, for over two millennia on Western literary theoretical thinking. A recent defense of literary mimesis by the Liverpool phi­los­o­pher Richard Gaskin maps particularly closely on to the theoretical positions of Aristotle and Johnson and

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provides a helpful heuristic for Johnson’s methodology. Gaskin’s basic thesis is “that the reading and study of creative lit­er­a­ture is a cognitive activity.”22 Gaskin sets out explic­itly the princi­ples that his book defends. He argues that works of lit­er­a­ture “bear on the world by virtue of employing terms that refer to real (principally universal, but also sometimes individual) entities” and “by virtue of making, or implying, true or false (principally general, but also sometimes par­tic­u­lar) statements about the world.” Some works of lit­er­a­ture “have cognitive value in the sense that, of the true statements that t­ hese works make or imply, some can be known to be true, and of t­ hese knowable statements some are worth knowing” (Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Lit­er­a­ture, 63). Gaskin reaffirms the possibility of belief in the referential and cognitive nature and value of works of lit­er­a­ture. Amongst the holders of that belief, Gaskin names Horace, Johnson, and Arnold. Gaskin’s thesis is pertinent to Johnson’s notes to Shakespeare, as to his other, more explic­itly and discursively theoretical statements on literary mimesis. Two of Gaskin’s comprehensive sets of arguments are especially pertinent to Johnson’s h ­ andling of Shakespeare. First, Gaskin insists that to call imaginative lit­er­a­ture fictional is not to deny the potential truth of the propositions it affords about the world: “All lit­er­a­ture . . . ​has factualist aspects: for example ­t here w ­ ill be . . . ​truths of a general nature that any work of lit­er­a­ture, no ­matter how outlandish its imaginings, aims to track” (Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Lit­er­a­ture, 38). The worlds of imaginative lit­er­a­ture—­The Tempest, for example—if they are to be “comprehensible to real readers,” must “traffic in ordinary properties and other abstract objects . . . ​with which ­those readers are familiar” (Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Lit­er­a­ture, 49).23 They must traffic, in fact, with shared, and hence recognizable, h ­ uman experience. Second, Gaskin provides an analy­sis of the mimetic mode of existence of literary characters in terms that refer and apply directly to Aristotle, to Shakespeare, and to Johnson. Lit­er­a­ture may of course refer to “real-­world individuals” (as Shakespeare, and Pope, and Johnson, for instance, often do), but, Gaskin argues, “it is in a work of lit­er­a­ture’s ability to pick out worldly universals that its main title to have cognitive value resides.” Thus he arrives “at the traditional (Aristotelian) doctrine that it is the business of lit­er­a­ture to deal . . . ​in universalities rather than in particularities.” He illustrates the point not only by an extended quotation from Johnson’s preface (the famous passage beginning “[Shakespeare’s] characters are not modified by the customs of par­tic­u ­lar places”), but also by a careful account of the ontological status of such characters as Hamlet. For Gaskin, Hamlet “is . . . ​ endowed . . . ​w ith a psy­chol­ogy that is immediately comprehensible to . . . ​a very large number of p ­ eople brought up within a wide variety of distinct cultures.” Ontologically, Hamlet is “a richly specified universal . . . ​not an individual.” Gaskin’s account is in effect a modern phi­los­o­pher’s version and refinement of the position Johnson had articulated, in his own terms, just two hundred and fifty years ago (Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Lit­er­a­ture, 59–61). In his 1765 edition, Johnson’s ­running editorial annotations at the foot of Shakespeare’s text are relatively slight in comparison with the ­later variorum editions of

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Steevens and Malone. On many pages, however, Johnson engaged in a continuing argument with previous commentary, and especially the commentary of William Warburton’s 1747 edition; t­ hese engagements give Johnson’s notes a degree of visual presence at the foot of the page and a degree of dialectical and hermeneutic nuance and density, which inevitably is underrepresented in the text of his notes as it appears in the scholarly edition best known to modern readers, the seventh and eighth volumes of the Yale edition.24 A high proportion of Johnson’s notes address issues of textual emendation, with Johnson most commonly preferring to retain and explain the witnessed reading, in opposition to Warburton’s proposed conjectural emendations, always made on the basis of hermeneutic considerations, less commonly on the basis of bibliographic considerations. Many even of the ostensibly textual notes, however, and certainly the overwhelming majority of the remainder, represent Shakespeare as the model mimetic poet of general nature. ­There is a small number of set-­piece examples of Johnson’s tendency to universalize Shakespearean character. Warburton’s note on the character of Polonius begins by describing him, in rather general terms, as “a weak, pedant, minister of state,” but immediately gives him a local habitation and a name: “Polonius’s declamation is a fine satire on the impertinent oratory then in vogue.” Johnson refuses to accept that Polonius is such a “character only of manners, discriminated by properties superficial, accidental and acquired.” While acknowledging the temporal satire, Johnson insists that Polonius is not for an age but for all time: Polonius is a man . . . ​exercised in business, stored with observations, confident of his knowledge, proud of his eloquence, and declining into dotage. . . . ​Such a man is positive and confident, ­because he knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak. . . . ​As the mind in its enfeebled state cannot be kept long busy and intent, the old man is subject to sudden dereliction of his faculties, he loses the order of his ideas, and entangles himself in his own thoughts. . . . ​Th is idea of dotage encroaching upon wisdom, ­w ill solve all the phaenomena of the character of Polonius. (Note to Hamlet, 2.2.86, in Yale Works, 8:973–974)25

Polonius, like the uncharitable l­awyer of Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews, is “not only alive, but hath been so ­t hese 4000 Years.”26 He is not, or not only, an individual, but a species: “such a man.” He is a picture not of “one Profession, one Religion, or one Country,” but, powerfully and appallingly, a universal mimesis of all men, and ­women, of once strong mind as they enter their decline. ­These are sentiments to which all too many of our bosoms return an echo. It is striking that Johnson does not provide comments on Polonius’s other extended speeches (his instructions to the departing Laertes, for instance [Hamlet, 1.3.54–81]); in such ­matters Johnson is concerned not with “vertical,” local, editorial elucidation of each line and dramatic moment, but with the informing and general truths of character. This theoretical position informs the 1765 notes throughout. The observations Shakespeare makes about ­human life are “worthy of a man who has surveyed

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­ uman nature with the closest attention.” “Such was the power” of his mind, “that h he looked through life in all its relations private and civil” (Yale Works, 8:812). Johnson remarks of the characters of The Tempest that they “are preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of opinions, and accurate observation of life,” men of all roles and stations “speaking in their real characters” (7:135); he makes essentially the same judgment of all the plays. The plays imitate life, be­hav­ ior, and speech with both exactness and truth. The vicar of Love’s ­Labour’s Lost offers “a finished repre­sen­ta­t ion of colloquial excellence” (5.1.3, in Yale Works, 7:279–280). When John of Gaunt speaks of attempting to avoid “a partial slander,” Johnson explains, “that is, the ‘reproach’ of ‘partiality.’ This is a just picture of the strug­gle between princi­ple and affection” (Richard II, 1.3.472, in Yale Works, 7:431). When the second Richard swears that he w ­ ill “hate him everlastingly, / That bids me be of comfort any more,” Johnson remarks that “this sentiment is drawn from nature” (3.2.207, in Yale Works, 7:441–442). When Henry IV asks God to forgive him for the way in which he obtained the crown, Johnson observes that “this is a true picture of a mind divided between heaven and earth” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.219, in Yale Works, 7:517). The content and rhe­toric of Johnson’s notes repeatedly insist on the general and perpetual truth and application of Shakespeare’s characterization. Don John in Much Ado confesses that “I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests; eat when I have stomach, and wait for no man’s leisure” (1.3.14, in Yale Works, 7:362); Johnson comments that “this is one of our authour’s natu­ral touches. An envious and unsocial mind, too proud to give plea­ sure, and too sullen to receive it, always endeavours to hide its malignity from the world and from itself, u ­ nder the plainness of s­ imple honesty, or the dignity of haughty in­de­pen­dence.” ­Because the ­human be­hav­ior Shakespeare describes is common, it is therefore recognizable to the reader or audience: “This vehement retraction of Leontes, accompanied with the confession of more crimes than he was suspected of, is agreeable to our daily experience of the vicissitudes of violent tempers, and the eruptions of minds oppressed with guilt” (Winter’s Tale, 3.2.173, in Yale Works, 7:298).27 Henry V muses at length on his responsibility, as king, for his countrymen: Upon the King! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, our ­children and Our sins, lay on the King; he must bear all. (Henry V, 4.1.226–28, in Yale Works, 8:553)

Johnson’s note finds “something very striking and solemn in this soliloquy, into which the King breaks immediately as soon as he is left alone. Something like this, on less occasions, e­ very breast has felt. Reflection and seriousness rush upon the mind upon the separation of a gay com­pany, and especially a­ fter forced and unwilling merriment.” Johnson understands Harry’s sense of his solitary burden, as Shakespeare articulates it, as a common and sharable sentiment, which all readers ­will recognize, which “­every breast has felt.” On this occasion we may find, in John-

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son’s stress on the emotions that arise from sudden solitude, a profoundly personal as well as a universalizing understanding of Shakespeare’s lines. Johnson’s grammatical constructions in his notes characteristically generalize Shakespearean characters and their be­hav­ior by the use of plural pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, and “he that” and “­those who” constructions (personal or demonstrative pronoun with post-­modifying relative clause). “­Those who cannot judge but by the eye, are easily awed by splendour; t­ hose who consider men as well as conditions, are easily persuaded to love the appearance of virtue dignified with power” (Mea­sure for Mea­sure, 2.4.14, in Yale Works, 7:187); “He that has no longer any confidence in himself, is glad to repose his trust in any other that w ­ ill undertake to guide him” (Much Ado about Nothing, 4.1.251, in Yale Works, 7:371); “Jocose follies, and slight offences, are only allowed by mankind in him that overpowers them by ­great qualities” (All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.2.32, in Yale Works, 7:378–379); “This sally of Hotspur may be . . . ​v indicated as the violent eruption of a mind inflated with ambition and fired with resentment; as the boastful clamour of a man able to do much, and ­eager to do more” (1 Henry IV, 1.3.201, in Yale Works, 7:461); the moral to be drawn from the repre­sen­ta­tion of the character of Falstaff is “that no man is more dangerous than he that with a ­will to corrupt, hath the power to please” (2 Henry IV, Johnson’s concluding note, in Yale Works, 7:524); “­Those who are vexed to impatience are angry to see o ­ thers less disturbed than themselves” (2 Henry VI, 3.2.333, in Yale Works, 8:590); “­There is in this speech a sullen haughtiness, and malignant dignity, suitable at once to the lord and the man-­ hater” (Timon of Athens, 4.3.252, in Yale Works, 8:736). One of the properties of Johnson’s notes that distinguish them most clearly from the annotations of other Shakespearean editors of his ­century is the frequency and consistency of his use of paraphrase. Paraphrase of course had been used by other editors, and would continue to be used by Steevens and Malone (as well as by such Milton editors as Thomas Newton); nevertheless, most editors, particularly Theobald and Steevens, more frequently favored the interpretative methodology of linguistic contextualization of Shakespeare’s meaning by citation of parallel places (in his own work and in that of his contemporaries), as well as through appeal to Shakespeare’s historical, social, po­liti­cal, and religious contexts. Johnson however, employed paraphrase frequently, indeed predominantly, as a textual and interpretative tool. He used paraphrase, particularly against Warburton’s conjectures, in order to defend original textual readings “and try if t­ here be any interstice, through which light can find its way.” He used paraphrase also to explain Shakespeare’s meanings to readers who w ­ ere not lexicographers and Shakespearean scholars, and no doubt especially to explain Shakespeare’s meanings to novice readers, who, as he advised in his preface, when they have “read ­every play from the first scene to the last,” should “attempt exactness, and read the commentators” (Yale Works, 7:106, 111). Paraphrase has not always been welcomed by readers, or respected by theorists, ­either as offered explanation or as hermeneutic methodology. Late-­seventeenth-­ century Romanist apologists, concerned to undermine the Protestant reliance on Scripture as a rule of faith, argued that not only translation from one language to

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another, but also paraphrase within the same language, must be intrinsically unreliable.28 Protestant hermeneuticists naturally defended and practiced both translation and, extensively, biblical paraphrase; Johnson’s use of paraphrase sits squarely within that Protestant interpretative custom and tradition.29 The Romantic insistence on the unique and untranslatable linguistic mode of existence of any worthwhile poem began no doubt with Coleridge, and has been embraced since by many schools of theoretical thought, not least in the New Critical attack on what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase.”30 Th ­ ere has, however, been a robust and cogent defense of paraphrase, as not only pos­si­ble, but essential, to textual understanding and explication. Richard Gaskin, as part of his argument for the cognitive and referential nature of lit­er­a­ture, provides a case for the possibility of paraphrase, based on the distinction between sense and reference. Works of lit­er­a­ture have referents and pre­sent their referential content “by means of a par­tic­u­lar sense.”31 Hence, “works of lit­er­a­ture to which the sense–­reference distinction . . . ​applies can be paraphrased . . . ​and . . . ​a paraphrase constitutively pre­sents the same referential content as the work” (Language, Truth, and Lit­er­a­ ture, 68–69). A work of lit­er­a­ture is not, on Gaskin’s understanding, or on Johnson’s, a hermetically sealed linguistic object. It refers to the real world, and can be known and shared by ­human beings with knowledge of the world to which it refers. It is hence capable of adequate paraphrase, which communicates the work’s reference even though it does not duplicate the sense. Some texts say ­t hings about the world that may be true; and our understanding of ­those truths is not confined within the strict original verbal form of the work, but may be accurately comprehended within a periphrastic statement of the work’s referent. Paraphrase notoriously meets its greatest challenge in relation to meta­phorical, or to put it more broadly, tropological, modes of expression. Johnson was resistant to the semantic confusion of vehicle and tenor involved in meta­phor, always preferring the clear distinction made in the simile. It is striking therefore, and at first sight perhaps surprising, that in the notes Johnson is generally prepared to find paraphrasable meaning in Shakespeare’s meta­phoric expressions and to rescue them from Warburton’s desperate corrections. Laertes says of Ophelia’s madness that Nature is fine in love; and where ’tis fine, It sends some precious instance of itself ­After the ­t hing it loves.

Warburton, bemused by Shakespeare’s meta­phor, amends to “fal’n in love”; Johnson, though he finds the passage obscure, avoids emendation and recovers the sense of the chemical or alchemical conceit by paraphrase: “Love . . . ​is the passion by which nature is most exalted and refined, and as substances refined and subtilized, easily obey any impulse, or follow any attraction, some part of nature, so purified and refined, flies off a­ fter . . . ​t he ­t hing it loves.” In his note on the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Pope had suggested emending “take arms against a sea of trou­bles”

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to “a siege of trou­bles,” while Warburton insisted that “without question Shakespear wrote . . . ​assail of trou­bles,” both editors flattening and literalizing Shakespeare’s mixed meta­phor. Johnson sees no cause for emendation: “I know not why ­t here should be so much solicitude about this meta­phor. Shakespeare breaks his meta­phors often” (Yale Works, 8:998, 981). Johnson certainly had ­little patience with poetry that was in his view merely fictional, based on extended allegory or on elaborated conceit. Lycidas notoriously is such a poem, pursuing “a long train of mythological imagery.” Of Milton and King, “We know that they never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten; and though it be allowed that the repre­ sen­ta­tion may be allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it . . . ​cannot be known when it is found.” The meaning of the opening stanza of Gray’s “Pro­gress of Poesy” cannot be made out ­because of its confounding of “the images of spreading sound and ­running ­water.” The third stanza “is drawn from My­thol­ogy,” and therefore objectionable; though its my­thol­ogy “may be more easily assimilated to real life,” its “meta­phor drawn from Art degrades Nature” (Lives, 1:279, 4:181–182). For Johnson the critic, Lycidas and “The Pro­gress of Poesy” do not recognizably represent, at the level of ­whole poem or long stanza, the world that we know. They cannot readily be construed or recognized. For Johnson the editor, establishing textual readings and textual meanings at the sentence level, Shakespeare’s meta­phors, even his mixed meta­phors, are quasi-­propositional and satisfactorily referential, and they yield for the most part relatively straightforwardly to explanation by paraphrase. The use by Johnson, as by other commentators, of paraphrase is consistent with, and a constituent part of, his mimetic theory of lit­er­a­ture. It deals not only with local textual and hermeneutic issues raised by Shakespeare’s text, but also with the mimetic truths that text represents. One of the most striking and characteristic features of the notes is that, time ­after time, Johnson chooses to use extended paraphrase in relation to precisely t­ hose Shakespearean passages that deal with shared ­human experience. To take one instance among many: the Duke warns Claudio, in Mea­sure for Mea­sure, that all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty To make thy riches pleasant. (Mea­sure for Mea­sure, 3.1.32–38, in Yale Works, 7:194)

Warburton had amended “all thy blessed youth / Becomes as aged” to “for pall’d, thy blazed youth / Becomes assuaged”; and “nor beauty” to “nor bounty”; as often, Johnson refutes Warburton’s conjectures with this extended paraphrasing elucidation: Shakespeare declares that man has neither youth nor age; for in youth . . . ​he commonly wants means to obtain what he could enjoy; he . . . ​must beg alms

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Like many other paraphrases in Johnson’s notes, this begins with a specifically textual issue and has a primarily hermeneutic purpose. Like other such paraphrases, however, it includes striking and insistent appeal to shared experience: the truths that Shakespeare relates are such as “neither man nor w ­ oman ­will have much difficulty to tell”; they are “what ­every one knows” and “what ­every one feels.” A note that begins with textual dispute and semantic explanation becomes an affirmation, one of very many such affirmations, of the cognitive, mimetic pro­cesses involved in reading Shakespeare with understanding. In the preface Johnson notoriously wrote that Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose.” It is pos­si­ble, Johnson acknowledges, to select from Shakespeare’s writings “a system of social duty, . . . ​for he that thinks reasonably must think morally” (Yale Works, 7:71). Nevertheless, Johnson complains, “his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil.” This is, for Johnson a serious criticism, but critics have arguably placed more than necessary stress on ­t hese words. Certainly this censure applies to the plots and to the outcomes of Shakespeare’s plays. Still, it is clear from the notes that Johnson was entirely alive to the frequency and force with which Shakespeare pre­sents the truths of moral experience woven intrinsically into the text of his plays. Johnson’s notes do not pretend to extract from Shakespeare anything like a moral compendium. He does not simply proceed from paraphrase and interpretation to strictly didactic application, as Protestant biblical commentary typically did. Nevertheless, the notes repeatedly insist not only on the familiarity of the ­human experience Shakespeare represents, but also on its truth and its ethical value to Shakespeare’s readers and audience. In Love’s L ­ abour’s Lost, for instance, Biron, “amidst his extravagancies,” “speaks with g­ reat justness against the folly of vows.” Johnson expands, and extrapolates, finding a general lesson in a dramatic moment: “Vows are made without sufficient regard to the variations of life, and are therefore broken by some unforeseen necessity. They proceed commonly from a presumptuous confidence, and a false estimate of ­human power” (Love’s L ­ abour’s Lost, 1.1.53, in Yale Works, 7:267). Of the Duke of York’s resort to arms to seize the crown from Henry VI, Johnson remarks: “I know not w ­ hether the authour intended any moral instruction, but he that reads this has a striking admonition against that precipitancy by which men often use unlawful means to do that which a ­little delay would put honestly in their power. Had York staid but a few moments he had saved his cause from the stain of perjury” (3 Henry VI, 1.2.49, in Yale Works, 8:599). Even

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if Johnson cannot be certain that Shakespeare “intended any moral instruction”—­ whether indeed Shakespeare wrote with any moral purpose—he nevertheless stresses that we may find h ­ ere a telling admonition against a common moral failing. More explic­itly, and with an altogether firmer and indeed challenging didactic direction, Johnson identifies and recommends a moral lesson in the words of Iago: She did deceive her f­ ather, marrying you; And, when she seem’d to shake, and fear your looks, She lov’d them most . . .

Johnson comments: “This and the following argument of Iago o ­ ught to be deeply impressed on e­ very reader. Deceit and falsehood, what­ever conveniencies they may for a time promise or produce, are, in the sum of life, obstacles to happiness. ­Those, who profit by the cheat, distrust the deceiver, and the act, by which kindness was sought, puts an end to confidence” (Othello, 3.3.210, in Yale Works, 8:1032–33). In their dramatic context Iago’s words are poisonous, and as readers or spectators we resist Iago’s repre­sen­ta­t ion of Desdemona’s motives and be­hav­ior. Even in such moments, however, ­t here are lessons that the readers and spectators of the drama must learn. For Johnson, deceit ultimately and generally leads to unhappiness and distrust. This note is disturbingly exceptional only in the extent to which Johnson abstracts the moral application from the action of the play. Revealingly, and not atypically, Johnson is h ­ ere not much interested in the particularities of plot, the specific local dynamics of character interaction, the possibilities or effects of stage enactment. He is concerned with the printed word. “A play read, affects the mind like a play acted” (Yale Works, 7:79); Johnson’s notes are directed at the reader in the closet, not the audience in the theater.32 Johnson was perpetually a moralist. Like his pre­de­ces­sor Theobald and his followers Steevens and Malone, Johnson indeed was committed to the establishment of true textual readings and the eliciting of true textual meanings. Shakespeare’s drama, however, is the mirror of universal life, and Johnson was therefore also committed to the application of the universal truths, experiential and ethic, of the Shakespearean scriptures to his own life, and the life of his readers. That is a stage and pro­cess based on but beyond editorial correction, contextualization, and explanation. Everywhere in the 1765 notes Johnson insists that writing that is based on “general princi­ples” and “delivers universal truths” can provide us with repre­sen­ ta­tions of the world and ­human life that we may recognize, take plea­sure in recognizing, and may use as ethical beings.33 The notes to Shakespeare are everywhere concerned with demonstrating how lit­er­a­ture may give us delight and wisdom—­ how the Bard enables his readers “better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”34

notes I am grateful for helpful comments made on versions of this article by colleagues during seminars at Pembroke College Oxford, Keele University, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Toronto. I am particularly indebted to suggestions made by Howard Weinbrot,

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Michael Davies, Paul Baines, Nicholas Seager, Susan Bruce, Kate Rumbold, and Thomas Keymer. 1.  For extended and rigorously analytic discussion, see Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Repre­sen­ta­tions of Scholarly L ­ abour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), chap. 6. 2.  Edward Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991), 15. Jean H. Hagstrum pays unusually close and penetrating attention to the 1765 notes, in the light of Johnson’s larger critical princi­ples, in Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), chap. 4. 3.  Marcus Walsh, “Fragments and Disquisitions: Johnson’s Shakespeare in Context,” in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New ­Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2014), 170. 4. Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, 5, agreeing with William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), 318. 5.  Rambler 92, in Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 4 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr., 23 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–2018), 122. 6.  Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vols. 7–8 of the Yale Works, 7:61. 7.  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 2:433. 8.  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), 2:149. 9.  I have discussed this tendency in my essay “Edmond Malone,” in Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, ed. Claude Rawson, vol. 1 of ­Great Shakespeareans, ed. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole (London: Continuum, 2010), 176–179. 10. Molière, La Gloire du Val-de Grâce, 1.107, 110, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Robert Jouanny (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 2:860. 11.  Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (Paris, 1715; repr. Brighton: Sussex Reprints, 1971), 12. In discussion with Reynolds, Garrick, and Goldsmith, Johnson instanced the work of Dominique Bouhours as “an example of true criticism” (Boswell’s Life, 2:90). For a cogent discussion of this issue in relation to Johnson, see G. F. Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 35–37. 12.  Du Fresnoy, in his De Arte Graphica, insisted (in the words of John Dryden’s translation) that “the principal and most impor­tant part of Painting, is to find out and thoroughly to understand what Nature has made most beautifull, and most proper to this Art.” Dryden, in his own preface to the translation, summarizes: “The business of [Du Fresnoy’s] Preface is to prove, that a learned Painter shou’d form to himself an Idea of perfect Nature. This Image he is to set before his Mind in all his Undertakings, and to draw from thence . . . ​t he Beauties which are to enter into his Work; thereby correcting Nature from what actually she is in individuals, to what she o ­ ught to be, and what she was created” (The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenborg, 20 vols. [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956–2000], 20:85, 47). In his Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), Johnson quotes, to illustrate lively adj. 3, “Representing life,” Dryden’s translation of another passage from Du Fresnoy: “Since a true knowledge of nature gives us plea­sure, a lively imitation of it in poetry or painting must produce a much greater.” Discussing poetry’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the visual, Addison asserts in Spectator 418 that “it is the part of a Poet to humour the Imagination in its own Notions, by mending and perfecting Nature where he describes a Real­ity, and by adding greater Beauties than are put together in Nature, where he describes a Fiction” (The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965], 3:569). La belle nature would l­ ater be developed and codified by Charles Batteux in Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746). 13. Boileau, The Art of Poetry, trans. John Dryden (London, 1683), lines 535–538, 790–793, in Dryden, Works, 2:140, 148. Otter is a character in Ben Jonson’s Epicene.

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14.  John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in Dryden, Works, 17:44. 15. Dryden, Works, 20:60. On Dryden’s developing relation to the French classical tradition, see Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999). 16.  Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, lines 297–300, in Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), 273 and n. 17.  The significance of Johnson’s epistemological understanding of Aristotelian mimesis is perhaps highlighted by contrast with André Dacier’s commentary on the Poetics, which provides for the most part a plainly explanatory periphrasis, and dilutes the specifically recognitive emphasis in Aristotle, chap. 4 (Aristotle’s Art of Poetry Translated [London, 1709], 30–31). 18.  Johnson applies the same criteria (to take two among many examples) in judging Lycidas a failure on mimetic grounds (“in this poem ­t here is no nature, for ­t here is no truth”) and in lamenting that the plan of Paradise Lost “has this incon­ve­nience, that it comprises neither ­human actions nor ­human manners. The man and ­woman who act and suffer, are in a state which no other man or w ­ oman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged” (Lives, 1:278, 289). 19. Aristotle, Poetics, ed., trans., and commentary by S. Halliwell (London: Duckworth, 1987), 31. For extended explanation and clarification of the Poetics, with par­tic­u ­lar regard to its ancient context, to more recent discussion, and to philosophical and epistemological issues, see the introduction and commentary in Halliwell’s translation and the more developed examination in his monograph, Aristotle’s Poetics, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1998), esp. chap. 4, “Mimesis.” 20.  Halliwell remarks that what Aristotle ­here requires “is not the direct reproduction of any one type of real­ity, but something more like an under­lying correspondence to the general concepts and truths which we derive from experience of the world” (Aristotle, Poetics, 109; emphasis added). 21. Aristotle, Rhe­toric, 1:1371, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 134. 22.  Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Lit­e r­a­ture: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 345. See also Tony Nuttall’s extended defense of mimetic theory in par­tic­u ­lar relation to our understanding of Shakespeare in A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Real­ity (London: Methuen, 1983). 23.  Despite his equation of fiction with untruth—­one of the Dictionary’s definitions is “a falsehood, a lye”—­Johnson certainly believed that even super­natural or improbably burlesque action in fiction could seem probable to the reader. “Imagination is useless without knowledge”; where Hudibras is valuable, it is ­because “Butler . . . ​had watched with g­ reat diligence the operations of h ­ uman nature”; “Poetical Action o ­ ught to be probable upon certain suppositions”; and Hudibras is probable to the extent that its “suppositions” are based on Butler’s knowledge and observation of h ­ uman nature (Lives, 2:7, 9). 24.  The relation between the notes of 1765 and the marginal notes in Johnson’s handwriting made in his own copy of the 1747 Pope/Warburton Shakespeare has been briefly examined by A. Cuming, “A Copy of Shakespeare’s Works Which Formerly Belonged to Dr. Johnson,” Review of En­glish Studies 3, no. 10 (April 1927): 208–212. Johnson’s text appears to be based on Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare, in somewhat unprincipled alternation with the text of Theobald’s edition as it appeared in 1757. See G. Blakemore Evans, “The Text of Johnson’s Shakespeare (1765),” Philological Quarterly 28 (1949): 425–428; Arthur M. Eastman, “The Texts from Which Johnson Printed His Shakespeare,” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 49, no. 2 (April 1950): 182–191. 25.  For similar instances see Johnson’s lengthy discussion of Falstaff in his concluding note on 2 Henry IV (7:523–524) and, more briefly, the brilliant comment on Scroop in Henry V: “The king means to say of Scroop, that he was a cautious man, who knew that fronti nulla fides, that a specious appearance was deceitful, and therefore did not ‘work with the eye without the ear’, did not trust the air or look of any man till he had tried him by enquiry and

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conversation. Surely this is the character of a prudent man” (2.2.135, in Yale Works, 8:540; Johnson’s citation is of Juvenal, Satires, 2.8). 26.  Henry Fielding, “­Matter Prefatory in Praise of Biography,” in Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 189. Johnson of course did not approve of the moral methods or example of that novelist, however precisely his own theoretical position on mimesis maps on to Fielding’s. Johnson’s arguments for Shakespeare’s pre­sen­ta­tion of recognizable general characters, and for the reader’s recognition of the applicability of such moral examples, might be thought to be echoed, however, in the work of Henry Fielding’s ­sister. Kate Rumbold has argued cogently that Sarah Fielding’s per­sis­tent Shakespearean quotation in her novels, and particularly in The Countess of Dellwyn (1759), is designed to point out the valuable moral lessons to be derived from Shakespeare’s characters, the necessity to “discern the most impor­tant and applicable parts of Shakespeare’s writing” in our reading, and to apply them in our lives (“Shakespeare’s ‘Propriety’ and the Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century Novel: Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn,” in Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France, ed. Shaun Regan (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2012), 194). 27.  Among many similar instances, compare Johnson’s comments on the Princess in Love’s ­L abour’s Lost, who “shews an incon­ve­n ience very frequently attending rash oaths, which, ­whether kept or broken, produce guilt” (1.1.52, in Yale Works, 7:267); on the inconsistency of Suffolk in The First Part of the Contention as “very common in real life. ­Those who are vexed to impatience are angry to see o ­ thers less disturbed than themselves, but when o ­ thers begin to rave, they immediately see in them, what they could not find in themselves, the deformity and folly of useless rage” (2 Henry VI, 3.2.333, in Yale Works, 8:590); and on Bottom, who “declares his inclination to be for a tyrant, for a part of fury, tumult, and noise, such as e­ very young man pants to perform when he first steps upon the stage” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2, in Yale Works, 7:140). 28.  For example, William Rushworth: “Who should conferre anie one chapter of two translations in the same language, and see ­whether anie one sentence doe so exactly agree as that scanning rigorously the varietie of their words, ­t here may not be some dif­fer­ent sense gathered out of them. And he w ­ ill not denie but ’tis impossible to put fully and beyond all quarrel the same sense in divers words” (The Dialogues of William Richworth; or, The Judgmend of Common Sense in the Choise of Religion [Paris, 1640], 266–267; cf. 276–277). 29.  I discuss this issue in Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-­Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 45–47. 30.  Thus Coleridge in the first chapter of Biographia Literaria: “What­ever lines can be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance, ­either in sense of association or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. . . . ​I was wont boldly to affirm that it would scarcely be more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare (in their most impor­tant works at least), without making the author say something e­ lse, or something worse, than he does say” (Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate [Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1983], 1:23). Compare Cleanth Brooks: “But to deny that the coherence of a poem is reflected in a logical paraphrase of its ‘real meaning’ is not, of course, to deny coherence to poetry; it is rather to assert that coherence is to be sought elsewhere” (The Well Wrought Urn [New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947], 207). Brooks uses the phrase “heresy of paraphrase” at p. 202 of this work. 31.  E. D. Hirsch Jr. makes a related point: “Synonymity is in fact pos­si­ble, and . . . ​on this possibility depends the determinacy of meaning, the emancipation of thought from the prison ­house of a par­tic­u ­lar linguistic form, and the possibility of knowledge generally” (Aims of Interpretation [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976], 10). For Hirsch, periphrastic commentary on a text is not parasitic, but genuinely explicatory: “If we isolate . . . ​t he interpretative function of commentaries . . . ​f rom their critical function, we ­w ill observe that the art of explaining nearly always involves the task of discussing meaning in terms that are not native to the original text. . . . ​A translation or paraphrase tries to render the meaning in new terms:

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an explanation tries to point to the meaning in new terms” (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967], 136). Compare Aims, 50, and Validity, 252–253. For a briefer but impor­tant statement, see M. H. Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,” in his ­Doing ­Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York: Norton, 1989), 238. 32.  Jean Hagstrum is properly troubled by Johnson’s note, remarking of it that “nowhere is his morality more obtrusive, artificial, and irrelevant. . . . ​Thomas Rymer at his worst equalled that, but he would have had difficulty outdoing it. It not only blandly disregards the motives of Iago’s remark and its specific dramatic context but it bases the tragic issue upon Desdemona’s ‘deceit’ and ‘impudence’ and thus destroys the fundamental moral and dramatic relationships of the play: the malignity of Iago, the innocence of Desdemona, and the helplessness of Othello” (Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism, 72–73). I would argue that Johnson’s note does not “destroy the fundamental moral and dramatic relationships of the play”; it is, as Johnson’s r­ unning notes typically are, a local, moral application, not a judgment of the play as a ­whole. Hagstrum indeed concludes his judgment of this note with the comment that “fortunately such was not Johnson’s final estimate of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.” 33.  Idler 59, in Yale Works, 2:183–284. 34.  Review of Soame Jenyns’s “­Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Origin of Good and Evil,” in Yale Works, 17:421.

B

Samuel Johnson and the Allen ­Family Matthew M. Davis

Looking around for primary source documents concerning Samuel Johnson can be a frustrating business. A Johnson scholar in our age cannot hope to find much in fields harvested many years ago by Hawkins, Boswell, and Thrale, then gleaned by Croker, Powell, and Hill, and then gleaned again by the almost obsessively thorough Allen Lyell Reade. We have good reasons for assuming that most of the impor­tant documents concerning Johnson’s life have already been gathered up. I myself accepted this dispiriting conclusion many years ago, so I was surprised and delighted to discover, in the Bodleian Library, in the year 2013, a manuscript that sheds new light on Johnson’s friendships with Edmund Allen and other members of the Allen ­family, while also suggesting a solution to an old puzzle involving Johnson’s Dictionary. Readers of this journal are likely to know something about Johnson’s friendship with Edmund Allen. Allen was a London printer with offices in Bolt Court, Fleet Street. He and Johnson w ­ ere friends for at least twenty-­five years.1 In addition, Allen was Johnson’s landlord and next-­door neighbor for the last nine years of his life, from ca. 1776 u ­ ntil 1784.2 It was Allen who served Johnson the dinner that elicited the famous comment, “Sir, we could not have had a better dinner had ­t here been a Synod of Cooks” (Life, 1:470). It was Allen who convinced Johnson to intervene in the affairs of the Reverend William Dodd, when Dodd was arrested for forgery and sentenced to hang (Life, 3:139–143). And it was Allen whom Johnson contacted on the morning of 17 June 1783, ­after he suffered a stroke that briefly deprived him of his ability to speak (Letters, 4:148). What has not been recognized, however, is that Johnson was acquainted not only with Edmund Allen, but also with several other members of the Allen f­ amily. This is made clear in a manuscript history of the Allen f­amily that has been on deposit in the Bodleian Library for many years but has not been previously noticed by Johnsonians.3 The document in question was created in 1865 by Mary Allen Brooke. Brooke was sixty-­five at the time. Her husband had died several years ­earlier, and she seems to have had no ­children of her own. However, she had sev32

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eral nieces and nephews, and she thought t­ hese younger relatives might like to know something about the history of the Allen ­family. She therefore set down what she knew about her f­ ather and his f­ amily, drawing mostly on unwritten f­ amily traditions but also on a few written rec­ords, including letters and parish registers. The document she produced is titled “On the Allen and Olney F ­ amily of That Ilk.” It consists of twelve handwritten pages. The pages are numbered, front and back, at the bottom of the page, apparently by Brooke herself. In the folders at the Bodleian, the twelve numbered pages that make up Brooke’s history are followed by two additional pages. ­These are also in Brooke’s handwriting, but the writing is not as neat, and the pages are not numbered. Th ­ ese pages appear to be a fragment of an e­ arlier draft of the history. They cover roughly the same material as pages 3 and 4 of the finished history. Although t­ here is a g­ reat deal of overlap between the draft pages and the final history, ­there are some details that are included only in the draft pages, and I ­w ill have occasion to quote from them as well as the finished history in the paragraphs that follow. When referring to t­ hese materials, I ­shall cite the two draft pages as D1 and D2 and the twelve pages in the finished history as H1 through H12. In her history, Brooke supplies information concerning many members of her ­family. In this article I w ­ ill focus on four members of the f­ amily who are said to have been acquainted with Johnson: 1. Brooke’s paternal grand­father, the Reverend Charles Allen (ca. 1730–1795), a Church of E ­ ngland clergyman who was rector of St. Nicholas, Rochester 2. Brooke’s great-­uncle, the Reverend John Allen (ca. 1720–1784), another clergyman, who was vice-­principal of Magdalen Hall, Oxford 3. One of Brooke’s cousins, Edmund Allen (1718–1784), the printer mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay 4. Brooke’s ­father, the Reverend William Allen (1770–1829), in l­ ater life a clergyman and a military chaplain Brooke states that the first three men—­Charles Allen, John Allen, and Edmund Allen—­were friends of Johnson’s; the fourth, William Allen, was introduced to Johnson by his ­father, Charles Allen, when he was a boy of ten or eleven. Figure 3.1 shows the familial relationships between ­t hese four men and Mary Allen Brooke. It also shows their immediate ancestors.4 The four men who are said to have known Johnson are marked with asterisks. Many other members of the ­family have been omitted as they are not relevant for the current article. The Johnson-­related material in Brooke’s f­ amily history consists of twelve statements and one long anecdote. I w ­ ill number the statements as I pre­sent them so that I ­w ill be able to refer back to them ­later. Brooke makes three statements about her cousin Edmund Allen and his relationship with Johnson: 1. ­There was a “warm friendship” between Johnson and Edmund Allen—so much so that, ­after Edmund Allen died, “Dr. Johnson gave the affectionate

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T h e Age of Joh ns on Thomas Allen (d. 1687) baker, Lord Chamberlain of Oxford

Thomas Allen (d. 1699) baker, Oxford

Rev. Thomas Allen (1681–1755) rector of Kettering

Edmund Allen* (1718–1784) painter, London

Rev. Timothy Allen (1695–1762) rector of Betchworth

Rev. John Allen* (c. 1720–1784) VP, Magdalen Hall

Rev. Charles Allen* (c. 1730–1795) vicar of St. Nicholas, Rochester

Rev. William Allen* (1770–1829) military chaplain

Mary Allen Brooke (b. 1800) author of family history

Figure 3.1. ​The Allen f­ amily.

testimony that ‘his was a face which had never turned upon him but with a smile’ ” (H4, D1). 2. Edmund Allen’s printing office in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, was “made memorable by its being the residence for many years of Dr. Samuel Johnson our ­great & notable lexicon [sic]” (H3–4, D1). 3. Johnson lived in his Bolt Court lodgings, “rent-­free, thro’ the warm friendship of Edmund Allen . . . ​during the season of his narrow circumstances” (H4). To ­t hese statements we must add five statements Brooke makes concerning her grand­father, Charles Allen, and his relationship with Johnson: 4. Johnson and Charles Allen ­were friends (H4). 5. Charles Allen corresponded with Johnson, and some unpublished letters from Johnson to him ­were passed down in the f­ amily. Charles Allen passed ­t hese letters on to his son, William Allen, who showed some of them to his ­children, including Mary Allen Brooke (H4–­H5). 6. One of ­t hese letters disproved a claim that had been made about Johnson in the newspapers: “Some years ago it was stated in the papers that Johnson never wrote ‘Dr.’ before his name. A card now in [our f­ amily’s] possession proves this to be a ­mistake, as our F ­ ather, Wm. Allen retained one amongst his F ­ ather Charles A’s papers which had the Dr. written thereon” (H5). 7. One of Johnson’s letters to Charles Allen was a letter of recommendation that subsequently led to employment: “One of his unpublished letters to Charles (vicar of St. Nicholas) [is] still in the Olney branch [of our ­family], the subject

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being the recommendation of a gentleman as curate, on the score of his g­ reat literary attainments which would be congenial—­however, the party proved less congenial than was hoped as our grand­father Charles had a difficulty to get him to vacate the curacy” (H5). 8. Johnson sometimes visited Charles Allen at St. Nicholas Church in Rochester (H4). In addition, Brooke makes several statements concerning her ­g reat ­u ncle John Allen and his relationship with Johnson: 9. Johnson and John Allen ­were friends (H4). 10. Johnson and John Allen made “annual visits . . . ​together to the Rev. Bouchier Marshall, Vicar of Bow, Devonshire” (H4). 11. John Allen helped Johnson with the Dictionary. “He was,” Brooke wrote in the finished history, “a man of considerable literary attainments & tho’ it is not generally known, yet he assisted very largely our ­great lexicographer, Johnson, in the first standard En­glish Dictionary” (H4). As it happens, this is one of the passages for which we have both the final history and the draft, and the draft supplies a few additional details: “This John Allen Vice P. of Magd. was a man of g­ reat learning & high scholastic attainments, so much so that it was said he roared out Latin. He also assisted Dr. Johnson in the compilation of his Dictionary—­t he Dr. transmitt[ed] the sheets to him for revision before they ­were given to the publisher” (D1–­D2). On one occasion, however, it seems ­t here was an unfortunate accident. Some sheets that had been passed to John Allen by Johnson w ­ ere “lost in the carriage back” (H4). This loss of ­t hese sheets occasioned a “delay, to the annoyance of the publishers” (D2). Fi­nally, Brooke claims that Boswell treated the Allens shabbily in his Life of Johnson. She claims that Boswell deliberately downplayed Johnson’s friendships with the members of the Allen f­ amily while also presenting members of her ­family in an unflattering light. In the draft version of the history, Brooke phrased her complaints as follows: Boswell refers very briefly to the Allens and only when he can . . . ​place them in false views, for instance the true friendship of Edmund Allen to the Dr. & his [i.e., Edmund Allen’s] sweet benevolence is [sic] made absurd by the false portrait of his character—­& John Allen’s assistance on the Dr.’s greatest work is only alluded to in the year that one delay, to the annoyance of the publishers, was caused by John Allen having lost the copy—­& Boswell wholly ignores the g­ reat friendship subsisting between Charles Allen, John, and . . . ​Dr. Johnson—no love, may be, was lost as the ­family did not receive Boswell into their circle. (D2)

In the final draft of the history, Brooke advanced the same charge but used dif­fer­ ent words: Boswell only alludes to John Allen in this ­great work as having had a copy [of some pages of the Dictionary] passed to him by Dr. Johnson, which had been

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T h e Age of Joh ns on lost in the carriage back. Boswell was not received cordially by ­either Charles or John (as I have understood) & may be not by Edmund, as he [Boswell] omits in toto the friendships between them & the annual visits made by John Allen & Dr. Johnson together to the Rev. Bouchier Marshall, Vicar of Bow Devonshire, or to the Dr.’s visits to Charles [Allen] at St. Nicholas Rochester. (H4)

I ­shall refer to ­t hese allegations against Boswell, collectively, as statement 12. In addition to ­these twelve statements, ­there is the anecdote I mentioned ­earlier. The central character in this anecdote is Brooke’s f­ ather, William Allen.5 However, Charles Allen and John Allen also feature, and Edmund Allen is briefly mentioned. Brooke indicates that her grand­father, Charles Allen, brought her ­father, William Allen, to meet Johnson when William was a boy of ten or eleven, which would have been in 1780 or 1781. At the time, Johnson was living in his Bolt Court apartment, adjacent to Edmund Allen’s printing h ­ ouse. A ­ fter visiting with Johnson at Bolt Court, Charles Allen took William Allen to Oxford and placed him in the custody of his ­uncle (Charles’s b ­ rother), John Allen, who was the vice principal of Magdalen Hall. As an adult, William Allen liked to tell a story about ­t hese events, and Brooke chose to include a retelling of his story in her ­family history: Altho’ strickly [sic] writing in reference to our ­Great ­Uncle John Allen, yet I think I may diverge into a digression on an Event in his nephew William’s Life, which arose from the circumstance of his (John) taking him [William] ­under his charge when he [William] was a boy of some ten, or eleven years of age to Educate him ­under himself at Magdalene Hall, of which he (John) was then Vice Principal. I ­w ill give it in our F ­ ather’s own words so often told me in our London Rambles & as near as I can recollect. I must premise that at a very early age Wm. Allen (son of Charles Allen) was sent to Merchant Tailors school in London, & ­t here boarded in Lothbury with the celebrated Dr. Prince, the then Head Master.6 . . . ​Wm. was not only worked at school, but hard classics went on in the holidays at home [in Rochester, Kent]—­ little we may believe to the boy’s relish—­One day [while William was at home in Rochester, on holiday] his F ­ ather’s given Latin task became a puzzler, & to get rid of the t­ hing, he said, “I was resolved to go, & hire myself out as a Cabin boy in a Merchant Vessel at Chatham”7—­The result was, some [captains] did not require a “Cabin boy” [and] ­others ­were too inquisitive—at last he agreed with a Dutchman, & was to be ready when the tide served in the after­noon—­“Man does propose”—­happily ­there is an over-­ruler, “who disposes.” The joys of breakfast held the boy in too much thralldom to be lightly passed, so notwithstanding the terrors of the Latin, he was in readiness for the meal—­but g­ reat was [his] surprise to learn that his ­uncle John had sent forthwith for his introduction to his special charge, to be put into the very Den of Latin—­for of John it was said “he roared the language forth, & woe to the poor student who wrote or spoke false quantities.” John was considered, even at Oxford, the highest Latin authority.

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It happened that our grand­father Charles had some impor­tant business in London on that day & as traveling was not so con­ve­nient in 1781 as in 1865, his son William found himself (likely) on the deck of a coach, & rolling on the foam of the “Manger” as the old four-­in-­hand8 [carriage] dashed onward—­instead of the foam of the billow. The next day brought another episode in the life of our ­father. His account was this—­“thro’ all the journey from Rochester, & especially from ‘The Belle Savage’ [Inn] on Ludgate Hill,9 largely had his ­father Expaciated [sic] on the Extraordinary honor he was about to confer on his son”—by the way, he [Charles Allen] was a man of pleasant temper and pleasant face so we believe ­t here was no crossness in the tone which said, “Now Bill, You Varlet, I am ­going to introduce you to the G ­ reat Dr.  Johnson—­one of the greatest men in the world”—­On this they entered the Bolt Court, Fleet Street . . . ​which our ­father thought a queer looking place for so wonderful a personage, being none other than our Cousin Edmund Allen’s printing office—­& wondering in Childhood Won­der, on ­going up the creaking staircase, so dif­fer­ent from the noble ascent at the Vicarage [in Rochester], & when entering a room “to see a big man, a ­table which had seen its best days, & a c­ ouple of chairs hardly safe seats”—­our ­father came to the conclusion, “he had been brought ‘to a show’ ”—­but he said he “got very tired with the long conversation our grand­father held with the ‘big showman’—­As all ­t hings come to an end, His ­Father at last rose—­& our ­father used to wind up in this quaint manner—­“The Dr. came over to me & said ‘So Sir you are g­ oing to live with your u ­ ncle John [John Allen, of Magdalen Hall, Oxford]—­Sir if you have only as much learning in your Whole Body, as he has in his l­ ittle fin­ger, you w ­ ill be a learned man.’ ”—to suit the action to the word, he caught our f­ ather’s l­ ittle fin­ger, & adroitly closed it upon half a crown. (H5–­H7)10

Although William Allen’s interview with Johnson is said to have ended with the gift of the half crown, the story he told did not end ­t here, for he added a coda in which he described what happened to him and his half crown when he arrived at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, a few days ­later: Ah! What a half crown was that to the boy! L ­ ittle did the Dr. know, that it would prove as “a light­house on a rock, for life.”—­Joyously went the boy to Oxford—­ Joyously did the boy leave his ­father [Charles Allen] and his u ­ ncle [John Allen] to discuss Pliny or Cato, Socrates or Cicero—­a ll one to him, whilst he went forth as the V.P.’s nephew to join the bright youth of the Hall—­and to learn in the Magdalen Hall cloisters, his lesson for life.—­Quickly did the young gamblers draw him on & in a few minutes, his bright half crown—­was in another’s pocket. (H7–­H8)

And so William Allen lost the half crown Johnson had given him! But, apparently, the coin was not lost in vain. Brooke states that, when her ­father told this story, he always ended by explaining that this experience had taught him to shun gamblers

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and gambling, a lesson that he continued to heed throughout the remainder of his life (H8). This is the substance of what Mary Allen Brooke has to report concerning Johnson and his relations with her f­amily. Of course, as scholars, we cannot simply accept Brooke’s statements as facts. We need to form a judgment as to the reliability of the witness, and we need look about for evidence that e­ ither corroborates her claims or calls them into question.

Evaluating Brooke’s Statements ­ ere are some obvious reasons why we might hesitate to accept Brooke’s stateTh ments at face value. Brooke was not a scholar, and she obviously relied heavi­ly on the oral traditions of her ­family. What’s more, she did not write her ­family history ­until 1865, eighty-­one years a­ fter Johnson died, and she herself was not born ­until 1800, sixteen years ­after Johnson died. Most of what she knew about Johnson must have come from her f­ather, William, and he may have met Johnson only once—­ when he was just a boy. Most of what William knew about Johnson must have come from his f­ ather Charles Allen, his u ­ ncle John Allen, or his cousin Edmund Allen. ­These are the three members of the Allen ­family who ­were roughly Johnson’s age, or only a few years younger, and who are said to have known him—­and we have to go back two generations from the author of the history to get to them. In general, Brooke’s knowledge seems to stretch back two to three generations, but not much farther. When writing about her ­father and her grand­father, she is generally a reliable witness: the claims she makes and the dates she provides tend to square with the documentary rec­ord. The information she provides about her great-­grandfather and his ­brother, however, is patchier, and she appears to have been profoundly confused about the identity of her great-­great-­grandfather and great-­great-­great-­grandfather.11 On the other hand, many of the basic claims about Johnson made in Brooke’s history can be shown to be consistent with the factual rec­ord. For example, Johnson did live in Bolt Court from 1776 ­until his death in 1784; Edmund Allen was his landlord; the two men ­were friends; and Johnson did speak of Edmund Allen with ­great affection, calling him “one of my best and tenderest friends.”12 Thus, t­ here is strong corroborating evidence for statements 1 and 2. ­There is also evidence that corroborates Brooke’s claim that Johnson was friends with John Allen (statement 9). In April of 1758, Thomas Warton wrote to Johnson, asking him for his p ­ ardon. Warton explained that he had lost some receipts for Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare. Johnson wrote back a few days l­ater, urging Warton not to worry about the lost receipts and informing him where he could obtain replacement forms: “You give yourself too much uneasiness, dear Sir, about the loss of the papers. . . . ​You are not the only friend who has had the same mischance. You may repair your want out of a stock, which is deposited with Mr. Allen of Magdalen-­Hall” (Letters, 1:163). Although Johnsonians have not previously made

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the connection, the “Mr. Allen” mentioned h ­ ere is clearly John Allen, the vice principal of Magdalen Hall.13 Johnson’s friendship with John Allen is also mentioned in a little-­k nown letter from the pen of Rev. George Berkeley Jr. (ca. 1734–1795), the son of the famous phi­ los­o­pher. In the letter, dated 19 November 1788, Berkeley fils states that Johnson once considered writing a life of his ­father, Bishop Berkeley, and even went so far as to approach him, by means of an intermediary, to inquire w ­ hether he would be willing to supply materials for the work. Berkeley declined to supply the materials on the grounds that Johnson had made some “rough” and unfavorable remarks about his ­father in his presence some years e­ arlier. (He presumably would not have known about the now-­famous rock-­k icking episode, since Boswell’s description of that incident was not published ­until 1791.) What is of most interest for this inquiry, however, is that Berkeley fils identified the intermediary whom Johnson sent to speak with him on this occasion: “When Mr.  Allen, late vice-­principal of Magdalene-­hall, Oxford, applied to me for materials to enable his friend Johnson to write a life of a man who did honour to h ­ uman nature [i.e., Bishop Berkeley], I gave this relation of that rough conversation as my reason for declining to comply with his request.”14 An even more in­ter­est­i ng reference to Johnson’s friendship with John Allen occurs in a letter that the Reverend William Jones of Nayland sent Boswell in the mid-1790s, a­ fter reading his Life of Johnson. In the letter, Jones shared some reminiscences of his encounters with Johnson, including an occasion when John Allen threw down the gauntlet and challenged Johnson to attack infidel scribblers and stand forth as a defender of the Christian religion: The weight of his [Johnson’s] pen, exposing the false wit and chastising the vanity of scepticism, would have been felt by friends and foes, and might have done good as a preservative against the evil times which w ­ ere approaching. The late Mr. Allen of Magdalen Hall, who was a priviledged [sic] person, and could say what he pleased to him, addressed him once very freely upon the subject. “Johnson, if you ­really are a Christian, as I suppose you to be, do write something to make us sure of it.” But I presume he was not very conversant in ecclesiastical history, and that he was a better critic on the sense of Juvenal than on the style of the Bible, on which considerations he was not forward to pit himself against an infidel.15

This is eye-­opening, for ­there ­were not many ­people who enjoyed such “privileged” status and could “say what they pleased” to Johnson. ­There is also evidence that connects Johnson to Charles Allen and tends to corroborate statements 4, 5, and 7. A letter from Johnson to Charles Allen is included in Redford’s edition of Johnson’s letters, and the letter printed t­ here is clearly related to the letter Brooke says she saw. The printed letter makes it clear that the gentleman Johnson recommended to Charles Allen as a curate was William Shaw (1743–1831), a Scotsman from the Isle of Arran who had taken Johnson’s side in the disputes over

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the authenticity of the Ossian poems.16 On Johnson’s suggestion, Shaw had taken ­orders in the Church of ­England. In 1780, Johnson wrote a letter of introduction for Shaw to carry to Charles Allen: Sir, Mr. William Shaw, the gentleman from whom you ­w ill receive this, is a studious and literary man; he is a stranger, and ­w ill be glad to be introduced into proper com­pany; and he is my friend, and any civility you s­ hall shew him, w ­ ill be an obligation on, Sir, your most obedient servant, Sam. Johnson. (Letters, 3:321–322)

Although this could be the letter that Mary Allen Brooke saw, it prob­ably is not. ­There is no mention in this letter of Shaw serving as a curate for Charles Allen; it may be that that possibility was not broached u ­ ntil somewhat l­ater; or it may be, as I tend to think, that Johnson wrote one letter for Shaw to carry to Kent and another letter that he sent Allen via post, in which he informed Allen that Shaw was coming to Kent and suggested that he might make a congenial curate. The letter just quoted was clearly given to Shaw and seems to have remained in his possession for many years afterward, since it was subsequently published by him (Letters, 1:321 and n2). The letter Brooke mentions, on the other hand, was apparently sent to Charles Allen and seems to have remained in the Allen/Olney ­family papers for many years. It has not been published, and its current whereabouts are unknown. It seems likely, therefore, that the letter Brooke saw was not the same letter Shaw carried away with him. However, ­these two letters do seem to have been written at roughly the same time and with the same end in mind, and the fact that one of the letters has been printed makes the existence of the other seem quite likely. Brooke’s claim that Johnson visited Charles Allen at St. Nicholas parish church in Rochester (statement 8) is harder to substantiate. We do, however, know that Johnson visited Rochester on at least two occasions. In September of 1775, he and the Thrales ­stopped in Rochester while making their way to Dover to make the crossing to France. We know that they visited Rochester Cathedral, and since St. Nicholas was an adjoining building, t­ here is a good chance that they toured it and socialized with the vicar—­t hat is, with Charles Allen.17 In 1783, Johnson paid another visit to Rochester, this time primarily to visit Bennett Langton and his ­family, who w ­ ere renting a parsonage in the city. Johnson arrived on 10 July and remained u ­ ntil 23 July, and during his time in Rochester he paid a number of social visits. It is quite pos­si­ble that one of ­t hese social visits was to the Reverend Charles Allen.18 Brooke’s statement that Johnson and John Allen paid annual visits to the Reverend Bouchier Marshall, of Bow, in Devonshire (statement 10), seems at first to be demonstrably wrong. Th ­ ere was a Rev. Bouchier Marshall who was vicar of Bow, but he did not assume that position ­until many years ­after Johnson’s death. Therefore it is not pos­si­ble that Johnson visited Bouchier Marshall at Bow. However, Brooke may simply have gotten the host’s first name wrong. It seems likely that she confused the Reverend Bouchier Marshall (1786–1827) with his ­father, the Rev-

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erend Thomas Mervyn Marshall (1753–1794), who was rector of Bow from ca. 1775 ­u ntil his death in 1794.19 Johnson and John Allen might have visited Thomas Mervyn Marshall from ca. 1775 to 1784, and one reason for thinking they might have done so is that Marshall was a gradu­ate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he would have studied u ­ nder John Allen. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any rec­ ords that corroborate t­ hese putative visits to Bow, and, considering how much is known of Johnson’s whereabouts during the last de­cade of his life, it seems rather unlikely he could have made “annual” visits to Bow for eight or nine years without somebody noting one of them. Brooke’s claim that John Allen assisted Johnson with the compilation of the Dictionary (statement 11) is also problematic, for I am not aware of any evidence to corroborate this claim, and t­ here are some good reasons for doubting it. One reason for skepticism is that Johnson stated that he received very l­ittle help with the first edition of the Dictionary. In fact, he told Boswell that “the only aid which he received was a paper containing twenty etymologies, sent to him by a person then unknown, who he was afterwards informed was Dr. Pearce, Bishop of Rochester” (Life, 1:292). It is pos­si­ble, however, that John Allen played a role in the substantial revisions Johnson undertook for the fourth edition of the Dictionary. This would fit with what is known about the chronology of their friendship. It is not clear that Johnson knew John Allen in the late 1740s and early 1750s, when he was working on the first edition of the Dictionary.20 However, he clearly did know John Allen by the early 1770s, when he was preparing the fourth edition. Allen Reddick has presented detailed and convincing evidence that a section of corrections and additions for the letter “B” was lost at some point during the preparation of copy for the fourth edition, and that the loss of t­ hese pages caused a delay in printing.21 It is quite pos­ si­ble that the lost pages Brooke mentions in her history are the same pages Reddick describes in his book. What about Brooke’s claim that Boswell was uncharitable to the Allen ­family (statement 12)? Th ­ ere is some evidence to support this claim, at least as far as Edmund Allen is concerned. Although Boswell characterized Edmund Allen as “a worthy obliging man” (Life, 3:269), t­ here are two passages in the Life where he complains that Allen tried to emulate Johnson’s g­ rand style and “talk big” in com­ pany. In his account of 10 April 1778, Boswell notes that “though [Allen] was of a very diminutive size, he used, even in Johnson’s presence, to imitate the stately periods and slow and solemn utterances of the g­ reat man” (Life, 3:269–270). This is fairly mild criticism. In his account for 15 April 1781, however, Boswell treats the same be­hav­ior in a more sarcastic and satirical vein: “I was not a ­little amused by observing Allen perpetually struggling to talk in the manner of Johnson, like the ­little frog in the fable blowing himself up to resemble the stately ox” (Life, 4:92).22 Brooke’s claim that Boswell exhibited hostility to the w ­ hole Allen f­ amily is harder to corroborate—­and, indeed, harder to comprehend—­because, as far as I can tell, Boswell does not actually mention any other members of the f­ amily. Brooke complains that Boswell mentioned John Allen’s helping with the Dictionary only once

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in his Life of Johnson, “in the year that one delay, to the annoyance of the publishers, was caused by John Allen having lost the copy.” If ­t here ­were such a mention in Boswell’s Life, that would be very helpful, for it would provide some confirmation that John Allen was indeed involved in the Dictionary proj­ect. Unfortunately I can find no trace of this. I do not see that Boswell ever mentions the lost pages, and I do not see that he ever mentions John Allen ­either.23 I have inspected numerous printed editions of the Life, as well as the relevant sections of Boswell’s manuscript. I have also spoken with the editors of the Boswell Papers. They have informed me that they are not aware of any reference to John Allen, or any mention of lost Dictionary pages in Boswell’s papers. In short, the passage that Mary Allen Brooke referred to with so much confidence, and not a l­ ittle indignation, does not seem to exist. I suspect that Brooke’s dis­plea­sure with Boswell can be traced back to her grand­ father, Charles Allen. Of the three members of the Allen f­amily who ­were Johnson’s friends, he was the only one who was still alive when Boswell’s biography was published in 1791. He presumably objected to the satirical description of his cousin Edmund Allen puffing himself up like a frog, but he may have been even more both­ered by what Boswell might have printed about Johnson and the Allens but ultimately did not print. ­There is simply not much information about any of the Allens in Boswell’s book. Charles Allen must have been disappointed to make this discovery, and perhaps he would have felt even more disappointed when he s­ topped to consider what sort of book Boswell had produced. Boswell collected anecdotes from many of Johnson’s friends. He crammed his book full of conversations, ­table talk, anecdotes, and bon mots. Many readers felt that he had been embarrassingly promiscuous in his editorial work and had tossed in “every­t hing but the kitchen sink,” including several anecdotes that might have been better omitted, ­either ­because they w ­ ere inappropriate or b ­ ecause they ­were too trivial to warrant inclusion. And yet ­there is so ­little about the Allens! It must have grated on old Charles Allen’s nerves. One subject on which Brooke is clearly unreliable is Johnson’s finances. In two separate passages, she suggests that Johnson was very poor in the 1770s and 1780s (H4, H7). This is incorrect. During his early years in London, Johnson was indeed poor; however, by the time he moved to Bolt Court in 1776, the “season of his narrow circumstances” had passed and he was living quite comfortably on a royal pension of £300 per annum. Brooke’s claim that Johnson lived at Bolt Court “rent-­free” is prob­ably also inaccurate, for we have a letter, dated 15 October  1781, in which Johnson speaks of conveying a promissory note to “Mr. Allen to whom I owe rent” (Letters, 3:361), and contemporaries reported that Johnson paid Allen £40 per annum in rent.24 Of course, it is pos­si­ble that Allen allowed Johnson to live in his Bolt Court lodgings rent-­free at certain times, but at this point in his life Johnson would not have needed such charity, and one won­ders w ­ hether he would have accepted it. In short, we have good reasons for thinking the claims in statement 3 are prob­ably erroneous. Johnson was not in “narrow circumstances” during this stage of his life, and he prob­ably paid rent for the Bolt Court apartment.

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If Brooke saw a card signed “Dr. Johnson,” as reported above in statement 6, she saw something very unusual, for Johnson signed virtually all of his letters “Sam. Johnson.” I reviewed Redford’s edition of Johnson’s letters, beginning in the year 1765, when Johnson received his first honorary doctorate (from Trinity College, Dublin), and I could find no instance where Johnson signed himself “Dr. Johnson,” or “Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” I therefore think it likely that Brooke was in error on this point. Perhaps the “Dr. Johnson” she saw, which she took to be in Johnson’s own hand, was actually added l­ater, as an annotation, by her grand­father or her ­father. I am sorry to report that ­t here are also some reasons for doubting the truth of the long, charming anecdote in which William Allen describes his meeting with Johnson. The main prob­lem in this case is chronological: the dates in the story do not square with what we know about William Allen’s education. In the story William Allen, sick and tired of Latin study at the Merchant Taylor’s School and supplemental exercises at home in Rochester, decides to run away to the sea. However, before he can make his escape, a letter from his U ­ ncle John arrives, and he is summoned to Oxford. Before being carried north to Oxford, he is transported west to London and taken to Bolt Court to meet Johnson, and ­there he is given half a crown. Then he is carried up to Oxford, where he loses his half crown to the gamesters of Magdalen Hall. We are led to believe that all of t­ hese events occurred in the space of a few days. Unfortunately, it is difficult to square this story with the academic rec­ords. ­Those rec­ords indicate that William Allen’s educational c­ areer was divided into three phases: 1. He was a chorister at Magdalen College School, Oxford, from October of 1778 to 1782.25 2. He attended the Merchant Taylors’ School in London from 1782 to 1789.26 3. He matriculated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in July of 1789 and ­graduated, with a BA, in 1794.27 The basic prob­lem is this: in the story William Allen claims that he was introduced to Johnson just a day or two before he was carried up to Oxford to live with his ­uncle at Magdalen Hall. However, it’s hard to see how that could be correct. According to the academic rec­ords, Allen did not enroll at Magdalen Hall ­until 1789, by which time both Johnson and John Allen had been dead for five years. The meeting with Johnson, if it occurred, must therefore have taken place years ­earlier. If it occurred then, though, it presumably did not take place on the eve of his matriculation at Magdalen Hall. This may seem like a relatively minor prob­lem, but it is not. The conversation William Allen claimed to have had with Johnson would make sense only if Allen was in fact on his way to Oxford to live with his ­uncle. Johnson says, “So . . . ​you are ­going to live with your ­uncle John; if you have only as much learning in your Whole Body, as he has in his l­ittle fin­ger, you ­will be a learned man.” Then “to suit the action to the word,” he catches hold of William’s ­little fin­ger and “close[s] it upon half a crown.” And, of course, we are told that William Allen carried that half crown to Magdalen Hall, where he was fleeced

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by unscrupulous undergraduates. But if William Allen d ­ idn’t actually enroll in Magdalen Hall u ­ ntil several years a­ fter he met Johnson, what reason do we have for believing that Johnson actually gave him the coin, or that the conversation about John Allen and his ­great learning ­really took place? The 1789 matriculation date is like a tiny piece of thread: when one pulls on it, the w ­ hole garment seems to be in danger of unraveling. It is pos­si­ble, of course, that it was Mary Allen Brooke who introduced the chronological inaccuracies into the story: she may have been confused about which schools her ­father attended when, and, as a result of her confusion, she might have misreported when he met Johnson. Specifically, it is pos­si­ble that William Allen was taken to meet Johnson not in 1780 or 1781, but in 1778, prior to being enrolled at Magdalen College School. This would solve several of the chronological prob­ lems.28 However, it is also pos­si­ble that it was William Allen who introduced the chronological inaccuracies, and that he did so deliberately, in order to improve upon real­ity. Indeed, this seems to me somewhat more likely. Brooke indicates that her ­father told this story many times over the years. It seems to have been one of his chestnuts, and he may well have polished and “improved” it in vari­ous ways, as storytellers often do. He may have combined several events that actually occurred and then tightened up the timeline to give the impression that they all occurred in the space of a few days. Perhaps he r­ eally did attempt to run away to sea when he was a boy, and perhaps he ­really was taken to meet Johnson in his Bolt Court apartment. But perhaps t­ hese events did not happen one a­ fter another, as they do in the story. It is the concatenation of events in the story, more than anything ­else, that makes one skeptical. The coincidences seem almost too good to be true. How likely is it, for example, that the u ­ ncle’s summons to Oxford would arrive on the very morning when the boy had de­cided to run away to sea—­indeed precisely in the interval between low and high tide? Th ­ ings like that happen on the stage, but how often do they happen in real life? I suspect that William Allen may have combined several a­ ctual events from his life and fiddled around with the sequencing ­until he hit upon a way to create a delightful and doubly ironic ending, in which his attempt to escape from Latin learning is foiled and he is sent to “the very den of Latin” at Oxford, and the wonderful half crown that was slipped into his hand by Johnson is then slipped out of his pocket by the unscrupulous undergraduates. In addition, I suspect that William Allen may have “improved on memory” by borrowing some details from Boswell’s Life, which was not published u ­ ntil 1791, a de­cade ­after his meeting with Johnson is said to have occurred. At one point in the story, Allen reports that Johnson addressed him as “sir”: “So Sir you are g­ oing to live with your ­u ncle.” That certainly sounds Johnsonian, but would Johnson ­really have addressed a ten-­or eleven-­year-­old boy as “sir”? Or might William Allen have imported this well-­k nown tic from Boswell’s Life to give his story an aura of verisimilitude? I feel compelled to ask a similar question about the furniture in Johnson’s apartment. Allen notes that Johnson had “a c­ ouple of chairs [that ­were] hardly safe seats.” Again, this sounds au­t hen­tic: Johnsonians ­will recall reading about dicey

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chairs in other accounts of Johnson’s living quarters. But, again, one must ask, is this an in­de­pen­dent observation, or is it a direct borrowing from Boswell’s biography? Boswell describes an apartment that contained “a chair and a half.” He also describes Johnson balancing precariously on a chair “with only three legs and one arm” (Life, 1:328). My confidence in the veracity of William Allen’s story was not increased when I went back to look at the passage in Boswell’s Life and found that Boswell was describing Johnson’s apartment in Gough Square, as witnessed by another person, circa 1758. William Allen, on the other hand, is supposedly describing Johnson’s apartment in Bolt Court, circa 1780. It is pos­si­ble that Johnson still had the same three-­legged chair twenty-­two years ­later, and that he carried it with him when he changed apartments; it is also pos­si­ble, though, that the chairs ­were transferred not from apartment to apartment by Johnson but from Boswell’s book to Allen’s anecdote—by Allen. It would be ironic if William Allen had recourse to Boswell’s book, since he and his ­father seem to have nursed a grudge against Boswell, but t­ here are reasons for thinking he may have done so. In summary, we can say that, while not all of the statements and claims made in Brooke’s history hold up well ­under scrutiny, a number of them do. ­There are two that are prob­ably incorrect (statements 3 and 6). However, t­ here are four that may be correct, or correct with slight modification (statements 8, 10, 11, and 12), and six that are prob­ably correct (statements 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 9). As for William Allen’s story about meeting Johnson, it cannot be accepted at face value, but that does not mean that Allen was not taken to meet Johnson at some point. (For what it’s worth, I rather suspect that he was.) Moreover, it is impor­tant to emphasize that Brooke’s most basic claims about the friendships that linked Johnson to her grand­father and the other men of his generation (statements 1, 4, and 9) are almost certainly correct. We can now assert with some confidence that Johnson was acquainted not only with Edmund Allen but also with John Allen and Charles Allen, and Johnsonians may therefore wish to know a bit more about ­t hese three men. I ­shall therefore conclude this article by appending some biographical information about each of the three.

Edmund Allen Edmund Allen (1718–84) is a person about whom Johnsonians already know a ­little. Therefore, instead of setting down a cradle-­to-­grave biography, I ­will only attempt to correct a few ­mistakes and add a few details to what is already known. Edmund Allen was born in August of 1718, in Kettering, Northampton—­not in 1726, as has been sometimes reported.29 He was the son of the Reverend Thomas Allen (1681–1755), a pious but eccentric clergyman who was rector of Kettering from 1715 ­until his death in 1755.30 Thomas Allen was remembered in Kettering for the dedication with which he performed his clerical duties. He offered communion monthly and read prayers twice a day, seven days a week.31 He also “distribut[ed] halfpence among the l­ ittle ones” as he made his way to church, in spite of the fact that he himself was far from wealthy.32

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Thomas Allen was a man of considerable learning, a student of the early Church ­ athers, and, apparently, something of a High-­Churchman. He published a vigorF ous defense of the Church of ­England, its liturgy, and its episcopal hierarchy against the deist Thomas Wollaston.33 He also supported the state’s right to bar Quakers, Jews, and Dissenters from full participation in civic life.34 Thomas Allen was a voluminous writer. He was perhaps best known for his Practice of a Holy Life (1716) (see figure 3.2), a practical guide to devotion for families, which was translated into Rus­sian. He also published a long, quasi-­Miltonic poem, The New Birth (1753), in which he attempted to pre­sent the substance of Christian theology in blank verse, for the benefit of servants and c­ hildren. He seems to have entertained unrealistic notions about the good this poem was likely to do, for he stated that his aim was “no less than the regenerating of the w ­ hole British nation.”35 Thomas Allen published a half dozen works, but ­t hese represent only the tip of the iceberg. Several of his published works contain long lists of additional works he had written, or intended to write, and hoped to publish. In a pamphlet of 1753 he listed twenty-­two manuscripts he hoped to publish.36 Two of his most ambitious works w ­ ere a history of the world in twelve volumes, octavo, which he called Archaeologia Universalis,37 and an En­glish translation of five early Church ­Fathers, Polycarp, Ignatius, Hermas, Clement, and Barnabas, with notes based on the patristic scholarship of Ussher, Vossius, and Pearson.38 Allen spent many years casting about for money to get ­t hese works published. He approached men of letters such as Zachary Grey, Arthur Bedford, Thomas Hearne, Richard Rawlinson, and William Law, and noblemen such as the Earl of Huntingdon, the Earl of Rockingham, the Earl of Hardwicke, and the Duke of Montagu.39 Grey and Bedford agreed to write letters of recommendation,40 but Hearne concluded that Allen was “crazed.”41 The Earl of Hardwicke gave Allen three guineas, allegedly to help offset the cost of paper but prob­ably just to get rid of him.42 It seems that Allen’s solicitations w ­ ere unsuccessful, for he died without publishing e­ ither work, while reading eve­ning prayers at Kettering in May of 1755. Returning to the younger Allen, Edmund seems to have been the seventh of ten ­children. He grew up in a ­family that was battered by a series of tragedies. In 1716, two years before he was born, his m ­ other fell into “a fit of despair” and killed one of her sons. She then attempted to commit suicide by cutting her own throat. She recovered from her injuries and was brought to trial, but was acquitted. She went on to have several more ­children, including Edmund, but further hardships awaited. Several of the Allen ­children died of disease before reaching adulthood, and the Reverend Thomas Allen had the bad fortune to outlive all but two of his ten ­children.43 ­There is no evidence that Edmund Allen received a university education prior to ­going into the printing business. At some point, prob­ably in the mid-1730s, he was apprenticed to John Applebee (d. ca. 1750), a London printer, with offices “against the Bolt and Tun in Fleet Street.”44 By June of 1742, his ­father could report that he was “out of his time” as an apprentice but “not yet set up” as a printer in his own right.45

Figure 3.2. ​Thomas Allen, rector of Kettering (1681–1755); frontispiece to Practice of a Holy Life (1716). Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

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In July of 1742, Thomas Allen tried to convince the Earl of Huntingdon to publish several of his works and also find a position for his son Edmund: If my son w ­ ere set up in his trade possibly my manuscripts would be a good inheritance to him. I last year intended to have settled him at Leicester, where he should have carried on a newspaper with Mr. Unwin, and been partner with him; but his qualifications render him fit for almost any employment; perhaps your Lordship may find out some better than I can.46

In 1743, the solicitous ­father approached Joseph Pole, a bookseller in Eaton, to see if he would take Edmund on as an apprentice.47 ­A fter this failed, Allen approached Richard Rawlinson. His primary objective was to secure money for the publication of his universal history, but he also suggested that Rawlinson might want to hire young Edmund as an amanuensis for his projected continuation of Anthony Wood’s Atheniae Oxonienses: “As you write a bad hand yourself I wish you would hire my son as your amanuensis. His name is Edmund Allen. He served his time to Applebee the Printer and is a sober and religious youth and not unlearned.”48 Three years ­later, in 1746, it appears that Edmund Allen was still not settled. Thomas Allen wrote to Samuel Brewster: “I am glad to see Mr. Gardiner print[s] works for himself, in­de­pen­dent of the Booksellers, and glad I should be to see my son his equal and partner, or at pre­sent his assistant. If my copies [i.e., the copyrights to his works], my money, and estate, can make him his partner, I ­shall not be slack to promote him with my power.”49 During ­t hese years, Edmund Allen seems to have been actively involved in his ­father’s efforts to publish his works. He went with his ­father to visit the Oxford bookseller and publisher Sackville Parker (another friend of Johnson’s), and he ­carried letters and proposals from his f­ather to William Law and vari­ous other ­people his f­ ather thought might endorse, underwrite, or print his works.50 The earliest title page I have found that lists Edmund Allen as a printer with his own business is dated 1752.51 However, not all eighteenth-­century title pages identify the printer, so it is pos­si­ble that Allen began printing some years ­earlier. An ECCO search produces a list of roughly forty books he printed from 1752 to 1784. Johnson made some efforts to drum up business for Allen. In a letter of 1778 to Thomas Cadell, he urged Cadell to use Allen for any printing he might be assigned by the Royal Acad­emy: I take the liberty of requesting, and I request with ­great earnestness, that for anything to be printed for the Acad­emy, you ­w ill make use [of] Mr. Allen’s press in Boltcourt. Mr. Allen has hitherto done the work without payment, and having so long labored only to his loss, it is reasonable that he should at last have some profit, at least some recompense. Mr. Allen’s business is not extensive, and he ­will be glad of work which greater printers do not want, nor value, and if you continue him in the employment you ­w ill confer a g­ reat ser­v ice upon, Sir, your most ­humble servant, Sam. Johnson. (Letters, 3:104–305; see also 2:225)

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Johnson makes it sound as if Allen was struggling financially. However, t­ here is some evidence to the contrary. In her history, Brooke reports that Allen made a ­great fortune from his work as a printer—so much so that when he died in 1784, he left an estate of £60,000 (H3, D1).52 Edmund Allen was married, but, according to Brooke, he and his wife had no ­children of their own. Allen ­adopted one of his wife’s nieces (H3–­H4). His wife died before him.53 Allen was a member of the Essex Head Club, which Johnson and his friend Richard Brocklesby founded in 1783. He died in July of 1784, just a few months before Johnson. He left his estate to his ­adopted ­daughter, who married Mr. Beasley, his successor in the printing business (H3).54

Charles Allen The Reverend Charles Allen (ca. 1730–1795) was the son of Timothy Allen (ca. 1694– 1762), vicar of Betchworth (or Beachworth) in Surrey and Ifield in Sussex, and his wife Hannah (d. 1769).55 In July of 1736, at the age of six, Charles Allen was enrolled as a chorister at Magdalen College School, in Oxford (where his ­father had been a clerk from 1711 to 1722). For the next eleven years, he remained a chorister, studying, drawing a modest stipend from the foundation, and singing, once or twice a day, at choral ser­v ices in Magdalen College Chapel. He matriculated as a university student at Magdalen College on 15 May 1746, aged sixteen. In 1747 he resigned his position as a chorister and accepted a position as a clerk of Magdalen College. He held this position u ­ ntil 1750 but, oddly enough, did not take any Oxford degrees ­u ntil almost twenty years l­ater—­BA, 11 February 1766, MA, 14 July 1766.56 It is unlikely that he was in residence for this entire period, but it is not clear what he was d ­ oing in the early 1750s, or why he took no degrees u ­ ntil 1766. In 1757, Allen was ordained, and, in 1765, he was presented with the vicarage of St. Nicholas, Rochester, in Kent, a living in the gift of the bishop of Rochester. In 1779, he was presented with the rectorship of Westbeare (or Westbere), also in Kent, a living in the gift of the crown.57 He held ­these two livings si­mul­ta­neously, by dispensation. In 1779, he became domestic chaplain to Robert Shirley (1723–1887), Sixth Earl Ferrers. As we have seen, ­t here is some evidence to suggest that Allen tapped Johnson’s friend William Shaw to serve as a curate for one of his livings circa 1780.58 Brooke rec­ords some information about Charles Allen’s ­family: “About 1769, being some forty years of age, he married Sarah Boyle, second ­daughter of Dr. Wm Boyle . . . ​of Jamaica” (H4–­H5). Allen and his wife had four sons and two ­daughters. William Allen has already been mentioned.59 The other c­ hildren included William’s twin ­sister (Isabella), a younger s­ister (Sarah), and three b ­ rothers (John, Charles, and Henry).60 Charles Allen’s wife, Sarah, died in a terrible accident in March of 1794. She fell asleep while reading, and a candle fell on her muslin handkerchief. Her clothes caught on fire, and the burns she received proved fatal (H5). Charles Allen died a year l­ ater, in March of 1795, “­after a long illness” (H5).

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Very ­little is known of Charles Allen’s character; however, as we have seen, his grand­daughter described him as a man of “pleasant temper.”

John Allen John Allen (ca. 1720–1784) was Charles Allen’s older b ­ rother. He matriculated from Brasenose College, Oxford, in February of 1736 or 1737, aged sixteen, but transferred to All Souls College at some point and took a BA in February of 1740 or 1741. Six years ­later, in February of 1746 or 1747, he took an MA from St. Alban Hall.61 In March of that year, John Allen became vice principal of Magdalen Hall, Oxford.62 Magdalen Hall should not be confused with Magdalen College. It was a separate institution, one of four halls that had survived from the medieval era and ­were still enrolling students during the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century. Magdalen Hall was dissolved in 1874 and is largely forgotten ­today, but the institution produced some distinguished alumni, including William Tyndale, the biblical translator; Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, the historian of the ­great rebellion; John Wilkins, the author of Mathematical Magick; and Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan. During John Allen’s tenure, Magdalen Hall seems to have had about forty students on its rolls at any given time. Allen continued to serve as vice principal of this ancient hall for the better part of four de­cades, ­until shortly before his death in September of 1784. A relatively full obituary of John Allen was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine shortly ­after his death: At Beachworth, Surrey, in his 63d year, the rev. John Allen, M.A. vice-­principal of Magdalen-­Hall, Oxford. He may be said to have passed almost his w ­ hole life in the University. He was for many years under-­librarian of the Bodleian library; afterwards tutor, and vice-­principal, of Magdalen-­hall. By his attendance at the library, he gratified his appetite for reading, and looked into as many books as most men of his time: but he never wrote nor published any ­thing but a few Sermons. He was inducted into a college living, but obtained no higher preferment. But, though he never r­ ose to a prebendal stall, he enjoyed what was in his possession, which was more than a competency, with g­ reat thankfulness of heart. His residence at Oxford, which was only interrupted by being a private tutor in Berkshire for some time, occasioned his frequently serving the office of pro-­ proctor. Whilst in that station, he made a Latin speech, in which language he was a master, in the Theatre, on his presenting the King of Denmark to the degree of Doctor of Laws. He always mentioned this honourable, though l­ ittle, circumstance, with plea­sure, for he was a friend to kings. He was deeply read in civil and ecclesiastical history, and in polemical divinity. If he was a low-­churchman in politics, in religious affairs he was thoroughly episcopal, and even an Athanasian. He was very convivial; his conversation entertaining and instructive. . . . ​ His moral character was unimpeached. His parts ­were rather useful than brilliant, and he was fitted for a station that demands learning, patience, and steadi-

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ness. He went to take his leave of the University, and of his Hall, before he died; and on his return into the country, in an irrecoverable illness, he quitted the mortal scene, where, to the satisfaction of himself, his relations and his acquaintance, he had performed his part as well as most men. He was never married: a mode of life that would have come to soon to him in his youth, and in the decline of life is almost always too late.63

Some additional information about John Allen can be found in the collections of William Fletcher, Esq., an Oxford city alderman and antiquarian, who gathered materials for a history of Oxford University in the early years of the nineteenth ­century. In his collections, Fletcher mentions the account in the Gentleman’s Magazine, but he disputes two particulars in that account. He denies that Allen was ever employed at the Bodleian, and he also denies that Allen gave a speech in honor of the king of Denmark.64 As far as the first charge is concerned, the evidence suggests that Fletcher was mistaken. An old rec­ord book cited by William Dunn Macray in his Annals of the Bodleian seems to confirm the account in the Gentleman’s Magazine: it rec­ords that a John Allen was appointed as an under-­librarian in 1740 or 1741, about the time our John Allen took his BA.65 Fletcher seems to be on firmer ground when it comes to his second charge. Christian VII, king of Denmark, visited Oxford in the fall of 1768, and, although apparently a thoroughly worthless individual, he was presented with an honorary DCL degree. Th ­ ere are several accounts of his visit, but none of the accounts I have inspected mentions Allen. ­These accounts indicate that the principal representatives of the university on this occasion w ­ ere two other friends of Johnson, Arthur van Sittart and Nathan Wetherell.66 It is pos­si­ble that Allen was also involved in some way, but it seems unlikely that he was one of the principal personages. ­W hether or not John Allen presented a Latin oration on the occasion just mentioned, t­here can be no doubt that he had a reputation as a formidable Latin scholar. The anonymous writer of the obituary notice in the Gentleman’s Magazine stated that Allen was “a master” of Latin, and this is confirmed by other sources, including Brooke. As we have seen, she stated that her great-­uncle “was considered, even at Oxford, the highest Latin authority. . . . ​It was said that he roared the language forth & woe to the poor student who wrote or spoke false quantities” (H6, D1). John Allen flagged what he took to be a false quantity in what is now one of the most famous epitaphs in ­England—­t he Latin epitaph engraved on the monument to Shakespeare in Stratford Church. The engraved text reads, “ivdicio pylivm, genio socratem, arte maronem, terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, olympvs habet” (“him who in judgment was a Nestor, in intellect a Socrates, in art a Vergil, the earth encloses, the populace mourn, and Olympus holds”). Allen suggested ­ ught to be emended to that “genio socratem” introduced an error of quantity and o “genio sophoclem”—­in intellect a Sophocles. He may have been the first to make this suggestion, which has since been repeated by other critics.67

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Figure 3.3. ​The Reverend John Allen. From Bodleian MS Top. Oxon. c. 19, 147. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

Fletcher’s account of John Allen also includes a portrait of Allen. It is a hand-­ drawn sketch of Allen at a lectern, signed “Waller” (see figure 3.3). John Allen published five sermons:68 1. The Two-­Fold Evidence of Adoption, 1758 2. No Ac­cep­tance with God by Faith Only, 1759

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3. The Weakness and Wickedness of Being Righ­teous Over-­Much, 1759 4. The Enthusiast’s Notion of Election to Eternal Life Disprov’d, 1769 5. Associations against the Established Church Indefensible, 1773 In three of ­t hese sermons (items 2, 3, and 4) Allen criticizes “enthusiasm,” Methodism,69 and solifidianism. He takes issue with what he calls “the leading tenet of modern enthusiasm”: the belief that “any one, by suddenly believing that Jesus Christ shed his blood for his sins is instantaneously regenerated and justified; or to use their very language, only believe, and you are saved.”70 Allen denies that men can be instantaneously, irresistibly, and irrevocably saved by faith alone. He accepts that faith is crucial: one cannot be saved without it. But he insists that, while faith is necessary for salvation, it is not a sufficient in and of itself. Men are not instantaneously saved by faith; rather, their faith places them in “a salvable state.” The offer of salvation is conditional, and the individual believer must meet the conditions attached to the offer. He must not only have faith; he must display the fruits of faith by repenting and living according to the gospels. Allen’s views on justification ­were typical of Oxford churchmen of this era. For example, they ­were similar to George Horne’s views, and both Allen and Horne clearly owed a ­great deal to Bishop Bull’s views on justification, as set out in the Harmonia Apostolica (1669–1670).71 To a certain kind of radical Protestant, however, ­these views seemed totally unacceptable; such men felt that Bull and his followers had abandoned the Protestant Reformers’ understanding of justification by faith.72 John Allen viewed Calvinism, with its scheme of eternal, unalterable election, as one kind of enthusiasm, and he made his dislike for Calvinism clear not only in his sermons but also in his relations with Thomas Haweis. Haweis was one of the leaders of the eighteenth-­century evangelical movement. He was also a solifidian and a Calvinist. Haweis was educated at Oxford and was a student at Magdalen Hall for a few years beginning in 1757. ­After speaking out as an evangelical, however, he was driven out of Oxford by John Allen and other opponents of “enthusiasm” and “antinomianism.” 73 Many years ­later, in 1777, Haweis made inquiries about the possibility of obtaining a degree from Oxford. Allen declared that, if he had any say in the ­matter, Haweis would never be awarded an Oxford degree: “As to the spiritual tradesman you mention [Haweis], you may assure him, that he ­will never be graduated in this University. Did he never hear of Glasgow, or the lake of Geneva? Let him dive in the latter, or go to the shops of the former, for what he wants and does not deserve.”74 The abrasive tone of this letter gives some sense of why Allen was “commonly called Bull Allen.”75 Allen’s last published sermon, Associations against the Established Church Indefensible (1773), shows that he opposed the Feather’s Tavern Petition of 1772, which would have ended compulsory subscription to the Thirty-­Nine Articles. It also confirms that Allen was orthodox in his Christology and that he recognized skepticism about the Trinity as one of the moving forces b ­ ehind the petition.76 Thomas Seddon, who studied u ­ nder John Allen at Magdalen Hall, remembered him as a tutor “of no inferior cast,” who was “well qualified to give me all the

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advantages I had lost in the ­earlier part of my education.”77 However, not every­ one was so complimentary. Thomas Haweis and his evangelical friends took a darker view of Allen. Some contemporaries thought that Allen was a Hutchinsonian, one who sought to lessen Newton’s influence on religious m ­ atters. William Bowman, for example, condemned Allen as a “Hutchinsonian cabbalist” who was gnawing away at Newton’s legacy “like a rat.”78 However, I am not convinced that this charge is accurate. Th ­ ere is no criticism of Newton in any of John Allen’s writings; nor is t­ here anything explic­itly Hutchinsonian. Perhaps Thomas Haweis’s biographer, Arthur Wood, came closer to the mark when he described Allen as someone who was connected with Hutchinsonians such as Horne and Jones of Nayland: he was, Wood wrote, “a man of portly figure and violent temper, a High Churchman, an intimate of the Hutchinsonians, an avowed e­ nemy of Methodism, and, in his own esteem, a staunch champion of orthodoxy.”79 Oxford University sent two representatives to Parliament and, as vice principal of a hall, John Allen was one of the members of the university who was allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. In 1750 he voted for the Tory, High-­Church candidate, Roger Newdigate. And in the double election of 1768 he voted for Newdigate and Francis Page, another Tory candidate.80 ­These votes suggest that John Allen was aligned with the “Old Interest” at Oxford. Like so many ­others in his ­family, John Allen was an ordained clergyman. He held two parish livings. In 1762, on the death of his ­father, Timothy Allen, he succeeded him as rector of Ifield, in West Sussex, and, in July of 1781, he was made rector of South Moreton, in Oxfordshire.81 Brooke states that he used the income from the Ifield living to support two of his ­sisters: “A sweet trait in the character of John Allen should not be omitted—­t ho’ prob­ably not very wealthy till having the living of South Moreton in 1781, he allowed two [of his] s­ isters . . . ​to reside at the rectory of Ifield rent ­free & gave them the ­whole proceeds of the Ifield living” (H8). Brooke also indicates that John Allen was also something of a bibliophile. She says that he had “a large and valuable collection of books,” including “many valuable ancient works . . . ​one remarkable one being ‘An Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem.’ ”82 On the basis of what has been presented ­here concerning Johnson’s friendship with John Allen, I think it quite pos­si­ble that a reference in one of Johnson’s letters to “Mr. Allen,” which has long been thought to refer to Edmund Allen, may in fact refer to John Allen. The reference in question occurs in a letter Johnson wrote on 27 October 1757. The recipient of the letter is not specified, but most critics believe that Johnson was prob­ably writing to Thomas Warton, and I agree. ­Here is the text of the letter: Dear Sir: Oct. 27, 1757 I have been thinking and talking with Mr. Allen about some literary business for an inhabitant of Oxford. Many schemes might be plausibly proposed, but at pre­sent ­t hese may be sufficient.

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1. An Ecclesiastical Hist. of ­England. In this t­here are ­g reat materials, which must be compressed into a narrow compass. This book must not exceed 4 vols. 8vo. 2. A Hist. of the Reformation (not of E ­ ngland only but) of Europe.—­This must not exceed the same bulk, and w ­ ill be full of events, and very entertaining. 3. The Life of Richard the First. 4. The Life of Edward the Confessor. All ­t hese are works for which the requisite materials may be found at Oxford, and any of ­t hese well executed would be well received. I impart ­t hese designs to you in confidence that what you do not make use of yourself s­ hall revert to me, uncommunicated to any other. The schemes of a writer are his property, and his revenue, and therefore they must not be made common. I am, Sir, Your most ­humble Servant, Sam. Johnson. (Letters, 1:155–156)

Redford and other editors have concluded that the “Mr. Allen” mentioned in the first sentence of this letter must be Edmund Allen. This may, indeed, be the case. The fact that, according to John Wilson Croker, the original of this letter was found in Edmund Allen’s papers certainly supports this conclusion. But what makes me won­der is the subject m ­ atter of the letter. If Johnson was interested in identifying ideas for scholarly proj­ects that might be undertaken using materials in Oxford libraries, why would he discuss the ­matter with Edmund Allen? Edmund Allen seems not to have received a university education. Although his f­ ather described him as “not unlearned,” he is not known to have had any scholarly interests, and, as a London printer, he would presumably have known relatively ­little about manuscripts on deposit at Oxford. Would it not have made more sense for Johnson to confer with John Allen? He was an Oxford don who had resided in Oxford for twenty years, he had worked in the Bodleian Library, and he was said to have looked into more books than most men of his day. He is also said to have been an expert on general history, ecclesiastical history, and theology—­t he subjects mentioned in the letter. We have already seen another letter from Johnson to Warton, dated 1 June  1758, just a few months ­later, in which Johnson refers to John Allen as “Mr. Allen, of Magdalene Hall.” Might the “Mr. Allen” mentioned in this letter be the same person? The fact that the letter was found in Edmund Allen’s papers has previously been regarded as conclusive, but ­little was known about Johnson’s friendship with John Allen when that conclusion was reached, and it is not necessarily fatal for my conjecture b ­ ecause Edmund Allen and John Allen w ­ ere cousins and ­were in regular contact. In short, while I do not believe that the evidence is conclusive, I think it is quite likely that the man Johnson conferred with about Oxford-­based scholarly proj­ects was the vice principal of Magdalen Hall. If this is true, then it might also be the case that Johnson became acquainted with John Allen first and met other members of the Allen f­ amily through him.83 By way of conclusion, I w ­ ill point out that it is not difficult to imagine why Johnson might have entertained a high opinion of the Reverend John Allen. John

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Allen was a clergyman, an Oxford don, a supporter of “old interest” candidates, a distinguished Latinist, a book collector, a scholar well read in ecclesiastical history and theology, a strenuous defender of the Church of ­England, a critic of Calvinism, and a believer in conditional salvation. He was, in short, exactly the sort of person one would expect Johnson to like.

notes I wish to thank the Earhart Foundation for underwriting the travel and research that led to this article. I am also grateful to the Bodleian Library, the University of ­Virginia Library, and to many individuals who have helped me with specific inquiries, including Robin Darwall-­ Smith, Robert Petre, James Caudle, Gordon Turnbull, Thomas Bonnell, Sally Gilbert, Cindy O’Halloran, Alan Moss, Gabriel Roberts, Jayne Pearson, Alyson Shipley, Gerald Fox, Roger Tutton, ­Father Paul Chavasse, John Frederick, Julian Pooley, Allen Reddick, and Robert DeMaria. 1.  It is not clear when Johnson and Edmund Allen first met. Boswell characterized Allen as “a very old acquaintance” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964], 3:269). The two had certainly met by 1759, when Allen loaned Johnson six guineas. See Johnson’s letter to his ­mother, 13 January 1759, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1992–1994), 1:175n4, and vol. 1 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam Jr., with Donald and Mary Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 89. Their friendship may have begun as early as 1756, when Edmund Allen began printing the Universal Visiter, to which Johnson is believed to have contributed. 2.  Johnson’s letter to John Taylor, dated 4 April 1776, was written from No. 8 Bolt Court (Letters, 2.316 and n1). Johnson moved into the Bolt Court apartment at some point before this, prob­ably in early 1776 but possibly in late 1775. An illustration of the h ­ ouse can be seen in Charles John Smith, Graphic Illustrations of the Life and Times of Samuel Johnson, LLD (London: n.p., 1837), which is viewable online. The building was destroyed by fire in 1807. 3.  “On the Allen and Olney ­Family of that Ilk,” a history of the Allen f­amily, written by Mary Allen Brooke, is included in a larger, and very miscellaneous, collection of documents, Bodleian MS. Eng. Misc. c. 882. Brooke’s history begins on fol. 168r and continues to 175v in the Bodleian foliation. 4.  The information on the genealogical chart in this essay is consistent with Brooke’s ­family history in most re­spects. However, in a few cases, I have replaced the dates Brooke set down in her history with dates from reliable printed sources. I have also set aside Brooke’s account of her great-­great grand­father, given on pages H2–­H3, which seems to be erroneous. Brooke wrote that she did not know her great-­great-­grandfather’s first name, but she believed he was a clergyman who officiated in three Yorkshire parishes, Beverley Minster, Cottingham, and Welton. However, it seems that she was mistaken. I have found no evidence that anyone named Allen held any of ­these livings at any time from 1660 to 1750. On the other hand, I have uncovered compelling evidence that Brooke’s great-­great-­grandfather was, in fact, Thomas Allen (d. 1699), an Oxford baker. Two of this man’s sons, Thomas Allen (1681–1755) and Timothy Allen (1695–1762), enrolled in Oxford colleges, and the entries on ­these men in Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses agree that their ­father was Thomas Allen, of Oxford, a plebeian; see Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, early series, 4 vols. (London, 1891), 1:18. One of the entries in Foster indicates that Thomas Allen (d. 1699) was the son of yet another Thomas Allen, who was chamberlain of Oxford in the seventeenth ­century. This is confirmed by Thomas Hearne’s diary entry for 11 June 1731, in Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1885–1921), 10:426. Additional confirmation can be found in the parish registers of St. Peter in the East Church, Oxford, which rec­ord the burial of Thomas Allen Sr. “a baker,” in 1687 and Thomas Allen Jr. also a baker, in 1699; St. Peter in the East Oxford, Parish

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Registers, digitized from Colin Harris, Oxfordshire Parish Registers & Bishop’s Transcripts, 7th ed., accessed electronically via CD-­ROM issued by the Oxfordshire F ­ amily History Society, Oxfordshire Parish Register Transcripts, disk OXF-­OX04. The parish baptism rec­ords for 1681–1698 also confirm that Thomas Allen (d. 1699) was the f­ ather of the two Oxford students mentioned above, as well as several other ­children. But the most persuasive piece of evidence that the Oxford baker was the true progenitor of the Allen ­family comes from Oxford city property rec­ords, which indicate that a ­house located north of what is now 57 High Street, just outside the old city wall, was leased from the city for four generations by a series of members of the Allen ­family. The right to renew this lease was passed down from husband to ­widow, and ­father to son, as an inheritance. Thomas Allyn, a “whitebaker,” took out the lease in May 1666; the lease was renewed by him in March 1680/81, by “Thomas Allen” (evidently Thomas Allen, d. 1699, the son of the original lessor) in March 1692/93, by “Eliz. Allen, ­widow” in August 1708, by “Thomas Allen of Kettering, clerk” in August 1726, and by “Edmund Allen of London, printer” in August 1755; see H. E. Salter, Oxford City Properties (Oxford, 1926), 312– 313. This series of lease renewals allows us to trace a line of inheritance from Johnson’s friend Edmund Allen back three generations, all the way to Thomas Allen, “whitebaker” (d. 1687). On the strength of t­ hese documents, I have ventured to set aside Brooke’s claims that her great-­ great-­grandfather was a Yorkshire clergyman. 5.  Brooke states that her ­father, William Allen, was born on 5 August 1770 and baptized the same day at St. Nicholas, Rochester, by his ­father, who was the vicar of that church (H5). 6.  Brooke seems to have misidentified the head of the Merchant Taylor’s School. In 1781, the headmaster of was Thomas Green. See H. B. Wilson, The History of Merchant-­Taylor’s School, from Its Foundation to the Pre­sent Time (London, 1814), p. 1178. I have been unable to discover any master named Prince during this era. 7.  Chatham is a port town on the River Medway, just east of Rochester. It is home to the Royal Dock Yard. 8.  A “four-­in-­hand” was a carriage drawn by four ­horses. 9.  The Bell Savage Inn, on the north side of what is now Ludgate Hill, in London, was a public ­house and coaching inn from the 1400s ­until its de­mo­li­tion in 1873. It would have been only about a five-­minute walk from the Bell Savage to Edmund Allen’s office in Bolt Court; and, of course, the trip would have taken even less time in a carriage. 10.  A half crown was worth two and a half shillings, or thirty pence, which would have been quite a lot of money for a young boy. 11.  See n4, above, for more details. 12.  Quoted in R. B. Adam, Cata­logue of the Johnsonian Collection of R. B. Adam (privately printed, 1921), no page, s.v. “Allen (Edmund).” See also Johnson’s remarks in vari­ous letters written a­ fter Allen died: “dear Mr. Allen” (Letters, 4:358); “poor dear Allen he was a good man” (4:369); “Allen . . . ​a very worthy man, and to me a very kind and officious neighbor” (4:390); “The death of dear Mr. Allen gave me pain” (4:406); “he was a very good man” (4:424). 13.  G. B. Hill suggested (Life, 1:336, 6:5) that the person referred to might, possibly, be one Hollyer Allen (born ca. 1730, matric. Magdalen Hall 1749, BA 1753). This suggestion has been repeated in other publications, including Letters, 1:163n5. It turns out, however, that this is not the right man. 14.  George Berkeley’s letter mentioning Johnson and his plan to write a life of Bishop Berkeley was printed by George Gleig in A Voyage to Abyssinia, by ­Father Jerome Lobo, Translated by Samuel Johnson (London, 1789), 4–6. 15.  Jones of Nayland’s letter to Boswell was first printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. I quote from The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon (London, 1894). The letter begins on p. 538; the passage I quote is on p. 540. For more on this letter, see Matthew M. Davis, “Johnson and Jones of Nayland,” Johnsonian News Letter 64, no. 1 (September 2013): 11–16. In the passage quoted, when Jones mentions “the evil times which ­were approaching,” he presumably has the French Revolution in mind. 16.  On William Shaw and his connection with Johnson and the Ossian disputes, see Kenneth D. MacDonald, “The Rev. William Shaw—­Pioneer Gaelic Lexicographer,” Transactions

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of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 50 (1976–1978): 1–19; Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in G ­ reat Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). 17.  Norman Page, A Dr. Johnson Chronology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 59. 18.  For Johnson’s 1783 trip to Rochester, see his letter to Boswell dated 3 July 1783 (Letters, 4:165) and Johnson’s own brief notes from the trip, printed in Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, 360. 19.  For information on Bouvier (or Bourvier) Marshall and his ­father Thomas Mervyn (or Mervin) Marshall, see William Richard Drake, Fasciculus Mervinensis: Being Notes Historical, Genealogical, and Heraldic of the ­Family of Mervyn (London, 1873), 68–69, and Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, ­later series, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891), 3:916, 918. Thomas Mervyn Marshall was christened 6 August 1753. He matriculated from Magdalen Hall, where he would have been ­under the superintendence of John Allen, 20 March 1771, and took his BA in 1775. He was rector of Bow, in Devon, for many years prior to his death in 1794. 20.  It seems unlikely that Johnson and John Allen knew each other when Johnson was compiling the first edition of the Dictionary. Johnson withdrew from Oxford in 1729 and apparently did not return u ­ ntil his ­great work was virtually finished in 1754, so he presumably would not have met Allen in Oxford prior to that date. The two might have met in London, but it seems unlikely that Johnson would have viewed Allen as a valuable helper at this time, since Allen was still in the early years of his ­career. 21.  Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 5, 100–109, 118–120. 22.  According to Joseph Craddock, Johnson’s friend Tom Davies also made fun of Edmund Allen’s mannerisms—­a nd went a good deal further than Boswell. Joseph Cradock, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 4:299. 23.  Boswell prints Johnson’s letter to Warton, dated 14 April 1758 in the Life (1:336), but he does not identify the “Mr. Allen” mentioned in the letter. 24.  Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1:420n1. 25.  William Allen’s studies at Magdalen College School are noted in John Rouse Bloxam, A Register of the Presidents, Fellows, Demies, Instructors . . . ​and Other Members of . . . ​Magdalen College in the University of Oxford, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1853–1881). The entry on William Allen is at 1:199: “1778 Allen, William. adm[itted] 10 Oct. res[igned] 1782 Matr[iculated] At Magd. Hall, 13 July, 1789, aet. [at the age of] 18. Son of Charles Allen, of Rochester, Kent, cler[gyman] B.A. 4 March, 1794.” For this and additional information on Magdalen College, Magdalen College School, and Oxford I am much indebted to Robin Darwall-­Smith. 26.  William Allen’s time at the Merchant Taylors’ School is documented in Merchant Taylors’ School Register 1561–1934, ed. E. P. Hart (London, 1936), which contains the following entry: “ALLEN, WILLIAM 1782–89; b. 5.8.1770; s. of Rev. Charles, of Rochester, Kent; Magd. Hall, Oxf. 1789.” I wish to express my thanks to Ms. Sally Gilbert, an archivist at MTS, who supplied me with this information in a personal email dated 25 September 2013. 27.  William’s Allen’s matriculation at Magdalen Hall in 1789 is noted in the entries described in the last two notes, and also in an entry in Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses: “Allen, William, s. Charles, of Rochester, Kent, cler. MAGDALEN HALL, matric. 13 July, 1789, aged 18, B.A. 1794.” ­There can, I think, be l­ ittle question that the rec­ords described in this note and the two previous notes are accurate. All three identify William Allen as the son of the Rev. Charles Allen, of Rochester, in Kent, so t­ here is ­little possibility that they refer to some other William Allen. Also, the three entries are entirely consistent with one another, and the dates for Allen’s arrivals and departures at the three educational institutions fit together perfectly, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 28.  The “1778 scenario” can be sketched as follows: perhaps Brooke got the dates wrong and her ­father was actually taken to meet Johnson in the fall of 1778, just before he was taken up to Oxford to be enrolled as a chorister at Magdalen College School (MCS). This would solve a ­couple of major prob­lems. Johnson was still alive in 1778, and so was John Allen. Moreover, if young William was slated to be taken up to Oxford the next day, ­t here would have been good reasons for Johnson to mention John Allen during the conversation and slip the boy a

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coin. Perhaps young William was not being taken to study with John Allen at Magdalen Hall, as Brooke seems to have thought; perhaps he was ­going to lodge with his ­uncle, or to be ­under his indirect supervision, while studying at MCS. At the very least, we can say that a visit to Magdalen College School would have brought Charles and William Allen to the very doorstep of Magdalen Hall, for t­ hese two institutions actually shared a single building, and the entrance to Magdalen College School was just a few yards from the entrance to Magdalen Hall. Changing the date to 1778, however, would also cause a ­couple of new prob­lems. One of ­t hese involves William Allen’s time at the Merchant Taylors School (MTS). It is hard to see how he could have fled from his studies at MTS in 1778, since the rec­ords suggest that he was not enrolled ­t here ­until 1782. Also, if we change the date of the meeting to 1778, this would mean that William Allen was only eight when the events took place, and one won­ders if a sea captain would have agreed to hire him as a cabin boy at such a tender age. In short, while the 1778 scenario solves several prob­lems, it creates a c­ ouple of new ones. I do not see any way to fully square the sequence of events in Allen’s story with the sequence described in the academic rec­ords, and this makes me think that something may have been altered in the in telling of the story. 29.  Pat Rogers, The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996) and several other Johnson-­related books indicate that Edmund Allen was born in 1726. The correct date is given in the revised ODNB article on Thomas Allen, which draws on parish rec­ords. 30.  On Thomas Allen, see the entries in the new and old editions of the ODNB; the sources listed at the end of ­these two entries, especially Rawlinson’s manuscript collections on Oxford writers, Bodleian MS. Rawl. J. folios 23ff. and MS. Rawl. J 4o fol. 184r; baptismal rec­ords of St. Peter in the East, Oxford, for 1681; Robert Barlow Gardiner, The Registers of Wadham College part 1 (Oxford, 1889), 404; Foster Alumni Oxonienses, early series, 1:18; and the account in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eigh­teenth ­Century, 8 vols. (London, 1817–1858), 3:789–799. Nichols mentions a diary chronicling the last six years of Thomas Allen’s life, which was in Nichols’s possession when he wrote his account of Thomas Allen. This might shed much light on the lives of Thomas Allen and Edmund Allen. Unfortunately, the editor of the Nichols Archive Proj­ect, Julian Pooley, informs me that this document does not appear to be in the surviving Nichols papers. 31.  Allen explains why he began saying twice-­daily prayers and celebrating the eucharist more frequently in MS. Rawl. J. fol. 42r. 32.  Rev. Henry Lindsay, “Kettering,” in Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society 3 (1874): 263–264. 33.  For Thomas Allen’s critique of Woolston, see An Apology for the Church of ­England and Vindication of her Learned Clergy; or, The Clergyman’s F ­ ree Gift to Mr. Woolston (London, 1725). 34.  For Allen’s defense of the establishment of the Church of ­England, see MS. Rawl. J. fol. 35r; the list of MS works he appended to his Proposal for a F ­ ree and Unexpensive Election of Parliament Men (London, 1753); and Isaac Disraeli, “Toleration,” in Curiosities of Lit­er­a­ture, Second Series, 3 vols. (Boston, 1834), 2:102. 35. Nichols, Illustrations, 3:798. 36.  The fullest list of Allen’s manuscripts and proj­ects can be found in Parliament Men, in a fourteen-­page appendix which follows the main text and is paginated separately. 37.  For descriptions of Allen’s Archaeologia Universalis, see Nichols, Illustrations, 3:795; Parliament Men, appendix, 6–8; Manuscripts of R. R. Hastings, 36–37, and MS. Rawl. J. fol. 34r. 38.  For descriptions of Allen’s translation of the church f­ athers, see Parliament Men, appendix, 1, 9–10, and the printed proposal inserted at MS. Rawl. J. fol. 30r. 39.  See Nichols, Illustrations, 3:795, MS. Rawl. J. fol. 29r, and a letter from Thomas Allen to the Earl and Countess of Huntington, dated 14 July 1742 and delivered by Edmund Allen, which was printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission in Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, Esq., 4 vols. (1934), 3:35–37. 40.  See Allen, Parliament Men, appendix, 8–9.

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41. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, 8:345 (12 March 1725); see also 8:217 (27 May 1724) and 10:426 (11 June 1731). 42.  See “Rawlinson’s Athenae Oxonienses” in Oxford Bibliographical Society: Proceedings and Papers 1 (1922–1926): 70. 43.  MS. Rawl. J. fols. 28r–­v. 44.  Thomas Allen to Richard Rawlinson, 17 March 1738, in Bodleian MS. Rawl. J. fol. 33r. John Applebee was a London printer who specialized in pamphlets, biographies of celebrated criminals, and prison-­house memoirs. He had a shop in Bolt Court from ca. 1732, and it is pos­si­ble that Edmund Allen took over this shop when Applebee died in 1750. 45.  MS. Rawl. J. fol. 34v. 46.  Manuscripts of R. R. Hastings, 35. 47.  MS. Rawl. J. fol. 38c. 48.  MS. Rawl. J. fol. 42xr. 49. Nichols, Illustrations, 3:795–796. 50.  MS. Rawl. J. fols. 37r–40r; Manuscripts of R. R. Hastings, 35. 51.  William Cudworth, A Copy of a Letter Sent to the Revd. Mr K *** Concerning Repentance, printed by E. Allen, in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, London, 1752. 52.  I had hoped to test Brooke’s claims about Edmund Allen’s wealth by inspecting his ­w ill, but I have not been able to locate the document. 53.  In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, dated 28 June 1783, Johnson seems to allude to Mrs. Allen’s death as if it ­were a relatively recent event (Letters, 4:160). However, her death seems to have occurred several years ­earlier. A notice of her death ran in the Daily Advertiser for 6 February 1777. 54.  For the Essex Head Club, see the entry in the ODNB. For Allen’s involvement, see Letters, 4:331–332, for 7 June 1784. 55.  On Timothy Allen, see Brooke’s history, H3–­H4, D1; Foster Alumni Oxonienses, early series, 1:18; Bloxam, Register, 2:87, 1:160; register of baptisms, St. Peter in the East, Oxford, for 1695; and Clergy of the Church of E ­ ngland Database: theclergydatabase​.­org​.­u k, accessed online 7 April 2014. He is CCEd person ID 69195 and also 60828. Brooke states that Timothy and Hannah Allen had twelve ­children, and that Charles Allen was the eldest son (H4). However, Oxford matriculation rec­ords indicate that John Allen was in fact older than Charles. 56.  On Charles Allen, see Brooke’s history, H4–­H5; Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, ­later series, 1:16; Bloxam, Register, 1:160; Letters, 4:321–322; and the Clergy of the Church of ­England Database, in which his CCEd person ID is 72461. He is not to be confused with the Charles Allen who accepted the living of ­Little Dunham in 1748 (Person ID 121218). 57.  For details on Charles Allen’s two livings, see Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 12 vols. (Canterbury, 1797–1801), 4:153–160, 9:72–74. The bishop who presented Allen with the living of St. Nicholas, Rochester, was Zachary Pearce, who sent Johnson etymologies for the first edition of the Dictionary. 58.  In the Clergy of the Church of E ­ ngland Database, William Shaw’s Person ID is 40530. However, the rec­ords collected ­t here do not include any reference to his time in Rochester. Nor have I been able to turn up any other confirmation that he served ­t here, although Brooke indicates that he not only stayed but overstayed his welcome. 59.  William Allen grew up to be a clergyman, like his f­ ather. He was ordained in 1793 and served for some time as curate of Hoo and Higham, both in Kent. He is also said to have served as curate for his ­father, at St. Nicholas, Rochester (Brooke’s history, H6). ­After his ­father’s death in 1795, he served as a military chaplain for the 93rd regiment of foot (H6) and also served for several years in the navy. In July 1797 he married Anne Harvey Olney, of Woodford Bridge, Essex, with whom he had nine ­children (H7), one of whom was Mary Allen, ­later Mary Allen Brooke. By the 1820s William Allen was living on an army pension. He died on 6 May 1829 and was buried in Charles Church, Plymouth (H7). 60.  William Allen married into the Olney f­amily, and Sarah Allen married into the Chavasse f­amily; descendants of both families have done genealogical research, which has assisted me in the writing of this article, and I thank them for their help.

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61.  See Foster, Alumni Oxonieses, ­later series, 1:17. 62.  So indicates William Fletcher, the Oxford antiquarian. See Bodleian MS. Top. Oxon. C19, fol. 147. 63.  Gentleman’s Magazine 55 (January 1785): 75–76. 64.  MS. Top. Oxon. C19, fol. 147. 65.  William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598–­A.D. 1867 (Oxford, 1868), 158. 66.  On King Christian of Denmark’s visit to Oxford, see Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 14 September 1768; C. F. Lascelles Wraxall, The Life and Times of Her Majesty Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark and Norway, 3 vols. (London, 1864), 1:143–144; John Richard Green, Oxford during the Last C ­ entury (London, 1859), 18. 67.  See B. Roland Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, Translations and Commentary, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1940), 2:543–547. 68.  In addition to t­ hese five published sermons, ­t here are five manuscript sermons on deposit in the Bodleian MS. Eng. Th. D. 77. Three of ­t hese contain clear indications that they ­were written by John Allen, and it is probable that the two sermons without such indications ­were also written by him. The sermons list dates and locations where they w ­ ere preached. Most ­were presented first at Oxford, presumably by John Allen, and l­ ater at Rochester, presumably by his b ­ rother Charles. A few ­were also preached at other locations, and on l­ ater dates, prob­ ably by William Allen. Sermon sharing was, of course, a common practice. 69.  Allen’s sermons ­were understood to be critiques of Methodism. See Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, 3 vols. (New York: Harper ­Brothers, 1872), 2:428–429; H. C. Decanver, Cata­logue of Works in Refutation of Methodism, from Its Origin in 1729 to the Pre­sent Time (Philadelphia, 1846), 7. 70.  John Allen, No Ac­cep­tance with God by Faith Only (London, 1761), 8. 71.  Horne preached against solifidianism and antinomianism and drew heavi­ly on Bishop Bull in Works Wrought through Faith a Condition of our Justification (Oxford, 1761). For a discussion of how En­glish views of justification changed over time, and the importance of Bull in this pro­cess, see Alastair E. McGrath, “The Emergence of the Anglican Tradition on Justification 1600–1700,” Churchman 98, no. 1 (1984): 28–43. 72.  In his Life of Sir Richard Hill (London, 1839), Edwin Sidney compares John Allen to the Tractarians. He states that, although the “moral orthodoxy” of eighteenth-­century Oxford might seem to have l­ittle in common with “the semi-­Romanism of t­ hese times” (that is, the views of the Tractarians), both approaches tend equally “to impair the princi­ples of the Reformation” (129). He asserts that “the pulpit of St. Mary’s, Oxford, was in the last c­ entury continually occupied by welcome impugners of the leading doctrines of the Reformation,” and he gives, as an example, John Allen and his sermon “No Ac­cep­tance with God by Faith Only.” Allen and the eighteenth-­century Oxford divines taught a “cold morality,” with too much emphasis on “dry logic” and “dull ethics.” Newman and the Tractarians, by contrast, placed two much emphasis on baptism, the eucharist, and the externals of worship. And yet t­ hese two approaches had something in common: both led away from “the good old truths” of the Reformation” (147). “The anti-­evangelical demonstrations of the last ­century [e.g., Allen’s sermons against “enthusiasm”] and the revival of Popish doctrines and ceremonies now [i.e., the movement of Newman and Keble], have, though in widely dif­fer­ent ways, the same tendency to overturn the ­great leading tenet of the gospel—­justification by faith. It m ­ atters not ­whether we place or justification in moral works, or refer it to the efficacy of ordinances; the effect is the same” (146). For similar reactions to John Allen’s views on justification, see Girolamo Zanchi, The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted (London, 1779), 36–37; The Works of Augustus M. Toplady, 6 vols. (London, 1794), 5:192–193. 73.  On Haweis and his years at Oxford, see Arthur Skevington Wood, Thomas Haweis, 1734– 1820 (London: SPCK, 1957), and John Stewart Reynolds, The Evangelicals at Oxford, 1735–1871 (Oxford: Marcham Manor Press, 1975), 20–43. 74.  Quoted in the Anti-­Jacobin Review and Magazine (1806): 214. 75.  Woodforde at Oxford, 1759–1776, ed. W. N. Hargreaves-­Wadsley (Oxford, 1969), 283, xv.

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76.  Associations against the Established Church Indefensible (London, 1773), 17. In a reply, Henry Norman criticized Allen for the “violent” and persecuting spirit and “insolence” with which he defended his idea of “orthodoxy” (H[enr]y Norman, Two Letters on the Subject of Subscription to the Liturgy and Thirty-­Nine Articles of the Church of ­England [Winchester, 1773]: xxv–xl). Norman’s comments suggest that John Allen had a reputation for abrasiveness. 77.  Thomas Seddon, Letters Written to an Officer in the Army on Vari­ous Subjects (Warrington, 1786), xxxii. 78.  William Bowman, quoted in Nichols, Illustrations, 8:623. 79. Wood, Thomas Haweis, 69–70. 80.  A True Copy of the Poll Taken at Oxford January 31, 1750 (London, 1750), 15. An Au­then­ tic Copy of the Poll for Members to Serve in the Ensuing Parliament for the University of Oxford Taken March XXIII MDCCLXVIII (Oxford, 1768), 13. For background, see L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell, eds., History of the University of Oxford, Volume 5: The Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 125–127, 154–161. Johnson presumably approved of Allen’s votes in 1768, for he wrote to Hester Thrale, commending the members of the university for continuing to support the “old interest” candidates, Newdigate and Page, against their rivals, who ­were pushing for a reconciliation between Tory Oxford and the Whig government: Johnson thought “it must be for ever pleasing to see men adhering to their princi­ples against their interest, especially when you consider that ­t hese Voters are poor, and never can be much less poor but by the favour of t­ hose whom they are now opposing” (Letters, 1:299–300, for 24 March 1768). 81.  For John Allen’s ­career in the church, see Brooke’s history, D1; and the Clergy of the Church of E ­ ngland database, in which he is Person ID 83219. 82.  Brooke is almost certainly referring to Thomas Rattray’s Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem (London, 1744). This was not an “ancient” work; rather, it was a modern edition of an ancient liturgy. The fact that John Allen owned a copy of Rattray’s book suggests that he was interested in the eucharistic theology and liturgical initiatives promoted by Rattray, John Johnson of Cranbrook, and the usager nonjurors. 83.  Johnson mentions John Allen in a letter of 14 April 1758 (Letters, 1:163); if the letter dated 27 October 1757 (Letters, 1:155–156) also refers to John Allen, as I have conjectured it may, then this would mean that the earliest reference to John Allen (27 October 1757) predates the earliest definite reference to Edmund Allen (1759).

B

“Con Amore” hester piozzi’s annotations upon johnson’s early poetry Anthony W. Lee This we see is done con Amore. —­Hester Piozzi

Among the earliest readers of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson was Hester Piozzi, who was surely one of the more careful and interested persons to have ever taken up the book. She was a careful reader ­because she had herself written a major biography on the same subject, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, published some five years before Boswell’s; she was an interested reader ­because she herself is one of the central characters in the book throughout much of its chronological narrative, 1765–1784 (that is, within the covers of roughly three of the four volumes in the standard Hill-­Powell edition).1 She read it at least three times. We know she read it when it was first published in May 1791 b ­ ecause of an entry from her diary;2 we know she ­later reread it at least twice, the fifth edition of 1807 and the eighth edition of 1816, b ­ ecause her personal copies have survived. Th ­ ese surviving copies contain extensive annotations,3 commentary that has been available to scholars in a readily accessible form since 1963, when Edward G. Fletcher prepared a three-­ volume edition of the Life with marginalia for the Heritage Press.4 Surprisingly, however, too many scholars of Boswell and Johnson have neglected t­ hese annotations. The three modern editors of Johnson’s poetry, for example, have ignored her observations on the early poetry.5 The pre­sent essay endeavors to begin redressing this neglect by selecting three remarks from Piozzi’s marginalia and using them as an opportunity to reexamine the texts and contexts of three of Johnson’s early poems: “To a Lady on Her Birthday,” “Virgil’s Pastoral the First,” and “The Young Author.” ­These three paratactic aperçus, while in and of themselves having no g­ reat critical moment, offer small portals from which larger perspectives may begin to emerge and around which a number of in­ter­est­ing and useful observations may 63

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be aggregated. ­These perspectives and observations illuminate both Johnson and Piozzi’s literary art and consciousness in ways that promote a larger critical apprehension not apparent when ­these textual fragments are considered in discrete isolation. Furthermore, they offer a perch permitting a unique critical access to Johnson’s early poetry—­poetry that proves perhaps surprisingly complex and mature.6

A Young Lady’s Birthday The first example comes from Piozzi’s comment on line 6 of Johnson’s apparently slight effusion, “To a Lady on Her Birthday” (1727): “All but the sweet solicitudes of love.”7 In her copy of the 1816 Life of Johnson, Piozzi comments: “That this is a Line in some Poem I forget what” (Fletcher, 1:23). One’s initial impulse is to track a precursor to this line: What is Piozzi not remembering? “Sweet solicitudes” and “love” constitute the operative keywords. The earliest source lassoing ­t hese three is prob­ably Statius’s Silvae, 2.1.71, dulces mode pectore curae, which can be rendered into En­g lish as “just so the heart’s sweet care (solicitude).”8 If so, then Johnson appropriates a sentiment from a familial context, that of ­father to son, or guardian to charge, where the sweet solicitudes prove paternalistic, in order to reapply it to a romantic context. Nonetheless, both contexts involve love. The phrase appears l­ater to have settled into something of the status of a literary topos, as we see in the two following examples. In The Inferno, the narrator questions Francesca: Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri A che e come comce concedette Amore che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri. But tell me: in the time of your sweet sighs By what appearances found love the way To lure you to his perilous paradise?9

As an intertext, the “sweet sighs” issuing from Francesca’s sexual transgression nicely mesh with the moralistic point Johnson urges in his birthday poem, which warns against the perils of unlicensed love: Alas! ’tis hard for Beauty to be just. ­Those Sovereign Charms with Strictest care employ, Nor give the generous Pain, the Worthless joy. (lines 12–14, in Poems, 32)

Romantic love is indeed sweet, but it can also be treacherous. A poem l­ater than Dante’s that taps into this tradition is Richard Crashaw’s “Musicks Duell”: “Whose trembling murmurs melting in wild airs / Runs to and fro, complaining his sweet cares.”10 This poem, which opens Crashaw’s Delights of the Muses (1646), inhabits the pastoral mode and involves a singing contest and a lovely “harmlesse Syren.”11 Thus, both intertexts belong to the mode of romantic verse in which Johnson’s

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spontaneous jeu d’esprit participates; as such, they are perhaps more eligible candidates than Statius’s Silvae. If so, then Johnson’s line emerges from a rich intertextual sequence, strengthening the apparent lightness of his birthday effusion. Despite ­t hese initial possibilities, a more likely candidate is a popu­lar poem more recent to Piozzi’s remembrance, one that Johnson did not live to read. This line, “No sweet solicitude to know,” comes from “To Love” by “Della Crusca” (Robert Merry); it prompted a response from “Anna Matilda” (Hannah Cowley), “The Pen.”12 The ensuing exchanges between the two publicly played out in the pages of Edward Topham’s fash­ion­able journal The World in the summer of 1787 and quickly became a popu­lar vogue, before disintegrating into a widely mocked public farce.13 The affaire ­later ended with an abrupt anticlimax when the two would-be lovers fi­nally met face-­to-­face in April 1798, when Merry learned that his beloved i­ magined “Anna” was the older and married Cowley. Piozzi herself played a role in this short-­ lived misadventure. During her visit to Florence in June to September 1785, Piozzi fell in with Merry, William Parsons, and Bertie Greatheed, the En­glishman at the center of the Della Cruscan movement, which was an effort to sustain the tradition of Italian letters in the wake of the ­Grand Duke Leopold’s closing of the Academia della Crusca, the learned society founded in the sixteenth ­century to celebrate the ideals of the Florentine literary Re­nais­sance. While the group failed to live up t­ hese ideals, they maintained a serious po­liti­cal ele­ment in defiance of aristocratic privilege that in some ways anticipates the energies of the French Revolution just ahead on the horizon. Piozzi contributed to the Florence Miscellany (and l­ ater the Arno Miscellany), poetry collections produced by the group. In time, however, the En­glish Della Cruscans came to be viewed by the public as frivolous and insipid poetasters, especially ­a fter William Gifford’s biting satirical send-up, the Baviad (1791) and the Maeviad (1795). Piozzi disavowed Cowley, of whom she wrote privately: “Mrs Cowley seems an active ­Woman, whom nobody likes, yet all are forced to esteem. . . . ​ She and I never met; I fancy her Vulgar & illbehav’d; for no one speaks ill of her, yet She is never in polite Circles. . . . ​I have altered mine—­but God forbid it should be as bad as Mrs Cowley’s:—­one might write such Stuff in one’s Sleep.”14 During the time when the identity of “Anna Matilda” was unknown, many suspected Piozzi herself to be the author—­much to her ­later chagrin.15 Hence, her “I forget what” remark might be less a memory lapse and more an unconscious suppression of her participation in a distasteful literary episode that she had rather be forgotten, by ­others as well as herself. ­Here are the two lines set within the larger context of their original passages, first by Johnson: All pains, all cares may favouring Heaven remove, All but the sweet solicitudes of love! May power­f ul nature join with grateful art To point each glance, and force it to the heart! (lines 5–8)

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Then by Merry: Alas! Is all this boasted ease, To lose each warm desire to please, No sweet solicitude to know For o ­ thers bliss, for o ­ thers woe. (lines 34–37)

Comparison of Johnson’s periodic heroic couplets with Merry’s flabby octosyllabics and stale diction render the latter puerile and feeble. Both are artificial vers de société; Johnson’s, however, rises above the pitfalls endemic to the form by enforcing a sincere moral urgency, as he warns the lady he celebrates against the perils and temptations of youth and beauty. In contrast, the dialogic exchange between Merry and Hannah Cowley in “To Love” and “The Pen” represents the degenerate detritus of a sentimental enthusiasm that Johnson would critically combat against, from its emergence in the mid-­eighteenth ­century ­until his final major publication, The Lives of the En­glish Poets.

Crows and Ravens The second marginalia to be examined operates upon Johnson’s 1726 translation of line 17 of what had been shown since the late sixteenth c­ entury in many Latin editions as Virgil’s first Eclogue, lines 17–18: “De cœlo tactas memini prædicere quercus: / Sæpe sinistra cavo prædixit ab ilice cornix.”16 Johnson renders t­ hese as Our trees ­were blasted by the thunder stroke, And left-­hand crows, from an old hollow oak, Foretold the coming evil by their dismal croak.17

Piozzi remarks of this that “it was a Single Crow—­ever ominous in all countries” (Fletcher, 1:21). The point she makes is, on the face of it, no more than a comment on Johnson’s plural form: in Virgil’s Latin it had been one lone, noisily croaking crow, reflecting popu­lar tradition.18 Closer consideration of her note serves, however, to highlight other aspects of the passage in question, ones that are likely to have been at the back of her mind, as well as ones that solicit interest from our pre­ sent critical perspective. Piozzi draws our attention to the Latin, as hers immediately had been drawn.19 She appears not to have been worried by the interpolated verse, the striking similarity of which to line 15 of Eclogue 9 (“ante sinistra cava monuisset ab ilice cornix,” “[­unless] a crow to the left had warned [me] beforehand from a hollow oak”), as well as other conspicuously odd features, had irritated editors for a good 150 years before Johnson sat down to translate the verses. Neither his nor Piozzi’s seeming indifference to this point of textual criticism is particularly surprising, however, ­because (1) the offending line in Eclogue 1 (banished from modern texts) was very often retained, sometimes shown in brackets, sometimes not, in older editions,20

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and (2) more importantly, ­because Dryden had included the line in his hugely influential translation of 1697: Yon riven Oak, the fairest of the Green, And the hoarse Raven, on the blasted Bough, By croaking from the left, presag’d the coming Blow.21

The raven would then long remain the bird of choice for Virgil’s cornix, used, for example, by Joseph Trapp (London, 1731), Christopher Pitt (London, 1753), Robert Andrews (Birmingham, 1766), an anonymous translation, “On a More Liberal Plan than Ever Yet Attempted” (London, 1783), and John Jefferys (Edinburgh, 1799). En­glish versions prior to Dryden’s had chosen a solitary chough, rook, or—­marginally more popu­lar (and for the superstitious traditionally more alarming)—­crow. Only John Caryll preferred an unkindness of “Ravens” who “spoke too, though in a lower tone / And long from hollow tree ­were heard to grone.”22 Leaving ornithology aside, as well as Caryll’s disregard for the crucial, but somewhat vexed question of the direction,23 we need ­here note only that Johnson picked crows and that Piozzi, who doubtless knew Dryden’s translation, saw absolutely no need to comment on the species. Given that in 1726 Johnson, too, was almost certainly familiar with Dryden’s version,24 we should pause ­here and consider the two versions, comparison of which might offer a useful and instructive perspective into Johnson’s schoolboy translations. While some similarities in their diction simply lie in the nature of what they ­were both d ­ oing, ­there are ­others that could be regarded as direct echoes of or borrowings from Dryden (in Johnson lines 4 and 7, and, to a lesser extent, lines 8 and 11). If so, this would mean that the “crows” ­were intended as a deliberate correction of Dryden’s “Raven” (however puzzling the other’s plural remains). Taking, in addition, the almost strikingly obvious differences in the two texts to be quite conscious deviations from the e­ arlier in the l­ater, one is tempted to won­der, even, w ­ hether Johnson’s translation represents an exercise, an attempt on his part to see ­whether he could somehow improve on Dryden’s text or at least come up with something dif­fer­ent. Stylistically, Johnson departs from his exemplar by appropriating a distinctly Drydenian mannerism absent from the latter’s translation of the passage. While the older poet’s version employs ­simple couplets, Johnson expands his own version into a full-­blown triplet, a mannerism practiced frequently by Dryden. Cementing Johnson’s conscious formal bow to the g­ reat Restoration poet, however, is his deployment of an alexandrine as the final line of the triplet—­a distinctive stylistic flourish that Pope l­ater recognized as belonging to the g­ reat precursor, in his loving homage: Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine.25

Johnson’s translation, then, is no mere schoolboy exercise, but rather a conscious and intentional contribution to the ­great Augustan tradition in poetry that Dryden

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inaugurated in the 1660s, one that Pope in the mid-1720s was currently perfecting with his magnificent Homer translation, and that Johnson, in his own smaller way, was si­mul­ta­neously offering to make purchase of amid his provincial Midlands obscurity.26

Dies Mali An additional point about the passage Piozzi flagged in her copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson emerges from hint noted by J. D. Fleeman, in his edition of The Complete En­glish Poems. Fleeman observes of the phrase “their dismal croak”: “Derived by Minsheu (Dictionary, 1617) from Latin dies mali, evil days. It is already noticeable how even in in this early piece Johnson employs etymological meanings to enrich his language.”27 Johnson’s l­ater etymological note to the Dictionary entry for “dismal” confirms this reading: “Sorrowful; dire; horrid; melancholy; uncomfortable; unhappy; dark [dies malus, Latin, an evil day].”28 Fleeman’s acute observation suggests that the crow’s “dismal croak” is intended not just to be “sorrowful, unhappy, dark,” but ominous, portending Virgil’s “coming evil.” What Fleeman ­here calls “etymological meaning” other critics have designated as revivifying expired clichés or resuscitating dead meta­phors.29 We see this clearly in the Virgil translation, just as we ­w ill find it in the discussion of “The Young Author,” below. For now, however, let us pick up on Fleeman’s hint by looking more closely at the word “dismal” and its linguistic synonyms, and then by examining its deployment in Johnson’s Dictionary. In the 1773 Dictionary entry, s.v. “dismal,” t­ here are eight authorities used to illustrate the word’s meaning. Of ­t hese eight, three take place in hell (Milton two and three; Pope), one refers to Satan (Milton one), one refers to a slain traitor in a play rife with the demonic (Macbeth), and one to the choice whose consequence ­will issue e­ ither to heaven or to hell (Decay of Piety). Clearly, the darkly super­natural aspects of “dismal” importantly freight Johnson’s understanding of the word in ways signified in the concluding line from the Virgil translation. Elsewhere in Johnson’s Dictionary, we find three uses of a phrase that the portmanteau word dismal encapsulates “evil days,” twice from Milton’s Paradise Lost: To PU′RPLE v.a. [purpuro, Lat.] Though fall’n on evil days, In darkness, and with dangers compass’d round, And solitude! yet, not alone, while thou Visit’st my slumbers nightly; or when morn Purples the East. Milton’s Par. Lost, b. xxx. TONGUE.n.s. [tung, Saxon; tonghe, Dutch.] 4. Speech, as well or ill used. On evil days though fallen and evil tongues. Milton.

This brace of passages (culled from Paradise Lost, 7.26–30) evokes a connection between prophetic doom (“tongues” as metonymy) and dismal misery (“evil days”

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as literary allusion) within the parataxis of “evil days” and “evil tongues”—­a syntactic alignment augmented by the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis, “evil days, Evil day.” The deployment of this literary arsenal signals the freight of even more significance to Johnson’s “dismal” topos. In the “Life of Milton,” Johnson comments trenchantly upon book seven’s invocation: Milton, being now cleared from all effects of his disloyalty, had nothing required from him but the common duty of living in quiet, to be rewarded with the common right of protection: but this, which, when he sculked from the approach of his King, was perhaps more than he hoped, seems not to have satisfied him; for no sooner is he safe, than he finds himself in danger, fallen on evil days and evil tongues, and with darkness and with danger compass’d round. This darkness, had his eyes been better employed, had undoubtedly deserved compassion: but to add the mention of danger was ungrateful and unjust. He was fallen indeed on evil days; the time was come in which regicides could no longer boast their wickedness. But of evil tongues for Milton to complain required impudence at least equal to his other powers; Milton, whose warmest advocates must allow, that he never spared any asperity of reproach or brutality of insolence. (Lives, 1:268)

Is it not rather curious that Johnson would include a passage that he had l­ ittle more than scorn for as an ornamental authority in his Dictionary, an inclusivity that was carefully monitored?30 Perhaps he was motivated by the poetical beauty of the passage. Or, perhaps, the “evil/ dismal” days topos that we are tracking h ­ ere played an impor­tant role, at e­ ither a conscious or unconscious level, in Johnson’s literary imagination. Johnson takes the third “evil days” quotation from another author he greatly admired, Richard Hooker: RE′GIMENT. n.s. [regement, old Fr.] 1. Established government; polity. Not in use. We all make complaint of the iniquity of our times, not unjustly, for the days are evil; but compare them with t­ hose times wherein t­ here w ­ ere no civil socie­ ties, with t­ hose times wherein t­ here was as yet no manner of publick regiment established, and we have surely good cause to think, that God hath blessed us exceedingly. Hooker, b. i. s. 10.31

The phrase from Ecclesiastical Polity seems to be drawn from a dif­fer­ent intertextual rivulet Virgilian classicism: “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, / Redeeming the time, b ­ ecause the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15–16). The Latin Vulgate for the final hemistich of verse 16 is “quoniam dies mali sunt” (“­because the days are evil”).32 This Dictionary appropriation thus augments our critical apprehension of the Milton passage by placing it within an intertextual dyad that echoes a biblical passage. The allusion extends and shifts the foundations of Johnson’s intertextual appropriations. We witness h ­ ere the coalescence of the classical and Hebrew traditions that serves as a fractal emblem of Milton’s g­ reat

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poem itself, a dynamic fusion of a pagan form and biblically informed content. Such binary formal cells mark Johnson’s writing at numerous points and levels. We see this in Johnson’s complex ­handling of the word “dismal,” even as we are sensitive to his ­earlier pairing of the substantive “solicitude” with an adjective chosen from a binary field of tensions between positive and negative, desirable and repulsive, “sweet” and indeed the larger interplay of “dismal/solicitude” tracked in this article, ­under the auspices of Piozzi’s marginalia. (And we ­will see t­ hese tensions once again in the next section.) We are afforded a momentary glimpse into the deep moraines of Johnson’s linguistic and literary intertextual artistry, by virtue of the alert signaled by Piozzi’s own intertextual appropriation of Johnson’s Virgilian translation. And we witness the imperative of moral urgency that steeps and ingrains the aesthetic lozenge of the Johnsonian utterance, another binary articulation, his eighteenth-­century reconstitution of Horace’s venerable dictum, utile et dulce: just as in the “Birthday” poem, he warns against the evil days, the pitfalls and sloughs that imperil ­human life on earth. In this, the intertextual entwinements form a structure stamped with Johnson’s distinct imprint of moral urgency in combination with an ironic literary aesthetic finesse deployed at Milton’s expense.

Young Authors The final item to be considered comes from Johnson’s poem “The Young Author” (1729), which concludes with the couplet: “­There begs of heavn a less distinguish’d lot, / Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot.” Responding to this, Piozzi writes in the 1816 edition of Boswell’s Life, “This is worth them all, This we see is done con Amore” (Fletcher, 1:25). It is not at first clear what Piozzi means by con Amore, or, for that ­matter, “all.” The latter adjective prob­ably refers to “all” the juvenilia Boswell had collected, although it could refer to “all” the rest of the lines in the poem. One pos­si­ble meaning for the phrase is something done “with eagerness, with zest and zeal”; another one, musical (Piozzi’s husband was of course the musician Gabriel Mario Piozzi), is “tenderly, slowly.” Perhaps both shades of meaning converge in her memory of this passage section from a ­later poem, The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes: When first the College Rolls receive his Name, The young Enthusiast quits his Ease for Fame; Through all his Veins the fever of Renown Burns from the strong Contagion of the Gown; O’er Bodley’s Dome his ­f uture ­Labours spread, And Bacon’s Mansion ­trembles ­o’er his Head. Are ­t hese thy Views? Proceed, illustrious youth. Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise; ­There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail,

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Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron, and the Jail. (lines 135–141, 157–160; Poems, 121)

Piozzi was herself an eyewitness to the anguish t­ hese lines ­were capable of eliciting from Johnson personally, as we see from her firsthand account of this scene: “When Dr Johnson read his own satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted, with the vari­ous obstructions thrown in his way to fortune and to fame, he burst into a passion of tears one day: the ­family and Mr Scott only ­were pre­sent, who, in a jocose way, clapped him on the back, and said, What’s all this, my dear Sir? Why you, and I, and Hercules, you know, w ­ ere all troubled with melancholy.”33 And so this, perhaps, is what Piozzi intends with her con Amore remark: Johnson’s throbbing anguish at thwarted personal ambition, at memories of evil days in the past. The disappointment of talent depressed by impoverished merit was clearly a theme dear to Johnson’s heart, one that frequently exercised his muse. However, Piozzi’s remark may also point t­ oward a dif­fer­ent, but not mutually exclusive, reading. It may be that, as a sympathetic reader of good eighteenth-­century verse, Piozzi is giving her own enthusiastic approval to what is, given close, attentive inspection, the superb conclusion of a very fine poem, one displaying a command of craft akin to the confident triplet concluding the Virgil translation considered above. Perhaps her comment is the verbal equivalent to the clapping of her hands at a per­ for­mance well done. Let us pursue this hint. In its earliest version, the poem is thirty lines long. This one, the one most au­t hen­tic and emotionally energetic,34 separates into three distinct and structurally commensurate units. The first (A), lines 1–10, establishes the vehicle for the operative extended meta­phor of the poem, a young “peasant inclin’d to roam” who seeks fortune and renown as a sailor at sea; the peasant’s efforts are thwarted, and he beats a hasty retreat. The second (B), lines 11–20, shifts to the tenor of the meta­ phor, a Young Author. ­Here, expanding lines 1–5 of the first section (A1), the Young Author pursues the dreams of affluence paralleled in the experience of the young peasant. The third section (C), lines 21–30, amplifies lines 6–10 of the first section ­ itter opposition and, defeated, retreats igno(A2); in it the Young Author meets b miniously to his place of origin. This bare summary exposes a structural articulation that is complex and startlingly mature for the young Johnson. The first section establishes a basic premise that the two following sections si­mul­ta­neously expand upon and complicate: section B expands upon the first half of section A (A1), while section C expands upon the second half of the first section (A2). This may be schematically expressed thus: the w ­ hole poem = A(A1A2) B C; A1 prepares for B, while 2 A prepares for C. And fi­nally, the poem si­mul­ta­neously as a ­whole conforms to an ABA structure, that of the rhetorical figure of epanalepsis, wherein the ending constitutes a cyclical return to the beginning: the young author dreams of fame, departs for literary adventure, only to return to his prior ignominy. The heart of the poem is found in the center of the second section (B), lines 15–18, where the young poet makes bold to speak:

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The centrality of this passage is enforced not merely by its structural position at the heart of the poem but also b ­ ecause of a cluster of literary devices: the presence of first-­person voice (the preceding and succeeding halves of the poem are in the third person), the emphatic typographical ele­ments (an exclamation mark and quotation marks), and the urgent intensity of the diction (“extacy,” “cries,” “scorn”). With this basic sketch in mind, we may now attend to a few of the poem’s more salient formal properties. Above we noted that the phenomenon of enlivening of dead meta­phors is often featured in Johnson’s poetry. We see this at play h ­ ere again in “The Young Author,” especially in t­ hese two lines: “He trusts his happiness to h ­ uman kind” and “He plies the press, and hurries on his fate” (lines 13 and 20, in Poems, 33). The two key words h ­ ere are “kind” and “fate.” Johnson’s typographical separation of “kind” from “­human” sharply enforces a linguistic distinction, one that associates “kind” with its cognate “kin,” as in Hamlet’s pun, “A ­little more than kin, and less than kind.” Johnson’s disambiguation of “kind” from “­human” effectively distances the cold humanity that the Young Author ­faces and flees from with the “kindness,” in ­every etymological sense of the word, that it evokes from a “kinder” and more familiar and familial past. The Young Author ­w ill find h ­ umans quite “unkind,” which is of course the precise point of Johnson’s revivification. Likewise, the word “fate” operates si­mul­ta­neously at two levels, the first meaning “a preordained plan,” the other “death and doom.” Johnson adroitly exploits ­t hese two senses in the line by connoting the harsh inevitability of the outcome that the Young Author ­faces. Like the prospects of Gray’s anonymous poet in the “Elegy,” the Young Author’s pos­si­ble options are drastically foreclosed, as each is “doomed” to an ignominious “fate,” one thwarting the author’s intentions ­toward aspirational triumph. It should be recollected at this point that the binary oppositions structuring this poem parallel and reflect the supple interplay found within the positive and negative circulation of energies found within the topos discussed above, the “sweet/ solicitude” dyad and the binary bifurcation of “dismal.” ­Here, the dyads of “kind/ unkind” and “plan/doom” foreground the rich linguistic texture that Johnson’s intertextual plays sponsors. The concluding couplet flagged by Piozzi possesses similarly mature and rich literary features evident this early stage of Johnson’s authorial development. For example, it exhibits “strength,” an attribute Johnson described in the “Life of Denham” as one that conveys “much meaning in few words, and exhibit[s] the sentiment with more weight than bulk” (Lives, 1:239). In the couplet cited by Piozzi, Johnson compresses three clear and distinct ideas into seventeen words. He uses a spare, prosaic, almost entirely monosyllabic diction to deploy t­ hese notions, thus

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contracting the apparently ornamental flourishes displayed ­earlier in the poem into a verbally tight and chaste periodic finish and paralleling the structural compressions found in the central part of the poem, noted above. And the closing couplet exhibits examples of wit that flash out and contrast vividly against the apparent homeliness of the conclusion. For example, the alignment of “glad” with “hid” constitutes a gentle but firm irony, as ­t hese two Anglo-­Saxon derivatives deftly yet toughly announce a complete reversal in the speaker’s attitude. That is, the lovely and magnificent “proud to be forgot” conveys with a subdued but undeniable energy this shift: the poet who was e­ arlier “secure of praises from nations yet unborn” is now humiliated. His once high-­flung pride has now been reduced to an ignoble abjection. The episode forecasts a ­later Johnsonian take on the Young Author, one found in Rambler 10, addressed to “a modest young man” who aspires to authorship: This point of perfection [modesty], nice as it is, my correspondent seems to have attained. That he is modest, his own declaration may evince; and, I think, the “latent resolution” may be discovered in his letter by an acute observer. I ­will advise him, since he so well deserves my precepts, not to be discouraged, though the Rambler should prove equally envious, or tasteless, with the rest of his fraternity. If his paper is refused, the presses of E ­ ngland are open, let him try the judgment of the public. If, as it has sometimes happened in general combinations against merit, he cannot persuade the world to buy his works, he may pre­sent them to his friends; and if his friends are seized with the epidemical infatuation, and cannot find his genius, or ­will not confess it, let him then refer his cause to posterity, and reserve his ­labours for a wiser age. (Yale Works, 3:54–55)

­ ere we find Johnson’s mature and sober advice to another Young Author, a H wisdom gleaned from some twenty-­five years of hard grappling with Grub Street poverty, drudgery, and indignity, overcoming rebuff and insulting neglect. It is impossible to say with any definite certainty w ­ hether Johnson had his early poem in mind when he wrote t­ hese words. Nevertheless, the ideological consonance between them suggests the power­f ul cohesiveness of Johnson’s ethical reflections across time and place, his constitutional allegiance to cultural uniformitarianism. At the stage in life when he pens the Rambler, however, Johnson is no longer the Young Author but an Established Writer, one who counsels the latest Young Author aspiring to make his place in the sun. Despite the shift in roles, the message remains the same—­namely, that truth, even when tinged with a somber melancholy, endures: “Nothing keeps its ground but truth, which gains e­ very day new influence by new confirmation” (Idler 52, in Yale Works, 2:162). It should be remembered that the conclusion to “The Young Author,” through its homely and eloquence-­denying diction, returns the peasant, the original Young Author, young Sam Johnson, back to rural obscurity—­again, through the rhetorical trope of epanalepsis. If autobiographical, the close captures a sadly dark snapshot within the life and c­ areer of a writer who stoutly confronted real­ity with brave clarity, one who did not shrink from the demanding impingements of disappointment

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and asperity. Yet, if the conclusion returns Johnson to the depressing rounds of his provincial Midlands obscurity, it also points t­oward the ­future. It provides grist for his mill, grist that ­will contribute vitally to Johnson’s coming literary success. The self-­abnegation of “The Young Author” ­w ill enable the writings that ­will eventually evolve ­toward and assure Johnson’s global stature as “The Rambler,” “Dictionary Johnson”—­a nd the author of the poetic masterpiece, The Vanity of ­Human Wishes, with its brilliantly mournful meditation upon the perils of authorship. Johnson’s literary ­labors in the garden of his early poems and translations bear fruit in his astounding ­later accomplishments. The seeds of this ­later triumph may be found planted in his earliest poetry. And Piozzi, who was witness to this ­later magnitude, is sensitive to its incipient roots.

Concluding Brief The preceding critical meditation upon the intertextual intersections between Piozzi and Johnson should urge the case for the importance of Piozzi’s Boswellian marginalia, as well as offering support to the authority of her critical voice at large. Piozzi has come in for rough h ­ andling by many Johnsonians, much of it manifestly unjust. This is owing to many ­factors, not least of which is her eclipse by her hostile biographical rival, James Boswell, as well the historical dominion of males in the critical establishment of Johnson scholarship. ­Today we should be ready to step away from the restrictions of ­t hese narrow confines. ­W hether treated as a vehicle for probing more deeply into Johnson’s writings, or as one providing a larger context within which to understand Johnson’s place in literary history, or indeed as an instrument for delving with greater analytic precision into her as a writer in her own right, Piozzi’s marginalia offers fruit ripe for the plucking—­and not just in the area of Johnson’s early poetry, but in larger and more general fields of literary investigation. Th ­ ese intertextual collaborations deserve more attentive consideration than they have hitherto obtained.

notes 1.  For attacks on Piozzi in Boswell’s Life and her responses to them, see Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs. Thrale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 148–171. 2.  Hester Thrale [Piozzi], Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (­Later Mrs Piozzi), 1706–1809, ed. Katherine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 2:809–811. 3.  The fifth edition contains nearly 575 marginalia; the eighth edition, about 450. At times the content of each sets overlap. 4.  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, with Marginal Comments and Markings from Two Copies Annotated by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, ed. Edward G. Fletcher, 3 vols. (New York: Heritage Press, 1963). This is the first complete set; partial collections had been emitted at dif­fer­ent times and venues previous to 1963. For an account of the history and textual circumstances of the two surviving editions, see Fletcher, 1:xxvii–­x xx, and Hyde, Impossible Friendship, 163–164. Both annotated editions are now at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. 5.  Samuel Johnson, The Complete En­glish Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1971); The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith,

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E. L. McAdam, [and David Fleeman], 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); and vol. 6 of the Yale Works, Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., with George Milne. In this essay, I cite the Oxford as Poems, and the Penguin edition as Fleeman, Poems. 6.  This essay is written and intended to be received as a contribution to the recent critical trend denominated as “The New Formalism”: See Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We ­C an’t Do without It,” in Re­nais­sance Lit­e r­a­ture and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (March 2007): 558–569; and Rajani Sudan, ed., “Rethinking New Formalism,” special issue, Philological Quarterly 86 (2007). 7.  Fletcher, 1:53–54; see also Poems, 32–33. 8.  The Latin text is from the Loeb edition of Statius, Silvae, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 108. 9. Dante, Inferno, 5:118–120. The Italian is from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 1:Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 92; the En­glish translation is from The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003), 50 (lines 115–117). 10.  Richard Crashaw, The Delights of the Muses, line 142, in The Poems En­glish, Latin and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 153. In a letter of 17 December 1710 to Henry C ­ romwell, Alexander Pope described this poem as “the best example of Crashaw’s ‘heroic Verse,’ ” in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 5:110. For Johnson’s interest in Crashaw, see W. B. C. Watkins, Johnson and En­glish Poetry before 1660 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1936), 83. 11.  Another text should also be noted, if only in passing. In the summer of 1757, Boswell’s youthful friend William J. ­Temple penned an “imitation” of Horace’s “Ode to Pyrrha,” which concludes with the last line, “Nor mix in love’s sweet cares”: see The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson T ­ emple, 1756–1795, part 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford, in the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, 19 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 2. The phrase is introduced with no textual pre­ce­dent from Horace, and so the sentiment may be confidently accounted part of the common topos identified above. 12.  Cowley (1743–1809) was a successful poet and playwright: see Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-­C entury ­Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 385–386. Merry (1755–1798) ­w ill be discussed more below. 13.  General Sir William Waller, The Poetry of Anna Matilda (London, 1788), 12; originally published in Robert Strahan and Edward Moore’s periodical The World, 29 (June 1787). The fullest account of the Della Cruscan movement is found in W. N. Hargreaves-­Mawdsley, The En­glish Della Cruscans and Their Time, 1783–1828 (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1967), from which I draw the details of my account. 14.  Thraliana, 2:709 (10 and 18 February 1788). Piozzi refers to Cowley’s epilogue to her tragedy The Fate of Sparta, and to her own epilogue to Bertie Greatheed’s play The Regent: A Tragedy. 15.  For an account of Piozzi’s participation in the Della Cruscan phenomenon and its adverse impact upon her literary reputation, see William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary ­Woman (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 93–96; James Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale), 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 250–254; and Thraliana, 2:716n2. 16.  P. Virgilius Maro, [Opera], ed. Nicolaas Heinsius (Leiden, 1671), 37. Johnson is known to have taken a copy Heinsius’s Virgil—­first published in 1664, revised in 1676 and, by 1727, printed at least eleven times—­w ith him to Oxford; see Johnsonian Gleanings, ed. A. L. Reade, 11 vols. (privately printed, 1909–1952), 5:xxx. But it is not clear exactly which edition he used. The 1676 edition marked the second of the two lines as an interpolation, and it had indeed long been noted by other scholars that the Latin was prob­ably corrupt at this point. 17.  Life, 1:51, and Poems, 32–34; Johnson translated only twenty-­five of the Latin poem’s eighty-­t hree or eighty-­four verses in 1727. Despite his l­ ater animadversions upon the pastoral form, he also prepared a companion translation based upon the fifth Eclogue and, years ­later, in July 1763, would remark of Eclogue 1.5 that “all the modern languages . . . ​cannot furnish so melodious a line as, Formosam resonare doces Amarillida silvas” (Life, 1:460; in his translation, “And

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the Wood rings with Amarillis’s name,” Poems, 5). In August 1777, Johnson jotted a fragment of line 62 from the first Eclogue, “Ararim Parthus—­Germania—”; he had reread the work as recently as November 1774 (Yale Works, 1:273). In September 1753, he wrote, “The first and the tenth pastorals, what­ever be determined of the rest, are sufficient to place their author above the reach of rivalry” (Adventurer 92, in Yale Works, 2:420). Very late in life (1783) Johnson said “The Eclogues I have almost all by heart” (Life, 4: 218). 18.  The superstition that a single crow anywhere near the ­house portended trou­ble was already exploded in the first-­or second-­century Life of Aesop, a text regularly included in editions and translations of the fables—­see, e.g., Roger L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists, (London, 1698), 17–18—­a nd would ­later be familiar to Johnson from allusions in, for example, Swift’s/Sheridan’s poem “Dr Delany’s Villa” (lines 7–8) and Henry Mackenzie’s 1771 Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 4. See also Joseph Sherman, ed., Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of My­thol­ogy and Folklore (New York: Routledge, 2008), 382: in G ­ reat Britain, “a single crow over a h ­ ouse meant bad news, and often foretold a death within.” 19.  Dr. Arthur Collier “was determined she should be a sound classical scholar” (Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi, 26). 20. ­There ­were exceptions, e.g., the 1618 Leipzig edition by Friedrich Taubmann, who mentioned the interpolation in a note (p. 9). Johnson knew this edition; see Gleanings, 5:xxx. 21.  Lines 24–26, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1956–2000), 5:74. Dryden is known to have used Charles de la Rue’s Delphine edition of Virgil; see Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 135–136; J. McG. Bottkol, “Dryden’s Latin Scholarship,” Modern Philology 40, no. 3 (February 1943): 241–254. La Rue (Ruaeus) himself did not question the line’s authenticity. 22. In Tonson’s First Miscellany (London, 1684), 342. Dryden of course compiled this collection, in association with Jacob Tonson. John Caryll (1625–1711), Jacobite baron and Catholic (and u ­ ncle of the John Caryll to whom Pope dedicated The Rape of the Lock), was a friend of Dryden’s. 23.  A bird “croaking from the left” would normally have been interpreted as a favorable sign by Roman augur (­because they faced south), as would a raven flying from left to right, but not a crow flying from right to left; sinistra (“left-­hand”) signs in general ­were deemed good. See, e.g., Cicero, On Divination, 1.85 and 2.82. 24.  When Johnson left Lichfield for Oxford, he carried a volume of Dryden’s Virgil and Juvenal with him; see Gleanings, 5:225. And young Johnson’s attraction for Dryden and his translation of the Latin classics was one he would sustain all his life; cf. Mrs. Thrale’s observation, “His superior reverence of Dryden [over Pope] . . . ​still appeared in his talk as in his writings,” in Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of His Life, in Memoirs and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 79. 25.  The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, lines 267–269, in Alexander Pope, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–1969), 4:217; Johnson quotes this triplet approvingly in the Life of Dryden, in The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 2:153. 26.  Johnson ­later remarked that Pope’s Homer “is certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen; and its publication must therefore be considered as one of the ­great events in the annals of Learning” (Lives, 4:17). 27. Fleeman, Poems, 187. 28.  In a note to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, line 1206, Walter Skeat offers a fuller etymology: The phrase in the dismal means “on an unlucky day,” with reference to an etymology which connected dismal with the Latin dies malus. Though we cannot derive dismal immediately from the Lat. dies malus, it is now known that ­t here was an Anglo-­French

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phrase dis mal (=Latin dies mali, plural); whence the M.E. phrase in the dismal,” in the evil days,” or (more loosely), “on an evil day.” (The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter Skeat, 2nd ed., 7 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899], 1:493) 29.  Two recent critics have used this terminology: Thomas Keymer in “Johnson’s Poetry of Repetition,” in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New ­Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino, CA: Huntington Press, 2014), and David Venturo, in Johnson the Poet: The Poetic ­Career of Samuel Johnson (Newark: Univ. Delaware Press, 1999), 48–52. Each traces its source to Christopher Ricks, particularly his “Samuel Johnson: Dead Meta­phors and ‘Impending Death,’ ” in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984). However, as Ricks himself takes pains to make clear, the original impetus is to be found Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in En­glish Verse and Articulate Energy (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), especially 28–29 and 43–44. 30.  For Johnson’s care in including and excluding quoted authors in his Dictionary, see Robert DeMaria Jr., Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), 16–17. 31.  Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1.10.3–4, in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977–1982), 1:98. 32.  Biblia vulgata, ed. Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1977). 33. Piozzi, Anecdotes, 77. Some have seen the 1729 poem serving as a dress rehearsal for Johnson’s greatest poem; see Fleeman, Poems, 190. 34.  Johnson l­ater revised it to appear in the July 1743 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine. I use ­here the earliest text, agreeing with Boswell’s view that the ­later “alterations are not always for the better” (Life, 1:54n1).

B

Johnson (and Boswell) in the Lists a view of their reputations, 1933–2018 Paul Tankard

Long before blogging, the internet, digitization, and databases—­indeed, long before printing—­there ­were complaints about how much reading material ­there is. Twenty-­five hundred years ago, the biblical preacher Qoheleth wrote: “Of making many bookes t­ here is no end, and much studie is a wearinesse of the flesh” (Eccles. 12:12)—­a verse that has always made me long for more hard data about the bookshops and libraries of ancient Jerusalem. But it is clear that this long-­standing surplusage of reading material, combined with the fact that reading—­even when it’s a pleasure—is time-­consuming and difficult to do while d ­ oing anything ­else, has meant that p ­ eople have always wanted advice about exactly what books are actually worth reading. And t­ here has of course been no dearth of p ­ eople wanting to tell other p ­ eople what to read. Samuel Johnson understood the difficulty of navigating the sea of books, and was always happy to give other ­people advice about what to read.1 The perennial interest of book-­literate ­people in discussing best or favorite books seems exacerbated at the pre­sent historical moment, with “Books about books” being something of a minor industry, as “the Book” and book-­reading face off with competing and increasingly pervasive communication technologies and practices. In the face of the digital media revolution, many writers both popu­lar and academic have written essays and studies striving to define and identify the par­tic­u­ lar characteristics and values of book-­literacy, and to convey both a sense of its pleasures and its importance as a cultural practice and its role in intellectual formation. And whilst neuroscientists are investigating the beneficial effects on the ­human brain of reading in silence and privacy for extended periods (as well as of traditional practices such as note-­taking, rather than passive listening), one of the best reasons to read is to gain access to par­tic­u­lar texts. A ­great many impor­tant and rewarding texts, such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the Bible, Ulysses, Four Quar78

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tets, or Das Kapital, are not ­going to be made into TV miniseries or video games any time soon. As Patrick Buckridge has observed, “Lists of what to read are a constant feature of the ‘reading-­advice book’ tradition from the start.”2 But which par­tic­u­lar texts have featured in such lists? Lists are both didactic and implicitly competitive, 3 and an unsurprising by-­ product of personal literary list-­making is that other qualified persons w ­ ill be interested to compare their own opinions with t­ hose claiming an expertise. Indeed, it may be that literary advice, in practice, does less to inform the ignorant than to enable educated ­people to compare their cultural capital and aesthetic preferences and tastes. No doubt when confronted by the kinds of lists or list-­shaped texts of which the following is a survey, many readers commence their browsing by looking for their literary favorites to find how they have fared. In this spirit, I have made it a habit to consult ­t hose lists of ­great, favorite, or recommended books that cross my path to find or not find mentions of Samuel Johnson and (by extension) James Boswell. Having got so far, I thought it might be an instructive contribution to the history of Johnson’s reputation to approach the subject more systematically. I have sought out both literary lists per se, as well as books (and one series of books) that are in effect elaborated lists. I have not considered lists that would from the outset exclude Johnson or Boswell: lists of books of the (say, twentieth-) c­ entury, or best American lit­er­a­ture, or best detective novels. Nor have I considered publishers’ lists, although it would be instructive to consider the variation in the number of editions of the works of our authors in print over an extended period, such as a c­ entury. Having embarked on this survey, I find that—in the same way that one can best acquaint oneself with a new city by g­ oing in search of some features of par­tic­u ­lar interest (my preferred destinations are the second­hand bookshops)—­t he account of the research that is required to contextualize my findings has resulted in an at least partial history of the book-­list genre, which itself constitutes a neglected ­angle from which to consider the con­temporary state of literate culture. That history w ­ ill form my fundamental narrative, and I hope that readers ­will agree that the recent history of book lists has its own significance. I have divided the chronological sequence of fifty-­seven list-­shaped texts into six periods, with thematic labels. This is, of course, speculative and personal, and as much for con­ve­nience as anything ­else. But I do contend—on the basis of my immersion in t­ hese materials—­t hat we can discern the narrative that t­ hose labels suggest. Thus, the impetus to create such lists begins within institutional contexts, as proj­ects to enable reading that would serve and sustain nation and culture. Although the ethic of “self-­improvement” is never far away, the rhe­toric frequently invokes the idea of “­great books” as a cultural possession that any educated person is responsible to acquire. This rhe­toric seems to have lost much of its persuasive force ­after the social revolutions of the 1960s, and apologias for books and reading increasingly recommend texts as favorites or as pleasure-­giving experiences. In the 1990s, the approach of the millennium generated many exercises in cultural summation, some merely journalistic, but often overlaid by concerns—in responses to the rise of cultural studies, together with the proliferation of new media—­about the ­future of literate culture. The

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“greatness” trope developed overtly po­liti­cal overtones, but historical surveys seemed to offer an objective account of what texts have been culturally significant—­ with the implication that they should remain so. In the early 2000s, the postmodern demand for choice and hunger for experience seemed to become more insistent, signified by the popu­lar “1,001 . . . ​before You Die” compendia, the subjects of which have included cigars, ideas, video games, golf holes, but also books. Of the fifty-­ seven original book-­selection or book-­rating proj­ects described below, twenty ­were published in the ten years of 2005–2014. This effort seems to have (temporarily, at least) exhausted the market, and my survey of surveys concludes with three contributions from the a­ ngle of book history, which treats books as historical and aesthetic artefacts rather than texts to be read. It’s hard not to feel ambiguous about books becoming history. And I apologize at the outset for the length of this piece; ­t here are some sorts of scholarly inquiry of which t­ here is ­little point u ­ nless they are as comprehensive as pos­si­ble. But I w ­ ill not lose sight of Johnson and Boswell. I w ­ ill give samples of the list-­makers’ commentary on them, when it is provided—­sometimes expressive of useful insights and sometimes of instructive misapprehensions—­and ­w ill sum up my findings at the end.

National Proj­ects I begin my survey eighty years ago, with a pamphlet entitled Students’ Guide to Good Reading, published in Chicago (unsurprisingly, as we ­shall see) in 1933 by the National Council of Teachers of En­glish, and “prepared” by the Committee on College Reading (a committee of the NCTE) ­under the chairmanship of Atwood H. Townsend.4 Subsequently retitled simply Good Reading, the publication went through twenty-­t hree editions, its final edition having been published fifty-­eight years ­later, in 1990. The 1933 edition is a fifty-­six-­page booklet, with the subtitle: A List of Some Nine Hundred Books, Well Worth Knowing, Enjoyable to Read, and Largely Available in Inexpensive Editions.5 It is divided into thirty topical lists, individually authored and annotated. It is not just a collection of lists: it aims to mediate the titles to its readers, and the style of its discursive ele­ments (headnotes, annotations, vari­ous essays) is direct, personal, enthusiastic, idealistic—­and agreeably idiosyncratic. The Life of Johnson appears in list 10: The Eigh­teenth ­Century, authored by C. F. De La Barra, who describes it as a “graphic portrayal of a striking character—­a masterpiece of biography” (14);6 the title is printed in boldface type, which the foreword says means the book is included in “a selected list of ‘One Hundred Outstanding Books,’ not necessarily the ‘best’ or the ‘greatest’ books in world lit­er­a­ture, but representative and impor­tant books in­ter­est­i ng to modern readers. This selected list is based on one prepared by the Department of En­glish of the University of Washington” (3). The Life of Johnson appears again in list 18: Biography and History, where Robert C. Whitford says of it, “A truly ­great biography. One book that every­body should read” (29). ­There is no appearance of Johnson the author. I expected him to appear in list 28: Essays, Letters and Criticism;

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but no. It is perhaps unsurprising that Johnson was not included t­ here by a professor who sees fit to include Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. Successively enlarged with each new edition, from the ninth edition of 1946 (with the cover subtitle or blurb, “1,500 Books Briefly Described: A guide for college students and other mature readers . . . ​listing books of solid worth and lively interest . . . ​from Homer to Hemingway”) Good Reading was guided by an advisory board, chaired by Columbia University En­glish professor John Erskine (watch this name), and including luminaries such as John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Clifton Fadiman.7 Boswell remains in his three locations: u ­ nder the Eigh­teenth ­Century, the Life of Johnson is described by a new authority, William C. Greene, as “the wide-­ reaching opinions of ­England’s favorite mind, remembered and put down by his devoted, shrewd admirer” (14), and ­under Biography, it is listed again but, for the sake of economy, without further comment. The list of one hundred books disambiguated from the rest of the text is now “Significant” rather than “Outstanding,” and the Life of Johnson retains its distinction. But Johnson also now appears as an author, ­u nder the Eigh­teenth ­Century, in Matthew Arnold’s 1878 edition of Six Chief Lives from the “Lives of the Poets” (without comment, anomalously).8 By its tenth edition of 1947, Good Reading was a 224-­page paperback, published by Penguin Books, which expands considerably on the previous pamphlets.9 Boswell’s Life of Johnson still appears in the introductory list of “100 Significant Books” (x). Part 1 of the book is a series of essay-­style introductions to vari­ous periods and genres, taking up almost half the book: Boswell’s Johnson is mentioned ­under biography as a masterpiece (58). Eleven members of the advisory board contribute their own personal lists of “Basic Books”; none mentions Boswell or Johnson.10 Part 2 of the book is the “Good Reading Book List” proper. Boswell’s Life of Johnson retains its place in List 7A, with Greene’s e­ arlier comment (114).11 In list 20, Biography, Robert C. Whitford includes Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson (1944), which is described as “a notably well-­proportioned and temperate view of the g­ reat lexicographer, as seen in the historical perspective” (152). Johnson, however, has dropped out as an author. The final section of the book before the indexes is a short collection of “Wit and Wisdom about Books”; it quotes Samuel Johnson (but, without acknowl­edgment, via Boswell): “A man ­ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task ­w ill do him ­little good” (188). The edition of 1948, a Mentor paperback,12 looks identical to the Penguin, but among vari­ous tweaks it reintroduces Johnson as an author: in list 6B: The 17th ­Century (Books About), Louis C. Zucker describes The Lives of the Poets: “Careful biography and in­de­pen­dent criticism of Milton, Cowley, and other 17th ­century poets” (114). Louis Kronenberger’s newly published edition, The Portable Boswell and Johnson (1947), is added to list 7A, and described as “se­lections from the writings of the literary dictator of his age; representative passages from Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (116). Having u ­ nder the guidance of Good Reading found ourselves in the late 1940s, we need to backtrack slightly. The back cover note on the Penguin and Mentor

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paperback editions tells us that the Good Reading proj­ect had its origins with John Erskine’s General Honors course—­t he “­Great Books” course—at Columbia University. Erskine’s course, a two-­year undergraduate seminar that taught the classics in translation, began as an experiment in 1920.13 The influential educational pop­u­lar­izers Mortimer Adler and Clifton Fadiman took the course as young men, and ­later in the 1920s Adler and Mark Van Doren, taught it as ju­nior members of faculty. During the 1920s, Adler, Fadiman, and Van Doren also taught adult classes on the classics at the P ­ eople’s Institute of a privately funded New York college, the Cooper Union. In 1930, Adler was invited to the University of Chicago by its new president, Robert M. Hutchins, to assist in reforms to the curriculum similar to ­t hose instituted at Columbia. This led to Mortimer Adler’s best-­k nown work, the pioneering self-­help book, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940).14 The first edition of the book was im­mensely popu­lar on both sides of the Atlantic; it was on American best-­seller lists for twelve months, and remained influential for some de­cades through reprints and translations.15 It concludes with “A List of the ­Great Books,” which includes 113 authors (or, in the case of anonymous works, titles), and 178 titles (and sixteen writers for whom a generic category such as “Plays” or “Works” is recommended); this list does not include ­either Johnson or Boswell. Although a perennial incentive to all list-­making is the sheer (and addictive) delight in the activity, ­t here is a greater impetus and urgency to making booklists when the a­ ctual or notional collections that they represent are beyond m ­ ental compass, or hard to access, or threatened. In the period we have so far considered, the Eu­ro­pean po­liti­cal crises of the 1930s culminated in the Second World War, which was in Britain a serious strug­gle for national survival. Despite restrictions on the availability of paper, the war generated a ­g reat deal of publishing, in the (very broadly understood) national interest, such as the famous “Britain in Pictures” series.16 While the number of titles published annually halved during the course of the war, from something like 14,000 in 1939 to ­under 7,000 in 1946, it was generally agreed that the “war had proved a g­ reat stimulus” to reading. In 1940, the social research organ­ization Mass-­Observation surveyed “publishers, book clubs, libraries and booksellers, all of whom agreed that the most noticeable sales increase was for popu­lar reprints of the classics.”17 So a ­little book that may, ­under other circumstances, have been neither compiled nor published, became a patriotic gesture and an explicit contribution to the war effort. An En­glish Library: An Annotated List of 1300 Classics (1943), by F. Seymour Smith, is ­really a bibliography, and the annotations are mostly details of affordable reprint editions of the works listed.18 Seymour Smith, a librarian and bibliographer originally recruited to compile the work by a war­time conference of the National Book Council, says that ­t here has been during the war a “re­nais­sance of good reading,” which he attributes, realistically enough, to the long periods of comparative inactivity in the days of ­t hose in armed forces and the dark and quiet imposed upon many at home, but also to “the urge of young men and w ­ omen to seek a fuller understanding of the civilization they are called upon to fight for and

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re­spect” (7). It is in­ter­est­ing to observe—­simply via the index—­that no authors are mentioned on as many pages as Johnson (the closest are Carlyle, Scott, Southey, Stevenson, and Wilde). This is owing to Johnson’s generic versatility, so that (unlike some other ­great names, such as Jane Austen or Shakespeare) Johnson appears as a writer in five categories: u ­ nder “Collective Biography”; “Essays, Belles Lettres & Literary Criticism” (for five works: Rambler, Idler, On Shakespeare, Lives, and Journey to the Western Islands); “Novels”; “Poetry”; and “Travel and Topography.” Boswell appears u ­ nder “Biography,” “Travel and Topography,” and “Essays &c.” (for the Tour to the Hebrides), but not ­under “Autobiography, Journals and Letters”—­ prob­ably ­because the only edition of his private papers then available was unaffordable (and, as it tran­spired, incomplete). Hester Piozzi’s Anecdotes is also included ­under “Biography,” which means Johnson—as author or subject—is represented in the 1,300 by ten dif­fer­ent works, three of which are listed twice. The introduction to the “Biography” chapter begins “The most criticized biography in En­glish is by general consent also the greatest. Partly b ­ ecause of the personality of Dr. Johnson, partly ­because of Boswell’s art and admiration for his subject, his work cannot be superseded and even attracts readers who are antipathetic to both” (17). Of the Lives of the Poets Seymour Smith says, “Some of the poets Johnson wrote of are now of minor interest and are known only to scholars, but Johnson’s essays are always of major importance, what­ever their subjects” (21). He describes Tour to the Hebrides as “a treat” (23). Seymour Smith’s book was lightly revised and reprinted during the 1940s. The American nation and its cultural traditions, including lit­er­a­ture, have never been externally threatened as clearly and dramatically as Britain was during World War II. But the United States has always been much more of a racial and cultural “melting pot” than the older socie­ties of Western Eu­rope, and ­t hose Americans who particularly value the British and Eu­ro­pean ingredients in American civilization have always had a sense of the risk of cultural marginalization—­a lthough it is only fair to acknowledge that culture is more threatened by galloping corporatization and consumerism than by competing national cultures. In any case, it is from the United States that come many of the most strident—­and particularly, institutional—­efforts to formulate literary canons. The success of Mortimer Adler’s book and the public profile of President Hutchins’s curriculum reforms at the University of Chicago led to “­great books” reading groups being convened around the city. This gave the financial and institutional support that enabled Adler, with the support of Hutchins, and in collaboration with the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (also based in Chicago) to develop the “­Great Books of the Western World” (1952), a series in fifty-­four volumes,19 of which Boswell’s Life of Johnson is volume 44.20 Although ­t hese authorities ­were even then fighting a rearguard action against cultural fragmentation and the decline in literacy, it was this sort of work that contributed to giving canon-­ making (in the late twentieth c­ entury) a bad name: the se­lection of texts has been regarded as too focused on “dead white males,” with 79 of the 151 writers in both editions being British and American writers (that is, to the exclusion of other

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national lit­er­a­tures), plus the Greek and Roman classics. Hutchins wrote an introductory volume to the series, The ­Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (1952). In the suggested program of “Ten Years of Reading,” selected passages from Boswell are set down for the eighth year. Johnson does not feature in the series as a writer. With a staff of 120, Adler spent eight years—­and almost half of the ­Great Books’ $2 million budget—­preparing, to accompany the series, A Syntopicon: a two-­volume index to the 102 “­great ideas” that the editors—­Adler, mainly—­deemed fundamental to the Western tradition and that he claimed demonstrated its under­lying unity.21 The Syntopicon is a vast work of intellectual discrimination and synthesis, fairly comparable with Johnson’s Dictionary,22 but the world has not found it as compelling or accessible. In the Syntopicon, each ­g reat idea is introduced in a lengthy essay (by Adler) and categorized into topics (3,000 of them altogether); each topic is traced to its locations in the ­Great Books (this is the “syntopicon” proper), and references are given to other relevant works.23 Unfortunately—at least, for my current purpose—­t here is no index to the index, so one is compelled to trawl through the two volumes to find that Adler determined that the Life of Johnson contributes to 74 of the 102 G ­ reat Ideas. An account of precisely how it thus contributes—of which passages illustrate which topics and subtopics—­would itself provide an idiosyncratic conceptual index to the Life of Johnson. ­Here, for example, are the topics for which the Life is referenced, concerning G ­ reat Idea #56, “Memory and Imagination”: “3d. Memory as the muse of poetry and history: the dependence of history on the memory of men [1 reference]. 5c. The pathology of imagination: hallucinations, per­sis­tent imagery [2]. 7b. The fantastic and the realistic in poetry: the probable and the pos­si­ble in poetry and history [1]. 8. The nature and ­causes of dreaming [1].” And for #64, Opinion: 2c. Reasoning and argument concerning ­matters of opinion: comparison of demonstration and persuasion, princi­ples and assumptions, axioms and postulates [1]. 3c. The sceptical reduction of ­human judgments to opinion [1]. 5a. Rights and duties with re­spect to the expression of opinion [2]. 5b. Advantages and disadvantages of freedom of discussion: the role of a ­free press [2]. 6b. The inexactitude of moral princi­ples as applied to par­tic­u­lar cases [1]. 7a. The value of majority opinion: the distinction between ­matters to be determined by the expert or by a consensus [1]. 7b. Majority rule, its merits and dangers: protections against the false weight of numbers [1].

It might be worthwhile to list the par­tic­u ­lar ­Great Ideas with which Boswell’s Life of Johnson is associated, rearranged according to the number of headings ­under which it is cited, and adding the number of references (headings/references):24 79. Religion. 22/41 99. Wealth. 22/40 97. Virtue and Vice. 15/22 20. Education. 13/26

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26. ­Family. 12/29 69. Poetry. 12/17. Additional Readings: Lives of the Poets 51. Man. 11/30 33. Happiness. 11/20. Additional Readings: Rasselas 50. Love. 10/18 38. Immortality. 10/17 45. Language. 10/17 30. Good and Evil. 10/15 94. Truth. 9/19 31. Government. 9/17 68. Plea­sure and Pain. 9/12 46. Law. 8/16 90. State. 8/14 29. God. 8/13 42. Justice. 8/13 74. Punishment. 8/13 47. Liberty. 8/12 55. Medicine. 8/12 81. Rhe­toric. 7/11 59. Monarchy. 7/10 64. Opinion. 7/9 35. Honor. 6/16 43. Knowledge. 6/10 4. Art. 6/9 12. Constitution. 6/7 34. History. 5/14 16. Democracy. 5/11 48. Life and Death. 5/11 22. Emotion. 5/9 58. Mind. 5/7 71. Pro­gress. 5/7 86. Sin. 5/5 100. ­Will. 4/7 19. Duty. 4/6 17. Desire. 4/6 44. Labor. 4/6 60. Nature. 4/6 14. Custom and Convention. 4/5 56. Memory and Imagination. 4/5 91. Temperance. 4/5 3. Aristocracy. 3/8 61. Necessity and Contingency. 3/4 80. Revolution. 3/4 25. Experience. 3/3

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87. Slavery. 3/3 88. Soul. 2/8 2. Animal. 2/2 7. Being. 2/2 8. Cause. 2/2 13. Courage. 2/2 27. Fate. 2/2 32. Habit. 2/2 62. Oligarchy. 2/3 77. Reasoning. 2/2 84. Sense. 2/2 85. Sign and Symbol. 2/2 95. Tyranny and Despotism. 2/2 6. Beauty. 1/1 11. Citizen. 1/1 15. Definition. 1/1 23. Eternity. 1/1 24. Evolution. 1/1 37. Idea. 1/1 40. Infinity. 1/1 53. Matter. 1/1 70. Princi­ple. 1/1 73. Prudence. 1/1. Additional Readings: Rasselas 92. Theology. 1/1 93. Time. 1/1 98. War and Peace. 1/1 101. Wisdom. Additional Readings: Rasselas25 Despite its appearance of intellectual precision, the Syntopicon is in some ways a blunt instrument; of course, the seventy-­four “­Great Ideas” in no way exhaust the value and plea­sure of the Life of Johnson—or of any of the other G ­ reat Books. And is the Life of Johnson mainly concerned with religion and wealth; and is t­ here nothing in the book itself about wisdom? In a sense it is all about wisdom.26 And its other main topic—as I tell my students—is friendship, which is not one of Adler’s ­great ideas. Of the 3,000 individual topics, t­ hose for which the Life is most cited are: 8 references: Honor, 3b. The conditions of honor or fame and the ­causes of dishonor or infamy. 7 references: Religion, 6d. The world religions: the relation between p ­ eople of diverse faiths: the attitude of the faithful ­towards infidels.

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6 references: History, 2. The light and lesson of history: its role in the education of the mind and in the guidance of h ­ uman conduct. Immortality, 1. The desire for immortality: the fear of death. Law, 9. The l­egal profession and the study of law: praise and dispraise of ­lawyers and judges. Life and Death, 8d. The fear of death: the attitude of the hero, the phi­los­o­ pher, the poet, the martyr. Truth, 8c. Truth and falsehood in relation to love and friendship: the pleasant and the unpleasant truth. Man, 13. The grandeur and misery of man. Wealth, 7e. The inheritance of property: laws regulating inheritance. It w ­ ill be clear that the Syntopicon is a happy hunting ground for list-­makers, and that one could trawl through it forever, elaborating and making comparisons: how, for instance, do the number of citations of Boswell compare with ­t hose of other ­Great Books? All such endeavors would be more useful ­were it not for the inevitable suspicion that both the se­lection of ­Great Books and the list of G ­ reat Ideas 27 are debatable, if not arbitrary. Adler was ­later moved to regret overlooking “Equality,”28 to which we might be inclined to add “Choice, Pluralism and Tolerance,” or postmodern notions such the other, the gift, the body, the quotidian, the liminal or the virtual—­not to mention the idea that t­ here are no such ­things as ­great books or ideas. Chicago and environs continued to be a hotbed of this sort of activity. Robert B. Downs was a librarian who spent most of his ­career at the University of Illinois, and was a prolific author of books about books and libraries. His Books That Changed the World (1956) covered sixteen books, mainly books of politics, society, or science, published between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries.29 In the revised second edition of 1978 it was greatly expanded to include ancient and medieval books and writers.30 Johnson and Boswell do not appear. The Chicago “­Great Books” tradition continued with The Lifetime Reading Plan (1960) by Clifton Fadiman, dedicated to Mortimer Adler.31 Fadiman had studied at Columbia with Adler, was taught t­ here by poet and critic Mark Van Doren, and went on to become book review editor for the New Yorker and a notable public intellectual on radio, TV, and in the press. He was on the advisory board for Good Reading and an associate editor of the “­Great Books of the Western World.”32 His ­daughter is the con­temporary biblio-­essayist, Anne Fadiman. In one hundred short chapters, Fadiman recommends ninety-­five authors plus a number of anthologies. Boswell is among seven writers or collections in the grouping “History, Biography, Autobiography.” Fadiman says, “His Life is the best in the language, perhaps the best in any language. It was published . . . ​in 1791. Ever since, Samuel Johnson has been the most intimately known figure in En­glish lit­er­a­ture. . . . ​He ­will never cease to be quoted, often by p ­ eople innocent of the source of the quotation.” But the essay also gives Boswell his due, itemizing the skills that contribute to his being

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“more than a superb reporter. He is an artist” (221). The “Suggestions for Further Reading” direct the curious not to anything by Johnson, but to Hesketh Pearson’s Johnson and Boswell, the London Journal, C. B. Tinker’s Young Boswell, and Macaulay’s famous review. For the revised fourth edition of the book, ­under the new title of The New Lifetime Reading Plan (1997), Fadiman engaged a collaborator, John S. Major, who was responsible for the new essays on non-­Western books and writers.33 The number of entries was expanded, and they ­were reordered into a chronological sequence, making Boswell no. 59 of 133. The essay on Boswell remains substantially the same as in ­earlier editions. The bibliography recommends the Yale edition of Boswell’s private papers, the London Journal, 1762–1763 in par­tic­ul­ ar, and to the writings about Boswell adds Pottle’s ­Earlier Years (though not Brady’s ­Later Years), Wyndham Lewis’s Short Life, and subtracts Macaulay. But still no Johnson. Back across the Atlantic, Frank Seymour Smith’s war­time book of patriotic bibliography was revised and reprinted during the 1940s, but had been out of print for ten years when its “fifth and fully revised edition” was published in 1963 as An En­glish Library: A Bookman’s Guide.34 It was by then a work of 384 pages, covering—as it con­ve­niently reports—1,170 authors and 2,630 books (12). Johnson is no longer the author who is indexed most frequently (that laurel is shared by G. K. Chesterton and D.  H. Lawrence, with eight references each); he is now one of six writers indexed seven times (the o ­ thers being Belloc, Scott, Stevenson, Swift, and Wilde). Works of Johnson appear newly in two sections: his Letters (in three volumes, and the one-­volume se­lection in World’s Classics, both edited by R. W. Chapman) in “Autobiographies and Memoirs,” and se­lections from the Dictionary (edited by E. L. McAdam and George Milne) in the new section, “A Bookman’s Reference Library.” Smith comments: “Johnson’s wit, prejudices, and vigorous style are ­here, and the se­lection provides a fascinating book to browse in, especially for the changes in meaning of certain words, the rich variety of words now lost from our vocabulary, and the illuminating clarity of the original definitions” (353). Hester Piozzi’s Anecdotes have dis­appeared, but Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson (in the 1962 abridgment by Bertram Davis) appears (51). Seymour Smith also includes three se­lections from across Johnson’s ­whole oeuvre: Prose and Poetry edited by R. W. Chapman (1922), Prose and Poetry edited by Mona Wilson (1950), and Se­lections edited by R. W. Chapman (1955). Boswell’s Johnsonian works retain their places, so Johnson is represented as author in eight works and three selected works, and as subject in another three—­fourteen in total. Boswell appears as an author, loosed from Johnson, with the six volumes thus far published of the Private Papers (19), and the Journal of a Tour to Corsica, edited S. C. Roberts, listed twice (19, 324). Odhams Press was a British publisher of newspapers and magazines that diversified into book publishing. During the 1960s, Odhams hosted the Companion Book Club (a series of hardcover reprints of popu­lar con­temporary novels), as well as a stable of comics. Their books included many that seem designed to appeal to a newspaper readership, including a series of anthologies, such as 50 ­Great Journeys, 100 ­Great Adventures, 50 ­Great Ghost Stories, 100 ­Great Modern Lives, 100 ­Great

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Events That Changed the World, and 100 ­Great Kings, Queens and Rulers, all edited by John Canning. This solidly middlebrow fare includes 100 G ­ reat Books: Masterpieces of All Time (1966), also edited by Canning, for which Lawrence Durrell wrote a short introduction.35 The hundred begin with the classics (The Iliad) and finish with Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Canning’s se­lection is not quite postcolonial, but certainly post–­British Empire. It includes forty-­one non-­English language titles (e.g., Don Quixote, Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Dostoevsky’s ­Brothers Karamazov, Mann’s Magic Mountain), and it is in­ter­est­ing to find the Old and New Testaments—­and the Koran—­t hough nothing by Shakespeare (­because he wrote no books: plays or books of poetry have been explic­itly excluded). On the other hand, ­t here are impor­tant works of nonfiction, by writers such as Malthus, Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Th ­ ere is a clutch of works that, what­ever their merits, are pre­ sent mainly ­because the book is a product of its time, such as Churchill’s My Early Life and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-­Tiki Expedition. The nineteen contributors are also a curious list in that they seem (from the jacket descriptions) to be widely published professional writers, but I’ve heard of none of them. Rather than being literary or academic figures, they all appear to be writers on history, politics, biography, and current affairs. Between essays on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of ­Women is the thirteen-­paragraph essay on Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson by Edward Ashcroft.36 It is enriched for a popu­lar readership by a dozen or so quotations and anecdotes, and gives both the subject and the author their due: “This supreme example of biography is very near to autobiography. It is of supreme interest ­because both Boswell and Johnson ­were in their dif­ fer­ent ways extraordinary men.” Of Johnson, we are told, his “superiority over other learned men, and often men of greater learning than he, lay in the ability of being able [sic] immediately to summon up all the powers of his mind” (201–202). He concludes, “As a thinker and a writer and as a Christian, Johnson may seem far away from the pre­sent world. But thanks to Boswell, we are able to live with this intellectual dinosaur as though we conversed with him e­ very day, and enjoyed his intellectual dexterity and knew, b ­ ehind it all, his courage, his fears and his greatness of spirit” (203). In 1972, Mortimer J. Adler published a new version of his (by-­t hen) classic How to Read a Book, subtitled Revised and Updated Edition, and co-­authored with Charles Van Doren, son of Mark Van Doren and an editor for Encyclopædia Britannica.37 It is virtually a new book, differently structured and with a wider range of topics. Th ­ ere are sections on dif­fer­ent types of reading for dif­fer­ent types of books, according to which biography is classed as a sub-­branch of history, and it is in that context that the Life of Johnson is mentioned and described as “One of the greatest of all biographies[,] . . . ​it is continuously fascinating. It is certainly definitive (though other biographies of Dr. Johnson have since appeared), but it is also uniquely in­ter­est­ing” (244).38 The only other biographers named are Walton and Plutarch. The reading list was given the more modest title, “A Recommended Reading List,” but updated and extended to 137 authors, including Johnson (356),

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for The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes, the Dictionary, Rasselas, and the Lives of the Poets; and Boswell (357), for “Journal (esp. London Journal)” and the Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. The scope of encyclopedias being . . . ​well, encyclopedic, they are not selective enough to be relevant to this pre­sent inquiry.39 But the fifteenth edition of the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica (1974) is an exception. Structurally, this edition was a radical rethink of the traditional A–­Z arrangement, with entries divided between two sequences: the twelve-­volume Micropædia of shorter articles and the seventeen-­volume Macropædia of longer articles.40 With the wisdom of hindsight, we might see the new structure as a response to pressures in the 1960s coming from all directions on canons of knowledge and traditional literacy. In the Macropædia, Johnson is one of eighty-­one historical individuals who are distinguished with a biographical entry.41 The essay was a new revision by James L. Clifford of the article by S. C. Roberts, which was first published in the 1965 version of the f­ ourteenth edition of the Britannica. In the 1995 version of the fifteenth, this was superseded by an essay by Robert Folkenflik, which—­w ith revisions—­remained into the version of 2010: the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in hard copy (at least for the time being).42 Folkenflik’s entry is the one now found in the Encyclopædia Britannia Online. In the Macropædia t­ here ­were fourteen writers: Cervantes, Chaucer, Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Johnson, Milton, Molière, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Virgil, and Voltaire. This se­lection suggests an effort to cover lit­er­a­ture by period, genre, and national tradition, albeit with a Eu­ro­pean focus. British lit­er­a­t ure is represented by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, and Dickens, and the remaining writers represent the lit­er­a­tures of Spain, Italy, Rus­ sia, Germany, France, and ancient Rome.

Great/Important/Serious versus Plea­sure/Favorite/Loved The rather ­grand midcentury enterprises of cultural summation considered so far are mostly American and connected with the Chicago “­great books” proj­ects. The movement has no equivalent in Britain or other English-­speaking countries. Britain has long celebrated both connoisseurship and eccentricity, and we find a characteristically British approach to ­g reat books in The Best of Every­thing, edited William Davis (1980). Some of the authors of individual chapters are straight out of Grub Street, but the chapter on lit­er­a­ture is by the distinguished and prolific novelist Anthony Burgess.43 Never one to shy away from sweeping statements—­ because he knew too much about every­t hing to be easily contradicted—­Burgess selected his own categories and proceeded to fill them. He begins, less than obviously, with the “Best Dictionary,” which, he says, “is still Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, which is h ­ uman, hence imperfect, hence lovable” (95). The remaining twenty unsystematic categories include the best novels in French, Italian, Japa­nese, and German (he confesses, “I have not read the w ­ hole of Japa­nese fiction”). Of “Biographies,” he begins by saying and asking, “Yes, but can we regard Boswell as sufficiently objective? Hero-­worship and a tape-­recorder brain are prob­ably not enough for a

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g­ reat biographer” (100); for that not undisputable reason he plumbs for Rupert Hart-­Davis’s biography of Hugh Walpole. ­Under “Best Repartee” he performs the same routine, giving Johnson’s reply to the Thames waterman, disqualifying it as having prob­ably been prepared in advance,44 and giving the award to R. B. Sheridan for saying in the British Parliament that a po­liti­cal opponent “is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.” But Johnson is clearly a touchstone for the Best. The British novelist and critic Frederic Raphael, together with playwright and prolific translator of drama Kenneth McLeish, wrote The List of Books (1981), with the cover subtitle or blurb, “A Recommended Library of over 3,000 Works.”45 It is a series of forty-­four annotated lists, arranged by topic or genre, with each individual title described in an entry of four to eight lines. At their frequent best, ­t hese entries are thoughtful and discriminating. Johnson fares particularly well in the category of “Biography.” Boswell’s Life of Johnson is described as “Perhaps the one assured world classic in En­glish biography” (25), and the Lives of the Most Eminent Poets as “18th-­century prose at its magisterial, grandiloquent best” (27). In the same category, the authors also nominate a modern Johnsonian biography, the 1945 life by Joseph Wood Krutch; and in the pro­cess of recommending W. J. Bate’s John Keats (1963), they tell us, “Bate’s Life of Dr Johnson [sic] is even better” (25). ­Under “Literary Criticism,” about “Johnson on Shakespeare (1795) [sic]” we are told: “The scholarship in this monumental edition is less than one might have expected, but the preface and the notes to the vari­ous plays are masterly” (100). The Dictionary appears ­under “Reference” (139); the entry repeats the usual caveats—it was not the first, the “definitions are often insular (‘oats’), idiosyncratic (‘lexicographer’) and prejudiced (‘patron’)”—­and is not at all sure of itself in its terms of recommendation. In “Travel and Exploration” the Journey to the Western Islands is described as “the fascinating encounter of a disciplined 18th-­century mind with the alien, half-­barbarian civilization of the Hebrides” (151). Philip Ward, the author of A Lifetime’s Reading (1982), was a British librarian who worked for many years in Indonesia and other non-­European countries. He describes a notably international collection of significant titles, or­ga­nized into a fifty-­year reading program.46 Boswell is set for reading in year twenty-­nine—­which, if one’s fifty years is scheduled from ages twenty to seventy—­seems (at age forty-­ nine) a bit late for one to become a confirmed Johnsonian. Ward himself does not, from his brief remarks on the Life of Johnson, seem well acquainted with the book. He quotes Sir Sidney Lee’s description: “the longest biography in the En­glish language” and “the best specimen of biography that has yet been written in any tongue” (187). A “Boswell,” he says, is “a loyal amanuensis meticulous in preserving a subject’s wit and wisdom on all occasions and in all com­pany” (188), and then devotes some sentences to describing the Boswell of the journals. He describes the Hill-­ Powell edition, but recommends for reading the popu­lar abridgment Every­body’s Boswell, which he attributes to “J. E. Shepard” (it was in fact illustrated by E. H. Shepard, well-­k nown as the illustrator of Winnie-­the-­Pooh; the anonymous editor has been identified in more recent editions as Frank Morley). The American edition

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of A Lifetime’s Reading was given the subtitle The World’s 500 Greatest Books, to exploit the American reading public’s historic interest in “greatness.”47 Charles Van Doren, Mortimer Adler’s co-­worker in the revision of How to Read a Book, authored The Joy of Reading: 210 Favorite Books, Plays, Poems, Essays, e­ tc.: What’s in Them, Why Read Them (1985).48 The younger Van Doren took a degree in liberal arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Mary­land, where they used a “­Great Books” curriculum on the Chicago model. A ­ fter early academic success, with higher degrees in astrophysics and En­glish, he became caught up in a quiz show scandal in the late 1950s and found through Adler’s influence a job at Encyclopædia Britannica, where he worked u ­ ntil 1982.49 His book surveys works by 144 writers and devotes three pages (67–69) to introducing Boswell and the Life to a popu­lar audience, saying nothing unexceptional; he does not recommend (indeed, barely mentions) any writing of Johnson’s, and says that the combination of the two writers is “greater than the sum of its parts,” and that the eve­nings of a (long) winter can be satisfactorily spent with the Life of Johnson. In 2008 the book was published in a second edition, augmented and rearranged (from alphabetical to chronological order), with the new subtitle: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World’s Best Authors and their Works. Boswell retains his essay.50 ­There are supposed to be 3,000 titles mentioned in the sole-­authored work of Frederic Raphael’s collaborator, Kenneth McLeish, the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (1988); however, it is more than a list or lists.51 As well as discussing 300 individual authors, McLeish uses arrows and charts to trace stylistic and thematic relationships between books, and thus introduces a ­great many more titles. His aim is to indicate how one book may lead its reader to another. The thoughtful and original structure of the Bloomsbury Guide at first glance made me feel as if I had stumbled back into Adler’s Syntopicon, but it is useable and fascinating, and McLeish writes with conviction and enthusiasm. The book’s coverage, however, is ­limited to prose fiction, and makes no pretense at a historical “­great books” survey: of the 300 authors only about thirty-­five are from before the twentieth ­century, and among the 3,000 titles, neither Johnson nor Boswell is mentioned. McLeish’s book went through four editions before his death in 1997. In his fourth and final edition (1996) the number of author entries had risen to 350, and titles mentioned to 4,000.52 He added to his mix a new category of entries, “Startpoints” (i.e., lists by genre); the latter innovation allowed him to introduce some nonfiction: “Autobiography, Biography, Letters and Diaries,” “Poetry,” and “Travel.” Thus it is that Boswell appears u ­ nder “Startpoints: Biography,” of whose Life he says, “Classic known by all but read by few. Wonderful, word-­by-­word accounts of Johnson’s ­table talk, evocative scene-­setting, full of personal affection for its subject. Like a win­ dow thrown up on 18th-­century London” (34). The twenty-­t hird (and, as it tran­spired, final) edition of Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers was published in 1990. Responsibility for the book had been taken over by the R. R. Bowker Com­pany, a publisher that specializes in providing bibliographical information on published works for libraries and the book trade (such Books in Print), and is in the United States and Australia the mono­poly pro-

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vider of ISBNs.53 The book had expanded by almost an order of magnitude from its beginnings in 1932, to a hardcover of 465 pages featuring nearly 3,000 titles.54 ­There are five parts, covering all fields of study—(Western) historical periods, non-­ Western and minority cultures, lit­er­a­ture, the sciences, and social sciences—­and a “Special Section” on reference books. But it retains the tone of direct, companionable address to the reader, and begins with four more idiosyncratic lists. The list of “101 Significant Books” survives (in revised form) from the earliest incarnations of Good Reading; and The Life of Johnson is still ­t here, and is also included in “A Short List of Books to Read on Vacation” (where it is the first book listed), but it is not on the short lists of books to read before entering college or ­after retirement. In the main body of the book, Johnson and Boswell persist in almost the same locations as in the past. Joseph A. Byrnes contributes the two chapters about the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries, and his comments echo the ­earlier editions. Of the Lives of the En­glish Poets, he says, “Cowley, Milton, and Dryden are among the En­glish poets of the 17th ­century appraised with sturdy in­de­pen­dence and common sense by the 18th ­century’s greatest critic” (49). The Life of Johnson retains its place in the eigh­ teenth ­century, and is described as “the sturdy common sense and literary judgments of an impressive mind, recorded by a shrewd and devoted friend in one of the greatest biographies ever written” (53). Johnson the writer is recommended in the form of Donald Greene’s Oxford anthology, which is said to be “the most generous one-­volume se­lection available of the works of the g­ reat literary dictator of the age” (55). The list of “Books about” the period is less belletristic than before, and includes W. Jackson Bate’s biography, Samuel Johnson: “a model of the modern biographer’s art, proving Johnson ­every bit as admirable as the hero-­worshipping Boswell thought” (57). Introducing the chapter on biography, Philip Roddman devotes two judicious paragraphs to Boswell and Johnson: “The Plutarchian tradition of ‘the ruling passion’ conferring symmetrical order upon the ages of man—­ youth, m ­ iddle, old age—­appears in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though not in his theories regarding experience. In Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, the supreme biography in En­glish, ‘the ruling passion’ does not appear at all” (204). And again, “Johnson’s point of view is clear-­cut and imposed with much force and wit. His biographer, James Boswell, on the other hand, follows the realistic tradition of Suetonius, where the character steadily characterizes himself—in and by his very voice, his style, and his habits” (204). However, neither of them features in the list that follows, as author or subject. A (very predictable) quotation from Johnson provides the epigraph to the appendix on reference books. As films and other media of popu­lar culture have made their way into the school and college curriculum, literary greatness and the notion of being “well-­read” have loosened their hold on many ­people. Writers who want to proselytize on behalf of book-­reading have had to find other ways in which to recommend t­ hese more difficult pleasures. Antonia Fraser’s Plea­sure of Reading (1992) is a handsome large-­ format collection of commissioned essays by forty writers on their early memories of books and reading, each accompanied by a list of favorite books.55 It was

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published to celebrate the bicentenary of British bookselling chain W. H. Smith. Boswell is mentioned by poet Stephen Spender as a masterpiece to which he enjoys returning (26), and by travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor as an “old friend” (42). Doris Lessing recalls being bored by writers for whom she was too young, including Dr.  Johnson (with Ruskin, Carlyle, and Hazlitt) (46). Apropos the question of w ­ hether books are “life-­g iving or death-­dealing,” A. S. Byatt quotes Johnson’s phrase about “the hunger of the imagination, which preys incessantly upon life” (131). Johnson and Boswell appear only once each on ­actual lists: The Life of Johnson is included by the playwright Ronald Harwood (126), and the Lives of the Poets by the Scottish novelist Candia McWilliam (241). In 2015, to ­ride the pre­sent biblio-­book wave, the book was reissued in a cheaper format, with five new (and younger) contributors, none of whom mentions Johnson or Boswell.56 Fraser’s Pleasures might be observed to contrast with the emphasis on “importance” and “expertise” in the title of Fred Bratman and Scott Lewis’s The Reader’s Companion: A Book Lover’s Guide to the Most Impor­tant Books in ­Every Field of Knowledge, as Chosen by the Experts (1994). Pat Buckridge observes that, with regard to reading advice, “­There are some indications . . . ​of a ‘pleasure-­bias’ on the eastern side of the Atlantic and a ‘self-­improvement bias’ on the western side” (73). This book is a collection of many brief, slightly annotated lists by dozens of (mainly American) notable writers and ­others.57 The Life of Johnson is recommended ­under “Journalists and Journalism” by Roger Rosenblatt (28) “for wisdom,” and ­under “Biography” by the distinguished En­g lish literary biographer Michael Holroyd, who says that “Boswell was a g­ reat diarist, and this biography of Johnson comes wonderfully alive whenever the two friends appear together on the page” (54). Holroyd also lists the Lives of the Poets, of which he says, “By turning readers’ attention from vulgar public ambition t­ owards domestic privacies [scholars ­w ill recognize the allusion], Johnson established biography as a discipline in­de­pen­dent history” (54). Boswell’s Life and Johnson’s Life of Savage are both listed by Justin Kaplan (55).

Millennial Anx­i­eties In the run-up to the end of both the ­century and the millennium, ­t here was an im­mense appetite for works of cultural summation. Prob­ably the most famous book of this type is the magisterial The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), by Harold Bloom, which inaugurated a boom in list-­making and the strident reassertion of the value of canon formation in the face of a c­ ouple of de­cades of ideological challenges.58 ­These challenges had not taken place, on the ­whole, in the world of publishing—as this essay has demonstrated—­but in the acad­ emy, and the challenges and reactions w ­ ere referred to as the “canon wars.” Bloom’s argument for the being and content of the Western literary canon was, so far the book-­reading public was concerned, unexceptional—­save that it made no concessions to popu­lar taste. It is culturally highbrow and intellectually demanding. His title was deliberately provocative in all its ele­ments: The + Western + Canon.

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Johnson is the subject of a chapter, as one of twenty-­six writers whose work Bloom regards as central to the canon of Western lit­er­a­ture. Bloom is (generally) hubristically assertive, but in chapter  8, “Dr.  Samuel Johnson, The Canonical Critic,” he succeeds in plausibly identifying the characteristic excellences of Johnson’s work, which he (and, he says, Johnson) believes to be a critic’s main task. He places Johnson in his literary context as an essayist, with (among this twenty-­six) Montaigne and Freud, but not of a skeptical temper: “All of his work . . . ​is essentially wisdom lit­er­a­ture” (184). The critic’s character—in Johnson’s case, “as good as he was ­great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree” (184)— is not irrelevant to his achievement as a critic, but central to it. Bloom considers Johnson first as a critic of Shakespeare—­who is the test of all critics—­and in the Lives of the Poets. He praises Johnson as a “thinker for himself” (185), which same quality Johnson admired and praised in his ideological e­ nemy Milton. Johnson, he says, “never came easily to belief” (191); his melancholy or gloom Bloom characterizes as “a negative empiricism” (187) but sees it as the root of his unsparing appreciation of (and need for) humor and gaiety. In Johnson, “with and without Boswell,” we see the quin­tes­sen­tial ­human quality: true life, vitality, a mind at work. Bloom seems to read Johnson as he believes Johnson reads, with his ­whole being. Bloom also includes as appendix to the book a very long list of writers—​ 353 (approximately)—­classified by period and nation, whom he considers canonical. The list was prob­ably more read and discussed than the prose of the book, although Bloom ­later claimed that he only concocted it at the request of his editor.59 Johnson, with only two other writers (Rimbaud and Lewis Carroll), is listed not for par­tic­u­lar titles but for “Works.” Boswell is listed for the Life of Johnson and his “Journals.” Bloom’s Western Canon stimulated much conversation and debate. And it was perhaps his example that made the “G-­word” permissible again—­since the “­Great Books” of 1952, books and reading had been “Good,” “Serious,” a “Plea­sure,” and “World-­Changing,” but not “­Great.” The Book of ­Great Books (1997), by W. John Campbell, is a sort of compendium of crib notes, with each book described by summary, background, characters, themes, symbols, structure, and critical overview; it is described as “the key to unlocking the secrets of 100 of the world’s most enduring novels, plays and epic poems,” which generic restriction rules out Johnson and Boswell.60 In ­Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (1997), by David Denby, the “­Great Books” of the title are not the author’s choices but ­t hose on the curriculum for the two required core courses for first-­year students at Columbia University, of which Denby’s book gives an account of rereading in his midlife.61 They are an impressive list of classics of the Western tradition, but the twenty-­seven authors do not include Johnson (or Boswell), so need not detain us. (Johnson is mentioned in the chapter on Shakespeare, and—­via Boswell—in the chapter on Rousseau.) The coffee-­table book The A–­Z of ­Great Writers (1997) by British journalist Tom Payne covers 389 world writers, devoting a page to each of them.62 Some 226 (roughly 58 ­percent) are English-­language writers—­surprisingly close to the ratio in John

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Canning’s se­lection of ­Great Books (1966). Johnson is t­ here (184); Boswell is not. Most of each page is taken up by a picture, a list of “Major Works,” a quotation or two, double-­spaced; and ­t here is a short discursive passage. Johnson is celebrated for his fluency, Rasselas, the Dictionary, and his humanity. Thomas J. Craughwell’s ­Great Books for ­Every Book Lover: 2002 G ­ reat Reading Suggestions for the Discriminating Bibliophile (1998), is revealed, in the very small print (title verso), to have been “originally published in separate volumes” as The 1995 [–1998] Book Lover’s Calendar.63 Arranged into seventy alphabetical chapters, it commences—­perhaps unpromisingly—­w ith “All-­Star Sports Books,” and ­t here certainly is plenty of less-­than-­highbrow material in chapters such as “Exercise and Fitness,” “­Great Gossip,” “Hard-­R iding Westerns,” and “Personal Finance.” But among the wide range of categories of reading material suggested ­here is a number in which Boswell or Johnson might be expected to appear: “Literary Lives,” “­Great Novellas,” “Notable Biographies,” “Traveller’s Tales”—­but no. The promising “Words to Live By” includes, by William Effros, How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days. Robert Kanigel’s Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World’s Best Books (1998) consists of nine short lists, incorporating eighty titles; ­t here is no Johnson or Boswell.64 Invitation to the Classics (1998), edited by Louise Cowan and Os Guinness, is a handsome illustrated book, assembled ­under the aegis of the Trinity Forum, based in Washington, DC, which sponsors events and publications for the discussion of politics, society, and culture from a Christian perspective.65 Most of the eighty or so chapters of the book concern an individual author or group of writers; Johnson, his essays and Rasselas, and Boswell’s Life are thoughtfully discussed by poet and scholar Lionel Basney. He asserts that “Johnson’s essays and his philosophical romance Rasselas constitute the most searching body of Christian moral reflection between Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth ­century and Søren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth” (185). Johnson in his essays contributes to both practical wisdom (prudence and good sense in the business of life) and spiritual wisdom (moral character: hope, the ego, humility). Basney concludes that “what we find in Boswell is generally compatible with what we read in Johnson,” describing the two Johnsons, for both of whom we should be grateful, as “the Johnson of the Ramblers and Rasselas, whose wisdom has become ‘a permanent part of the conscience of mankind,’ and the Johnson of Boswell’s Life, a wise and power­ful presence from the past” (188). The En­glish poet and writer Martin Seymour-­Smith—­the son of Frank Seymour Smith, whose list of 1,300 books we met back in 1943—­was a prolific professional writer, especially of encyclopaedic literary guide-­books. His more selective work, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to T ­ oday (1998), starts with the Upanishads and concludes with B. F. Skinner.66 Whilst not entirely excluding works of lit­er­a­ture (narrowly defined), the book is focused on works of philosophy, science, and sacred texts—­t he foundation texts of the vari­ous academic disciplines and schools of thought. Among the authors and thinkers treated are Chomsky and Gibbon, Lao-­Tzu and Euclid, Hegel and Calvin, Bacon and Bunyan, Mendel and Marx, Freud and Einstein; par­tic­u ­lar books

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and texts include the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s First Folio, War and Peace, The Trial, and 1984. ­There are also two works of reference, abutting each other in the chronological sequence: The Encyclopédie of Diderot et al., and Johnson’s Dictionary. Seymour-­ Smith’s essay on the Dictionary is judicious, vigorous, and affectionate, and it is worth giving a fairly detailed summary of his discussion ­here. Whereas the ­great book was once overpraised, he says that it had recently become fash­ion­able to regard it as merely quaint and eccentric. Affirming its importance, Seymour-­Smith puts the Dictionary accurately into its context, stating that Johnson improved on Nathan Bailey “by trying to make a scholarly rec­ord and by introducing a literary dimension” (266). He sees that although Johnson “believed that some [linguistic] stability was needed . . . ​he still based his definitions on usage, and he did give examples” (267). He paid attention to advances in science and medicine. ­There is a thoughtful discussion of ­whether it is (merely) “elitist” to regard any usages as “wrong” and at least some changes in language as “degenerate”: Seymour-­Smith asks, “When does ‘error’ turn into ‘correct usage’?” (269). Johnson’s influence, he says, “was upon dictionaries, rather than upon the En­glish language,” although his preferences have influenced British orthography (269). Johnson may have been “proved wrong” in some of the 800 words which he condemned but, Seymour-­ Smith concludes, ­because “we love Johnson . . . ​he continues to influence our thinking in the strongest way that is pos­si­ble for humankind” (269). Seymour-­Smith, it might be remarked, was not just an encyclopedist but a reputable poet and literary critic. Anthony Burgess, in a review of Seymour-­Smith’s Poets through Their Letters (1969), said, “On the evidence of this . . . ​we may expect [from Seymour-­Smith] literary biography as satisfying as Johnson’s.”67 The poet Robert Nye, noting Seymour-­Smith’s “encyclopaedic works of erudition in which hundreds of authors are discussed,” agreed with Burgess: “Certainly he resembled Johnson both in the breadth of his interests and the passionate audacity of his judgements.”68 In the May–­June 1998 issue of the quarterly magazine Utne Reader, which pre­ sents a digest of essays from the in­de­pen­dent and alternative press, the editors Jay Walljasper and Jon Spayde contributed “The Loose Canon,” subtitled “150 G ­ reat Works to Set Your Imagination on Fire.”69 Among what they describe as a “a smorgasbord of books, movies, plays, tele­v i­sion shows, and works of m ­ usic,” it is a bit of a surprise to find: Samuel Johnson—­represented by the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler essays (1750–1760)—­described thus: “None of the mundane emotions of daily life—­boredom, embarrassment, daydreams, vague dissatisfaction—­was too trivial for Johnson to take on and ennoble with his rolling ocean of prose” (54). Each work is paired with another, by way of elucidatory contrast; Johnson’s essays are paired with The Journey’s Echo: Se­lections from Freya Stark (1963). For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most (1999), edited by Boston-­based ­lawyer Ronald B. Shwartz, is a collection of short essays by vari­ous prominent living American writers,70 responding to the curator’s request that they identify, and write “in personal terms” about, “­t hose 3–6 books that have

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in some way influenced or affected you most deeply, ‘spoken to’ you the loudest” (xvii). Clearly Boswell’s and Johnson’s voices need to be raised, as they have not “spoken” their way into any one’s ­actual list of books (and are hence unindexed).71 But they do lurk in the book, to be uncovered by patient inquirers. Nicholson Baker begins his two paragraphs with the tantalizing comment: “Some titles are too private or too obvious to talk about, like Johnson’s Rambler or Tolstoy’s Anna K” (6), and he accordingly eschews any further discussion; but clearly Baker means something impor­tant by this remark (as the Rambler is a far from obvious choice—­ whereas Anna Karenina is listed by six contributors). Johnson is glanced at sideways as Joseph Epstein discusses his one se­lection or recommendation, Max Beerbohm’s book of essays And Even Now (1920), in which one of the essays, “ ‘A Clergyman,’ ” is a touching causerie about an incident in Boswell in which an unnamed clergyman is the victim of a Johnsonian squelching.72 Geoffrey Scott’s Portrait of Zélide (1925), recommended by Justin Kaplan, understandably occasions a mention of Boswell (131). And Johnson reaches his (still unindexed) zenith—­a lbeit at second­ hand—­when former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan recommends, as her number-­one book, Walter Jackson Bate’s biography, Samuel Johnson (1977), as follows: This is breathtaking book, not only perfectly professional in its scholarship, sourcing and precision but something extraordinary—an intellectual with warmth and heart writing about and pondering the life of a turbulent genius who strug­g led, strug­g led. Bate sees the meaning of Johnson’s life and work as the answering of a question: How to live? This was Johnson’s ­great subject, this the question he strug­gled to answer in his work and life, day by day. ­Great lit­er­a­ture gives you a g­ reat push upward, it makes t­ hings seem pos­si­ ble. Johnson’s life and Bate’s book do this for me. Johnson’s wit was actually moving; Bates [sic] manages to love his subject, honor him, and never compete with him. A rare ­t hing. (187–188)

In 2001, the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide was published in its fifth edition, for which Kenneth McLeish’s original book was edited by Nick Rennison, and which I w ­ ill therefore consider as a new book.73 Rennison was also the author for Bloomsbury of a number of pocket-­sized genre-­oriented “Good Reading Guides.” Boswell remains u ­ nder “Biography,” and gains a new appearance ­under the “Letters and Diaries” “Startpoint” (168), with the London Journal, of which Rennison says: “In the 18th ­century Boswell arrives in London as a young man in search of ­women, wine and the celebrities of the day and rec­ords his adventures with endearing honesty. Self-­reproach and vows to lead a better life are swiftly followed by further debauches.” Boswell’s presence expands yet again in the eighth edition (2009),74 when the London Journal becomes a “Hidden Gem” at the end of the “Letters and Diaries” entry. The entry just quoted is expanded by four sentences: “I own, sir, the spirits which I have in London make me do every­thing with more readiness and vigour,” James Boswell once told his mentor Dr. Johnson and the

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proof is in his London Journal. In 1762, Boswell arrives in London as a young man in search of w ­ omen, wine and the celebrities of the day. The London Journal, edited from private papers, first appeared nearly two hundred years ­a fter he wrote it and it provides not only a remarkable pa­norama of high and low life in the eighteenth-­century city but also a self-­portrait of [and rec­ords his adventures with] endearing honesty. Boswell lives London life to the full—­drinking, whoring, sightseeing, playgoing and then drinking some more. Self-­reproach and vows to lead a better life are swiftly followed by further debauches. Few personal journals are as entertaining for the reader as this one. (276)

Michael Ondaatje et al., eds., Lost Classics (2001), is an edited collection, by the editors of a Canadian literary magazine, Brick (1977–), of essays by seventy-­t hree con­temporary writers, recommending one classic each.75 No one mentions Johnson or Boswell, though perhaps being included as “lost” is not exactly a recommendation. The Book Lover’s Guide to ­Great Reading: A Guided Tour of Classic & Con­ temporary Lit­er­a­ture (2001), by Terry  W. Glaspey, comes from the evangelical publisher InterVarsity Press (the publishing arm of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship), which indicates the purpose of this book.76 The bulk of the book is seven chapters of annotated lists of authors and books, or­ga­nized as “­Great Books of the Christian Tradition,” “Other Classics,” “Poetry,” “Books to Help You Think Like a Christian,” “Books to Help You Grow in Your Spiritual Life,” “Con­temporary Fiction,” and “Young Readers.” Th ­ ere are (by my count) 480 authors discussed in all (some appear in a number of chapters). Given that the Life of Johnson concerns an articulate and out­spoken Christian, whose life conspicuously illustrated his precepts, and was written by another who was at least sincere in his religious devotion,77 it is curious that it appears in “Other Classic Writing” (76) and is accorded possibly the briefest entry in the book—­both of which circumstances suggest to me that Glaspey ­hasn’t read it. Harold Bloom, having perhaps noticed that his Western Canon had not made a discernible impact on En­glish lit­er­a­ture curricula, made another attempt at canon-­ formation with his 2002 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.78 Bloom naturally confines himself to “geniuses of language,” and says that ­these are the one hundred geniuses that he “wanted to write about,” and not the top one hundred (ix). His aim is to identify the par­tic­u­lar genius—as in peculiar and defining aptitude—of each of his writers. He has chosen—­rather eccentrically— to arrange the book in groups of ten Sephirot or “emanations” derived from the Jewish Kabbalah. The second sefirah, “Hokmah,” denotes wisdom lit­er­a­ture, and ­here we find, for sacred wisdom, Socrates, Plato, the Yahwist, St. Paul, and Muhammad, and for secular wisdom, Johnson, Boswell, Goethe, Freud, and Thomas Mann. Bloom acknowledges that it is “a touch outrageous” to regard Boswell as a Christian moralist, but says that Boswell’s magnum opus reflects the authority of its subject. He describes the Life of Johnson as “a careful miracle, subtly balancing the formidable Johnson with his biographer’s shrewd provocations and stage-­management”

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(159), but also credits Boswell as “one of the first foreign correspondents, and also the creator of an encyclopedic journal of the self and its vicissitudes” (166). Of Johnson, Bloom says, his “voice seems that of literary criticism itself. . . . ​He reminds us what lit­er­a­ture is for” (168). The educationalist and writer of popu­lar history and philosophy ­Will Durant died in 1981. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, ed. John R. ­Little (2002), is a posthumous collection of his essays and other pieces, uncollected in his lifetime.79 In an essay-­plus-­list entitled “The One Hundred ‘Best’ Books for an Education,” the Life of Johnson is listed (86) as book no. 60 and is asterisked as (one of twenty-­ seven books) recommended for purchase.80 This Greatest Minds collection gives no indication of the dates or sources of its contents—no doubt b ­ ecause the editor and publishers wanted the book to look to naïve readers to be new work rather than old work—­but the “Best Books” article seems to have been first published seventy-­ three years before, in 1929.81 ­There are a number of other curiosities about the republication. In the original list, Boswell is no. 59; it seems that at some point in its subsequent history, Durant sneaked in Diogenes Laertius at no. 23. And in 1929, ­t here w ­ ere no scare quotes in the title around the word “best”; in deference to the anticipated sensitivities of twenty-­fi rst-­century readers, the editor or publishers have de­cided that what ­Will Durant thought greatest, best, and peak should be more safely and sensitively said to be “greatest,” “best,” and “peak.” It is odd that the editor was not struck with the irony of d ­ oing this in a book of which the first essay is titled “A Shameless Worship of Heroes” (my emphasis).82 A university lecturer in American lit­er­a­ture and a home-­schooler, Susan Wise Bauer is—­like quite a few writers we have considered—­interested in helping ­people learn (in a more than mechanical sense) how to read. Readers of anything other than popu­lar and con­temporary books inevitably need assistance and orientation, and even “universities now ‘disdain to fulfil’ our yearning for the classics” (15; she is quoting Harold Bloom). In The Well-­Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (2003), she surveys five genres: fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry.83 As well as providing sensible instructions for reading (and rereading) in each genre, she examines a generous range of par­t ic­u ­lar titles: thirty-­t wo novels, twenty-­six autobiographies, thirty-­one histories, twenty-­ eight plays, and forty-­one poets; but no work of Johnson or Boswell. Th ­ ere is a quotation from Rambler 4, on fiction (60–61).

Books and Change More and more it seems that older writers who have been educated to read, and who can and do read demanding and rewarding lit­er­a­ture, are afraid that self-­education is ­going to be the only way by which ­people might acquire the book-­learning and taste for reading that schools or universities once provided. The rate of the production of such booklist books increases, and faith in the power of books to change or define history and the lives of individuals, even to save lives, seems unabated.

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Kelly Ana Morey, a New Zealand writer, borrowed Adler’s famous title—­perhaps unwittingly—­for her How to Read a Book (2005). Hers could hardly be more dif­ fer­ent from Adler’s version. But it does conclude with a list, “100 good books.”84 The earliest date of a book on the list is 1982; although I suspect some items (such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Age of Innocence) are older than the editions listed. But apart from the works of Shakespeare (“2005”) and the Bible (“vari­ous editions,” apparently) the world of books seems to have been d ­ oing not much at all before the late nineteenth c­ entury. ­There is at this point something of a rush of book lists: four a year for the next three years. It was Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (2006) that first prompted me to think about this topic. Contrary to the implicit suggestion of the title, this popu­lar illustrated compendium—­part of what has become a series of circa thousand-­page “Do before You Die” books—is entirely concerned with the novel: so it is a ­great pity it ­wasn’t called 1001 Novels, as the pre­sent title queers the pitch for anyone wanting to make such a compendium of non-­novels.85 In this volume about “books,” t­ here is, therefore, no poetry, sacred books, plays, biographies, philosophy, or works of reference—­over 90 ­percent of the Dewey classification. However, Johnson does make an appearance, with Rasselas, as one of sixty-­t hree pre-­nineteenth-­century novels, in the entry written by Sarah Dillon.86 She describes the book as “a parable in the literary tradition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Pro­gress”—­which ­doesn’t seem quite right—­but other­wise her account of the book seems not inaccurate: “Rasselas’s adventures and lengthy conversations provide a vehicle for Johnson’s moral reflections on an astonishingly broad range of topics”; and she says that the book is of interest on account of its “humour and universality” (56). The quotation from Johnson selected as a blurb is “­Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and l­ ittle to be enjoyed.” Emma Beare’s edited work, 501 Must-­Read Books (2006), is divided into vari­ ous subsections: “­Children’s,” “Classic,” “Modern,” and “Science Fiction”; “History,” “Memoirs,” “Thrillers,” and “Travel.”87 In this last section, written by Gabrielle Mander and Carola Campbell, is the “Journey to the Hebrides,” by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell (513), which refers to the Penguin Classics edition of the two accounts. Johnson’s, we are told, “is considered a social history”; Boswell’s “is considered more anecdotal”—­both of which descriptions sound suspiciously second­hand, and the entry needed editing to avoid repetition. In The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That ­Matter Most to Them (2006), edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, the seventy-­one writers are mostly not scholars or literary authors.88 The books recommended are eclectic, and mostly modern and popu­lar—­I suppose our lives are mostly changed (by books, or indeed, anything) when we are young. Th ­ ere is a scattering of textbooks and books of ideas. The only book chosen by three contributors is To Kill a Mockingbird; chosen by two writers each are The ­Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (1973)—­a popu­lar work of psy­chol­ogy of which I’d never heard. Tolstoy and Dante seem not to have changed

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any lives. Some of the writers sneak in mentions of titles and authors ­others than ­t hose that “­matter most,” but ­t here’s no Johnson or Boswell. The prolific British broadcaster and politician Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, published an account of 12 Books That Changed the World (2006).89 The “changed the world” meme has been very common in the titles of recent popu­lar nonfiction, and Bragg’s se­lection attracted some mass media attention for overlooking the usual “­g reat books” and casting his generic net more widely, to emphasize texts that caused revolutions in science (Newton, Faraday) or society (Wilberforce, Wollstonecraft) and include the original rule book for “football” (soccer). The only literary text is the First Folio of Shakespeare. But in his preface, Bragg admits that as a writer of a book with “a fair claim to have changed the world . . . ​Dr Johnson . . . ​ [was] hard to omit” (2). The index clarifies that this is a reference to the Dictionary. Johnson is quoted and mentioned in the chapter on Shakespeare. The American writer Michael Dirda seems to be trying to contribute to all the vari­ous subgenres of books about books: bibliomemoir (An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartlands, 2003), essays (Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments, 2003, and Bound to Please, 2005), anthology of quotations (Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, 2005), reading diary (Browsings: A Years of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books, 2015), and canon-­creation. In Classics for Plea­sure (2007), he includes accounts of eighty-­eight authors or books.90 Dirda is a gifted reader who shares his plea­sure with conviction. Inspired in his early reading by Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, he includes no works from the revised 1997 edition of that book (thus ruling out Boswell), hoping instead to draw attention to “new authors and less obvious classics” and including more “genre titles.” He includes sections of books of adventure, comedy, romance, horror, travel, and biography, and manages to squeeze Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Frazer’s Golden Bough into a section called “Encyclopedic Visions.” In the section “Words of the Wise,” he considers Johnson (116–119) in the com­pany of Cicero, Erasmus, Lao-­Tse, Spinoza, and Heraclitus, and selects The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes, Rasselas, his essays, and Lives of the Poets as Johnson’s most considerable works. He concedes, “Yes, we should always read Boswell’s sparkling Life of Johnson,” but asserts that we have greater need of “the deeply humane critic and moral essayist.” He describes Johnson as a man of faith, but one whose “strong mind always engaged with the real­ity of lived experience.” The American essayist and critic Joseph Epstein at first struck me as an odd (by which I mean, a too-­subtle and sophisticated) writer to be both­ered with literary list-­making. But his handsomely produced edited collection, Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define En­glish and American Lit­er­a­ture (2007), is thoughtful and stimulating, and the essay on Johnson by David Bromwich, a professor of En­glish at Yale, is excellent.91 Epstein chose the twenty-­five subjects and provides an introduction on “The Style of Genius,” in which he argues that what we call “genius” is a ­matter not only of intellect, but of temperament. We like our geniuses to be a bit mad, or at least eccentric; but scientific genius seems more rational and abstract, and scientific discovery a joint enterprise, whereas artistic genius is indi-

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vidual and par­tic­u­lar, and unpredictable. Epstein admits that his se­lection shows a slight bias against “wild geniuses” and is “conservative in the sense of being traditional”; he concludes that “timelessness, grandeur of vision, originality of outlook—­a ll ­t hese, in concert and worked at a high power, comprise genius in a writer” (5). Bromwich’s essay not only gives a rounded portrait of Johnson, but w ­ ill tell even seasoned Johnsonians ­t hings they may not have thought of. Or more to the point, he powerfully and recognizably sums up what Johnson teaches t­ hose who love him. He describes Johnson’s famous remark about cant as “alluding to the ­human propensity to speak and think in formulae that make a habit of falsehood” (48). He says that the diction of the Rambler has “a melancholy assurance that suggests a wide reserve of power even in resignation.” “All of his writings . . . ​are a summons to fight against this vanity which . . . ​is natu­ral, is h ­ uman, and is everywhere to be resisted.” And Barry Moser’s woodcut portrait for this chapter is splendid. We can dispense swiftly with Defining Moments in Books: The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Shook the Literary World, edited by Lucy Daniel (2007),92 which is a very pop treatment, full of pictures, trivia, lists, and so on. It is prob­ably intended for young ­people, or as a gift book, and covers the world of books only since about 1890. At the opposite end of the seriousness scale is The ­Great Books: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Lit­er­ a­ture (2007), in which British phi­los­o­pher and conservative thinker Anthony O’Hear deals with sixteen authors, only five of them post-­Shakespeare, and not including Johnson.93 Not much time need be spent on “110 Best Books: The Perfect Library,” in the London daily The Telegraph (6 April 2008).94 ­There are prob­ably other such ephemeral lists out ­t here, space fillers for the op-ed pages now given an afterlife in the cloud, and this one—at least, in its online incarnation—­gives no account how it was arrived at, or by whom. But for this study its authority is not an issue: it was published and garnered—if briefly—­a wide audience. Divided into eleven lists of ten titles each, it is in fact an in­ter­est­ing and realistic mixture of the classic and con­temporary, the literary and popu­lar, the mainstream and generic. Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson in the “Lives” section is described thus: “He’s one of En­glish lit­er­a­ ture’s all-­time heavyweights, but most of what we know about Samuel Johnson, the man, comes from his friend Boswell’s hearty anecdotal biog.” Julian Patrick’s edition of 501 G ­ reat Writers (2008), described on its cover as “A Comprehensive Guide to the ­Giants of Lit­er­a­ture,” is from the same stable of designers, editors, and publishers responsible for the “1001 . . . ​before You Die” series.95 Boswell is not one of the 501—­Boswell being a book, not a writer—­but Johnson is, at number 62 in the chronological sequence. He is accorded a single page—­t here are half-­, two-­, and even four-­page writers (Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, and Voltaire are t­ hose who come before Johnson). The Johnson entry (93) is by Andrew Smith, a New Zealander studying in Melbourne, and apparently financing his studies with literary journalism. The blurb, presumably written by a subeditor, says that Johnson is “known for the serious, moral tone of

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his essays; the lighter, satirical tone of his novellas [sic]; and the witty, grumpy, old man style [sic; “grumpy-­old-­man style”?] of his epigrams.” The entry itself is accurate and describes Johnson’s works as the essays, Rasselas, the Dictionary. Most entries are festooned with a quotation; Johnson’s is: “The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in . . . ​life.” Quite how this line from Johnson’s obscure Life of Sir Thomas Browne came to the editors’ attention is not clear; one suspects the intervention of an online quotation device. Jane Mallison, Book Smart: Your Essential Reading List for Becoming a Literary Genius in 365 Days (2008), is or­ga­nized thematically, with ten books recommended for reading per month, u ­ nder a variety of headings.96 It is a bit surprising to find such a book in which one of the categories is “Some ­Great Eighteenth-­Century Works,” but this is a thoughtful, original survey by a subtle and discriminating reader. Other months are devoted to classics in translation, biographies, young men, strong ­women, crime, humor, exotic locations, b ­ attle, growing up, and award-­ winners. September is eighteenth-­century lit month, and Mallison invites us to read the Life of Johnson, se­lections from Johnson’s Dictionary (Jack Lynch’s edition), and the Thraliania. The other seven works in this chapter are not all predictable: Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, Tom Jones, School for Scandal, The Female Quixote, and Tristram Shandy. But they are representative, slightly challenging, and all im­mensely rewarding. She notes that of her other writers in this chapter, Johnson knew Boswell, Lennox, Sheridan, and Thrale (194–195). For anyone who is aware of the lit­er­a­ture of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the Life of Johnson is not a surprising choice. Mallison says it earned its reputation b ­ ecause “it captures the man entire”—­not only Johnson’s “intelligence and . . . ​tenderheartedness,” but also Johnson the unkempt, the indecorous diner, and competitive conversationalist (196). For further reading she suggests Boswell’s London Journal, Mary Hyde’s Impossible Friendship, Bate’s biography of Johnson, Bruce Redford’s Designing the Life of Johnson, and David Buchanan’s Trea­sure of Auchinleck. She recognizes that many readers w ­ ill have “never considered the extended perusal of a dictionary,” but sells Johnson’s Dictionary for its treasure-­house of quotations, its testimony to Johnson’s powers, its very occasional idiosyncrasies, and the nobility of the preface. Mallison recommends that if readers become afflicted by lexicographilia they obtain the complete Dictionary (not easy!), Henry Hitching’s Defining the World, and Allan Reddick’s Making of Johnson’s Dictionary. The Thraliana is another most unexpected choice for this sort of a book (though Mallison leaves the reader in the dark as to how to find an affordable edition). Hester Thrale, she says, “knew a side of him [Johnson] not accessible to . . . ​James Boswell,” and says that Thrale’s two marriages offer “an enthralling study in mores of the time” (212). Mallinson admires Thrale for her intelligence, wit, and energy. For further reading, we are directed to Mary Hyde’s Thrales of Streatham Park, the biographies by James Clifford and William McCarthy, and Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney. Mallison is clearly—in the informal and best sense—­a Johnsonian: she refers to Johnson not only in reference to his, Boswell’s, and Thrale’s books, but in the

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pro­cess of recommending many other books, in this chapter and elsewhere. She tells us of Don Quixote that Johnson wished it longer ( 6); of Dante, that readers should “ignore all critical materials and plunge right in,” as Johnson recommended to prospective readers of Shakespeare (10); of Juvenal’s Satires she notes Johnson’s two ­great “imitations” (176–177); of Nabokov’s Pale Fire she points out the epigraph from Boswell re Johnson and Hodge (182); of Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote, that Johnson wrote the dedication, and perhaps a chapter, and was “quite taken” with the author herself (204); of Tristram Shandy, that Johnson said (wrongly) that it did not last (208); and of Candide, that it was published in the same week as Rasselas, which she recommends reading too (215). Andrew Taylor’s Books That Changed the World: The 50 Most Influential Books in H ­ uman History (2008) is a thoughtful and varied collection, including Horace, Machiavelli, Goethe, Adam Smith, Ptolemy, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mercator’s Atlas, J. D. Salinger, and J. K. Rowling.97 It includes Johnson’s Dictionary of the En­glish Language (78–81), the history of which it gives in a straightforward account, repeating a myth or two (“the total of 42,773 words entries was vastly more than any word-­book had included before”), but also advising that Johnson’s fee for payment for the Dictionary of 1,500 guineas would be “around £150,000/$300,000 ­today” and that the book’s price of £4 10s. would be “about £450/$900 ­today.” Two text-­boxes in the hardcover edition, one giving a short chronology of Johnson’s life (80), and the other labeled “Johnsonisms” (81), giving his definitions of “oats,” “lexicographer,” “tory,” “whig,” “excise,” and “patron,” w ­ ere omitted in paperback reprints. The London newspaper The Guardian (23 January 2009) published a list of “1000 Novels Every­one Must Read: The Definitive List.”98 The list, which is described as having been “Selected by the Guardian’s Review team and a panel of expert judges,” is not ordered in any way, but is divided into the themes “Comedy,” “Crime,” “­Family and Self,” “Love,” “Science Fiction and Fantasy,” “State of the Nation,” “War and Travel.” Johnson’s Rasselas is in this last category. Th ­ ere is no commentary on the se­lections. As we speed now ­toward the pre­sent, 2010 offers at least three books that need not detain us long. In The Torchlight List: Around the World in 200 Books (2010), New Zealand–­based po­liti­cal scientist Jim Flynn bewails how l­ ittle modern undergraduates read, and provides an eccentric collection of books that influenced him; it does not include Boswell or Johnson.99 The titles considered by Marilyn Green Faulkner in Back to the Best Books: How the Classics Can Change Your Life (2010) are all novels.100 The books in Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark’s Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You’ll Ever Read (2010), are pretty much all modern.101 However, Newman ­later noticed the omission or opportunity, and followed up the book with The Western Lit. Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, from Homer to Faulkner (2012).102 It must be said that this book, like many ­others of its kind, is pretty trivial; but Newman is smart and actually rather funny, and aware that her book is a symptom of the fact that “even p ­ eople who d ­ on’t want to read the G ­ reat Books ­w ill read about the G ­ reat Books” (xi). She gives the impression, at

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least, that her own knowledge is not second-­or third-­hand. Each work discussed is given a score out of ten for being Impor­tant, Accessible and Fun, pointing out at the start that fun comes in many dif­fer­ent kinds. She treats Boswell and Johnson together (120–121), and having asserted that the Life enables us to appreciate Johnson’s importance in his time, she describes Johnson’s character mainly as displayed by Boswell. Her marks are perhaps worth considering: Importance

Accessibility

Fun

Life of Johnson

7

7

9

The Rambler and The Idler

4

6

6

Johnson’s Poetry

3

4

3

Lives of the Poets

4

4

6

It seems a pity Rasselas was overlooked, as I’ve always thought it rates pretty well on the “fun” scale: an 8, perhaps? Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty G ­ reat Books (and Two Not-­So-­Great Ones) Saved My Life (2014) is a biblio-­memoir, which would not in itself qualify it to appear in this essay, the se­lection of books in such works being mostly serendipitous and idiosyncratic.103 But it concludes with (as appendices) three lists of books: “The List of Betterment” (i.e., the “Fifty ­Great Books”), “The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most,” and “Books I Still Intend to Read.”104 Johnson and Boswell appear in none of them. Another personal and idiosyncratic work, but from the academic end of the biblio-­lister spectrum, is Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Plea­sure of Books (2014), a subtle thematic exploration of her own reading experience.105 She describes and illustrates her plea­sure in varied effects, such as grandeur and intimacy, and at the end she offers a list of “A Hundred Books to Read for Plea­sure.” The authors whom she discusses most in the text, such as Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Proust, and Asimov, are not necessarily on the list, so it seems that some of the literary effects that she find most valuable and in­ter­est­ing are not strictly pleasure-­giving—­which Johnson would agree is perfectly reasonable. It is nevertheless a rather highbrow list, but it is not a historical survey, or a list of classics or ­great books. Th ­ ere is a swerve t­ owards ­women writers (twenty, three of them named Elizabeth), and non-­English speaking (twenty-­nine, ten of them Rus­sian). In her list of one hundred, ­t here are twenty-­four nineteenth-­century writers, but all the rest are twentieth-­century. So: no mention of Johnson or Boswell.

Books as (or Are) History Books may be considered and valued as artefacts as well as experiences, and ­t here has been a boom recently in histories of The Book, centers for The Book, and so

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on. No doubt this is a response to the fact that con­temporary media technologies are so socially pervasive, and make available many modes of more or less intellectual and imaginative occupation that are easier than reading, and that even “texts” for extended reading are now increasingly “accessed” in forms other than books. Indeed, playing up the “artefact” aspect of books seems to be seen by some authorities as a key to understanding reading and to promoting (or reviving) the importance of books and reading in the face of digital challenges. Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad, in A History of the Book in 100 Books (2014), include Johnson’s Dictionary (154–155).106 To get some idea of the criteria by which the hundred books have been chosen, we might consider the roughly chronological sequence of which the Dictionary is part: Tomlinson’s Art of Dancing (1735), Boucher’s Œuvres de Molière (1734), Johnson’s Dictionary, Newbery’s ­Little Pretty Pocket­-­Book (1744), Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751), Linnaeus’s Species Plantarium (1753), Playfair’s Commercial and Po­liti­cal Atlas (1786), The Newgate Calendar (1774), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), Banneker’s Almanack (1792), Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797–1804), Repton’s “Red Books” (ca. 1788–1812), and Hauy’s Education of the Blind (1786). The handsome coffee-­table book Books That Changed History, by ­Father Michael Collins et al. (2017), includes seventy books and two series (the first ten Penguins and the Baedeker guidebooks) featured in one-­, two-­, four-­, and six-­page spreads, and a further sixty-­six described at paragraph length in gatherings at the end of each of the five chronological chapters.107 A high proportion are unique items (such as the Dead Sea scrolls, the Exeter Book, and the Domesday Book) or par­tic­u ­lar editions (such as the First Folio of Shakespeare, the Gutenberg Bible, and William Blake’s Songs); many of the more recent items are influential mass-­produced texts (such as Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique) of which the bookish qualities are of negligible interest. Somewhere in between ­t hese extremes is Johnson’s Dictionary. The four-­page account includes a reproduction of a two-­page spread (“Bomb” to “Bookful”) and of entries illustrating “extensive quotations” (Love), “wry definitions” (“oats,” of course) and “strange omissions.” The Dictionary is also featured in a similar illustrated book concerning books less as reading experiences than as historical artifacts, Scott Christianson and Colin Salter’s 100 Books That Changed the World (2018).108 But the works described, each in a two-­page spread, mostly represent landmarks in the history of ideas, the imagination, and social change, rather than book history. Johnson is buttressed before by Gulliver’s Travels and Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, and ­after by Walpole’s ­Castle of Otranto and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Meta-­Lists The internet is a particularly congenial host to compilations. It offers a haven for texts that are crowd-­sourced or developed by accumulation, such as encyclopedias, and also—­because it is such a demo­cratic means of publication—­lists of all kinds,

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mostly sensational and focused on celebrities and picturesque medical conditions. Unsurprisingly books, being so listable, are well represented; indeed the first retail area to be seriously “impacted” by the internet was the book trade.109 A new coinage to describe an article (in the sense of a piece of writing in a newspaper) comprised of a list, is the word “listicle,” which was added to the OED in June 2016.110 ­There are two internet-­based biblio-­meta-­lists, bringing together a plurality of “­great book” lists into single numbered sequences. On a website called “The Greatest Books,” Shane Sherman aggregates “107 ‘best of’ book lists from a variety of ­g reat sources.” The lists are weighted according to criteria that Sherman clearly explains, and the products are two lists of “The Greatest Books” and “The Greatest Nonfiction Books.” In the latter, the Life of Johnson is no. 38 of 1,143 works; Johnson’s Dictionary appears at no.  120, Bate’s biography as no.  150, and Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (edited by Pottle) at no. 452.111 Another aggregator named Justin Kau has a site called “Greater Books,” which indexes and collates forty-­five “­g reat book” lists.112 Kau argues that t­ here may or may not be “­Great Books”—­ depending on where one stands in the culture wars—­but ­t here are certainly and identifiably “greater books”. Th ­ ere are 442 works that are on five or more of the lists he has collected. The Life of Johnson, in twenty lists, comes in at no. 31, Rasselas at no. 234 (on twelve lists), Johnson’s Dictionary at 300 (on six lists), and the Lives of the Poets at 301 (also on six lists). I ­shall not attempt to aggregate the findings I have reported above. It is the history of our writers’ reputations I am interested in, not in conducting a popularity poll. But a summary may be useful.

Johnson and Boswell in Lists of Books: A Summary In the interest of keeping this ­simple, I ­will note—­using their initials—­when Johnson or Boswell are mentioned as authors, in the ­actual list component of the text concerned. National Proj­ects 1933. Students’ Guide to Good Reading (JB only); as Good Reading, 1946 (SJ and JB), 1947 (JB only), 1948 (SJ and JB) 1940. Adler, How to Read a Book 1943. F. Seymour-­Smith, An En­glish Library (SJ and JB) 1952. Encyclopædia Britannica, “­Great Books of the Western World,” and A Syntopicon (JB only) 1956. Downs, Books that Changed the World 1960. Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (JB only); with Major, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, 1997 (JB only) 1963. F. Seymour-­Smith, An En­glish Library [5th ed.] (SJ and JB) 1966. John Canning, ed., 100 G ­ reat Books: Masterpieces of All Time (JB only)

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1972. Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book, rev. and updated ed. (SJ and JB) 1974. Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., Macropædia (SJ only) Great/Important/Serious versus Plea­sure/Favorite/Loved 1980. Burgess, “The Best of Lit­er­a­ture,” in The Best of Every­thing, ed. Davis (SJ and JB) 1981. Raphael and McLeish, The List of Books (SJ and JB) 1982. Ward, A Lifetime’s Reading (JB only) 1985. Van Doren, The Joy of Reading (JB only); 2nd ed., 2008 (JB only) 1988. McLeish, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide; 4th ed., 1996 (JB only) 1990. Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd ed. (SJ and JB) 1992. Fraser, ed., The Plea­sure of Reading (SJ and JB); 2nd ed., 2015 1994. Bratman and Lewis, The Reader’s Companion (SJ and JB) Millennial Anx­ie­ ties 1994. Bloom, The Western Canon (SJ and JB) 1997. Payne, The A–­Z of ­Great Writers (SJ only) 1997. Campbell, The Book of ­Great Books 1997. Denby, ­Great Books 1998. Kanigel, Vintage Reading 1998. Craughwell, ­Great Books for ­Every Book Lover 1998. Cowan and Guinness, eds., Invitation to the Classics (SJ and JB) 1998. M. Seymour-­Smith, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written (SJ only) 1998. Walljasper and Spayde, “The Loose Canon,” Utne Reader (SJ only) 1999. Shwartz, ed., For the Love of Books (SJ only [mentioned, but not listed]) 2001. Rennison, ed., Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, 5th ed. (JB only) 2001. Ondaatje et al., eds., Lost Classics 2001. Glaspey, Book Lover’s Guide to ­Great Reading (JB only) 2002. Bloom, Genius (SJ and JB) 2002. Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (JB only) 2003. Bauer, The Well-­Educated Mind Books and Change 2005. Moray, How to Read a Book 2006. Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (SJ only) 2006. Beare, ed., 501 Must-­Read Books (SJ and JB) 2006. Coady and Johannessen, eds., The Book That Changed My Life 2006. Bragg, 12 Books That Changed the World (SJ only [mentioned, but not listed]) 2007. Dirda, Classics for Plea­sure (SJ only)

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2007. Epstein, Literary Genius (SJ only) 2007. Daniel, ed., Defining Moments in Books 2007. O’Hear, The ­Great Books 2008. The Telegraph, “110 Best Books: The Perfect Library” (JB only) 2008. Patrick, ed., 501 G ­ reat Writers (SJ only) 2008. Mallison, Book Smart (SJ and JB) 2008. Taylor, Books That Changed the World (SJ only) 2009. The Guardian, “1000 Novels Every­one Must Read” (SJ only) 2010. Flynn, The Torchlight List 2010. Faulkner, Back to the Best Books 2010. Newman and Mittelmark, Read This Next 2012. Newman, The Western Lit. Survival Kit (SJ and JB) 2014. Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously 2014. Lesser, Why I Read Books as (or Are) History 2014. Cave and Ayad, A History of the Book in 100 Books (SJ only) 2017. Collins et al., Books That Changed History (SJ only) 2018. Christianson and Salter, 100 Books That Changed the World (SJ only) Meta-­Lists Sherman, “The Greatest Nonfiction Books” (SJ and JB) Kau, “Greater Books” (SJ and JB) In reaching conclusions about Boswell’s and Johnson’s reputations, based on statistics in this survey, a certain amount of latitude must be allowed me. I count a total h ­ ere of fifty-­seven original book-­selection or book-­rating proj­ects. Good Reading I have listed twice, on account of its many revisions and ­great longevity, and the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide also twice, on account of McLeish’s and Rennison’s versions being essentially two dif­fer­ent works. The first and fifth editions of Frank Seymour Smith’s book, and Adler’s and Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book I also treat separately, but Fadiman’s and Fadiman and Major’s Lifetime Reading Plans as (for this purpose) one work, Major having extended the book’s scope into new areas, but not having revised the original. I hope none of this w ­ ill appear entirely capricious. But exact comparability is impossible: some lists are very long (2,630), and some very short (12), and obviously it signifies more to be on a shorter list than a longer; some lists w ­ ere widely distributed and frequently reprinted—­others ­were not. Good Reading (in its many editions) is not one but dozens of lists; Johnson and Boswell are eligible in very few, and have featured in up to five. In Fraser’s The Pleasures of Reading ­t here are forty lists. Even Harold Bloom’s Western Canon comprises two lists, in which Johnson is one writer of twenty-­six (subjects each of a chapter), and Boswell and Johnson two writers of 353. Johnson and Boswell do not appear in nineteen lists of the fifty-­seven. In two of t­ hose, Shwartz and Bragg, they come close. From many of the o ­ thers they are

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excluded by explicit or implicit restrictions, chronological or generic. Th ­ ere is less disparity than I expected to find between the two writers: Johnson appears as a writer on twenty-­eight of the fifty-­seven, Boswell on twenty-­five. But while Boswell’s other works are occasionally mentioned, he is on no list solely on the basis of one of his non-­Johnsonian works. Looking at my division of the proj­ects into historical periods, we see that in the period 1933–1994, mentions of Boswell (fifteen) outweigh mentions of Johnson (ten); in the period 1994–2018, Johnson (eigh­teen) outscores Boswell (ten). I suspect that this may indicate not only that in the acad­ emy Johnson has come out from u ­ nder Boswell’s shadow, but also that reading has become more of a serious, academic, highbrow interest and that ­t here are fewer general readers who w ­ ill voluntarily read a 220-­year-­old biography of a thousand or more pages. If the list of proj­ects is divided at the turn of the millennium, it con­ve­niently falls as closely as pos­si­ble into two halves, of twenty-­eight and twenty-­nine lists. In the first half, Boswell and Johnson are overlooked in nine lists, in the second half, they are overlooked in twelve. Both writers are mentioned in eleven of the ­earlier lists and four of the ­later. Dividing the lists nationally, ­there are twenty-­four British lists and thirty American ones (and one from Canada and two from New Zealand), vindicating—by the way—­what Patrick Buckridge described as “a popu­ lar view . . . ​that Americans produce more lists of ­great books, and value them more, than the British do.”113 Boswell and Johnson do not appear to any noticeable extent more in British or American lists. ­Here is a tally of the mentions by author and work: Boswell Works: 1 The Life of Johnson: 22 The Tour to the Hebrides: 3 London Journal: 2 Private Papers: 1 Account of Corsica: 1 Total: 30 Johnson Works: 8 The Lives of the Poets: 7 The Dictionary: 11 Essays /Rambler /Idler: 7 Rasselas: 6 Poems: 4 Journey to the Western Islands: 4 Shakespeare: 3 Dictionary, se­lections: 1 Life of Savage: 1

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Anthologies: 5 Total: 57 Biographies of Johnson By Hawkins: 1 By Bate: 3 By Krutch: 1 Hester Thrale, Anecdotes of Johnson: 1 Thraliana: 1 I hope this account—­with all its blurriness—is useful and suggestive and might open doors to other studies. My own tentative conclusions are as follows. Boswell and Johnson are understandably read less when ­people do not feel u ­ nder an obligation for their cultural pleasures to partake of or be guided by some objective societal consideration. Any reference to some external standard—­“classic,” “best,” “greatest,” “changed the world,” or that which is implied even by the “you must read” meme—­suggests that one of the points of reading is to connect our personal cultural knowledge and pleasures with t­ hose of other ­people. We ­don’t read just to have a good time. Johnson would agree: reading must be lovable and give plea­sure, but plea­sure, while necessary to impel us to read, is not the end of reading. He told Francis Barber, “You can never be wise ­unless you love reading”114—­ which seems to nicely encapsulate the balance between wisdom and love. But a ­great many dedicated readers ­will not (or w ­ ill only very seldom) read “classics”—­ except perhaps ­under the impetus of a movie treatment—­and are almost exclusively interested in what is currently being published and favorably reviewed, even if it is at the quality end of the market: the latest Donna Tarrt or Ian McEwan, rather than the latest John Grisham.115 Why is this so with lit­er­a­ture, but not—­say—­w ith the visual arts, or ­music? ­People who enjoy fine ­music are just as—in fact, more—­likely to be listening at any time to Bach or Mozart or Ravel as to con­temporary composers such as Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. (The same applies to m ­ usic in the rock idiom: on radio the Beatles and David Bowie are played alongside Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran.) ­People other than art critics ­will go in huge numbers to art galleries to see special exhibitions of the French impressionists or Jackson Pollack. But the many readers who buy and read, say, the latest Jonathan Franzen or Hilary Mantel are not likely to pick up a book by Boswell or Johnson. ­Music and the visual arts require staging and curating, which is expensive, and limits what is promoted and available to consumers. Experienced and educated musical directors, dramaturges, and curators are required to select and mediate such cultural products to their audiences. Publishing—of an individual text—­happens on a much smaller scale, so t­ here is at any time much more choice available for the consumer and less filtering or promotion by way of guidance. Readers have for guidance only the mass media, and through such media, the culture of the celebrity writer, as well as best-­seller lists. New editions of classic texts are not likely to get media coverage—­indeed, u ­ nless

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they are major editorial proj­ects, they are usually not even reviewed in scholarly journals—­and Johnson and Boswell are no longer available for book signings and author tours. So it is partly a m ­ atter of through whom cultural knowledge is transmitted. Art curators and musical directors—on whom gallery visitors and concertgoers rely—­ are educated about their traditions. Readers of books rely on publishers, their marketing ­people, and journalists and broadcasters, who are not necessarily mindful of a responsibility ­toward their own traditions. A journalist who would at least know who Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt or Brahms or Tchaikovsky are, is very likely to be far vaguer about John Milton or Samuel Johnson.116 I would suggest that this is partly b ­ ecause reading books is simply harder than seeing artworks, hearing ­music, or watching movies. (My colleagues in film studies may leave the room at this point.) Archaic diction, challenging vocabulary, and length and complexity of sentences are likely to disincline readers, whereas failing to “understand” a piece of ­music or a painting or a movie is no barrier to seeing, hearing, or watching it. Furthermore, lit­er­a­ture is able to directly—­a nd indirectly—­address issues and beliefs, and thus more likely to be subject to (broadly speaking) “po­liti­cal” implications. Much ­music and art of the past is, for instance, deeply religious, but that in no way stops ­people from enjoying the sacred cantatas of Bach, when the same ­people, even if readers, would be unlikely to read the sermons of Martin Luther. ­Music and the visual arts are less likely than lit­er­a­ture to offend against fash­ion­able intellectual orthodoxies, of which ­t here seem to be, in “multicultural” and pluralistic Western socie­ties, an ever-­increasing number.

Conclusion For me, the interest of this and other modes of what are sometimes called “reputation studies” is less to do with showing or examining the nature of my authors’ reputations in the past, than to assist in considering how their reputations might be best continued into the f­ uture. If we—­I mean literary scholars in general, and scholars of Johnson and Boswell in particular—­want to ensure that our disciplines continue, or if (less professionally or egoistically) we want to encourage ­people to read and study our authors—­because we think that they have something unique and vital to say and that it would be good for them to remain in cultural circulation—­ what can we do, as scholars, editors, and teachers, to assist? Keeping their works in print and available for reading in new editions is obviously impor­tant. But Johnson’s individual major works (e.g., the Dictionary, The Rambler, the Lives of the Poets) and Boswell’s biography are—­for the average reader—­forbiddingly large. Of course, the works of both Johnson and Boswell are peculiarly amenable to quotation, sampling and se­lection;117 but only a particularly dedicated reader or purchaser of books (or a student) w ­ ill be attracted to books with nongimmicky generic titles such as “Se­lections,” “Major Works,” or “Prose and Poetry.” Few of Johnson’s works are con­ve­niently publishable (or readable) in their entirety. It is no surprise that Rasselas should be his most frequently reprinted

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individual work:118 it is no more typical of Johnson than any of his other works, but it is a con­ve­nient size. I would recommend that ­t hose of us who are teachers look for opportunities to squeeze Rasselas onto curricula. As college and university departments of En­glish have moved away from offering their students comprehensive and chronological accounts of the discipline, units of study in eighteenth-­century or Augustan lit­er­a­ture or the lit­er­a­ture of the Age of Enlightenment look unappealing to young p ­ eople, who are skeptical about ­grand narratives and accustomed to gimmickry and the language of advertising. But ­t here are in more modish thematic areas of study plenty of opportunities. The Journey to the Western Islands and the Tour to the Hebrides should be central to studies of the lit­er­a­ture of travel. Studies of life-­writing and memoir should include the Life of Johnson and se­lections from the Lives of the Poets. Abridged editions of the Life of Johnson should continue to be set on courses and in that way kept in print: books such as Christopher Hibbert’s Penguin Classic edition (1979) and Frank Brady’s Signet Classic (1968)—­t he latter was the first book by Johnson or Boswell that I read. Johnson and Boswell should be encountered by students in units of study on creative nonfiction, the essay, and journalism. We should not let Johnson’s own partiality for the “pure wine” of the Rambler lead us to overlook the approachability of the more informal and shorter Idler, of which ­t here seems not to have been an individual popu­lar edition since the mid-1800s. Of course, it is not only students of lit­er­a­ture who need to read g­ reat lit­er­a­ture in general and Johnson and Boswell in par­tic­u­lar. We should look for opportunities to expose writings by and about them to ­f uture members of educated professions such as ­lawyers, doctors, clergy, dentists, journalists, and schoolteachers. Much of the (in the best sense) amateur interest that has served to keep afloat the institutional and material supports for Johnson and Boswell studies has historically come from (at the very least) “name recognition” and at higher levels a fondness for our writers among p ­ eople outside of the profession of literary scholarship. We have always been pleased to have “in­de­pen­dent scholars” among our numbers at conferences, in higher numbers than at the conferences of (for instance) postcolonialists. Th ­ ere have always been, for instance, many ­lawyers who have loved Johnson for his undeniably juridical turn of mind and phrase, and who have devoted themselves to collecting, reading, and promoting his work. We ­will find our profession (literally) impoverished u ­ nless we can find ways to expose proto-­ lawyers to Johnson. One last note, on which I might conclude, is that I think Johnson and Boswell continue to need each other. I hope the long debate prosecuted by Donald Greene, in order to insist that Johnson himself is worth reading and studying, in­de­pen­ dent of Boswell, has had its effect. Jack Lynch’s online Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, although it has of recent years been only haphazardly updated, bears eloquent testimony to the health of Johnsonian scholarship. And Boswell, as an indirect result of the ongoing activity of the Yale Boswell Editions office, stands now on his own two feet, as an impor­tant witness in academic studies of any number of topics, as well as a subject in his own right. But postgraduate and professional

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scholarly activity depend on undergraduate interest, and t­ here ­w ill be inevitably less “take-up” of such offerings if their names are not culturally pre­sent in—­among other media and phenomena—­lists of g­ reat books. We know that Boswell’s Life of Johnson is the best biographical work, and that the greatest critic, biographer, essayist, grammarian, and poet, is Samuel Johnson, and that the world would be a far better place if more p ­ eople read them both. We should not be keeping this knowledge to ourselves.

notes I want to rec­ord my gratitude to the hard-­working document delivery personnel at the University of Otago Central Library. 1.  He sent a list of recommended books to a young trainee clergyman (at his request). See my essay, “A Clergyman’s Reading: Books Recommended by Samuel Johnson,” Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 11 (2000): 125–143. 2.  Patrick Buckridge, “ ‘How to Read Books’: Reading-­Advice Books in Britain and Amer­ i­ca, 1870–1960,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 26, no. 2 (2002): 67–80; see p. 73. 3.  See my essay (about lists as a literary genre), “Reading Lists,” Prose Studies 28, no. 3 (December 2006): 337–360. 4.  Students’ Guide to Good Reading: A List of Some Nine Hundred Books, Well Worth Knowing, Enjoyable to Read, and Largely Available in Inexpensive Editions, ed. the Committee on College Reading, 2nd ed. (Chicago: National Council of Teachers of En­glish, 1933). The first edition—­I have not seen a copy—­appears to have been published in 1932, in (according to the fine print on p. 2 of the 1933 edition) a “large but l­imited and subsidized edition . . . ​distributed ­free to undergraduates in more than a hundred colleges.” The back cover of the 1947 Penguin edition says that the first edition was “a 32-­page pamphlet listing 600 books available in reprint editions.” 5.  I am very grateful to John McVey, who responded to my enquiry to SHARP-­L , the listserv of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, and supplied me with the copy of the Students’ Guide to Good Reading (1933) that I used for the following paragraph. 6.  It is noted as being available in four inexpensive editions: Everyman’s Library, Modern Library, Modern Students’ Library (Scribner’s), and Oxford Standard Editions. 7.  Good Reading, ed. the Committee on College Reading, 9th ed. (Chicago: National Council of Teachers of En­glish, 1946). 8.  To determine exactly in which edition, between 1933 and 1946, the Lives of the Poets was first included would require a more thorough survey of all the editions of Good Reading than I think is justifiable. 9.  Good Reading: A Guide to the World’s Best Books, ed. the Committee on College Reading (New York: Penguin, 1947); described on the cover as the eleventh edition. 10.  Johnsonians should not be surprised that the Life of Johnson does not appear in the list of advisory board member Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is identified by Gordon Turnbull as having “a resolutely low opinion of the worth of the writings of James Boswell” and opposed the se­lection of Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 by the Book-­of-­the-­Month Club. See “Yale Boswell Edition Notes,” Johnsonian News Letter 67 (March 2016): 29. 11.  List 7B, “Books about the 18th ­Century” (by Thomas L. Donahue), is in­ter­est­ing for concentrating on literary rather than academic treatments of the subject, with novels such as Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and Scott’s Waverley, and popu­lar history such as Carlyle’s French Revolution. 12.  Good Reading: A Guide to the World’s Best Books, ed. the Committee on College Reading (New York: Mentor Books, 1948). This edition was reprinted in hardcover (New York:

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Hendricks House, Farrer Strauss, 1948); described on the front flap as the thirteenth printing since the first (i.e., the ­fourteenth). 13.  The following account is based on Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Demo­cratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the G ­ reat Books Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 14.  Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: A Guide to Self-­Education (London: Jarrolds, ca. 1940). Note the dif­fer­ent subtitle used in the early British editions; the term “liberal education” was presumably judged to be peculiarly American. 15. Lacy, The Dream of a Demo­cratic Culture, 30, 267n29. 16.  For a survey of the mentions of Johnson and Boswell in this series, see my “Johnson and Boswell in the 1940s: War­time Snap-­Shots from ‘Britain in Pictures,’ ” Johnsonian News Letter 69, no. 1 (March 2018): 37–47. 17.  Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in ­England, 1939–1945 (London: The British Library, 2008), 250, 27, 49. 18.  F. Seymour Smith, An En­glish Library: An Annotated List of 1300 Classics (London: National Book Council, 1943). 19.  ­Great Books of the Western World series, 54 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952); 2nd ed., 60 vols., 1990. 20.  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952). The volume is 618 pp., printed in two columns; the text is taken from the third edition, and—­ like all the books in the series—is not annotated. When the “­Great Books” w ­ ere published in a second edition (1990), with some additions and deletions, in sixty volumes, the Life of Johnson became vol. 41. 21.  Alex Beam, A ­Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the ­Great Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 88–94. 22.  Adler asserted in the preface to the first edition of the Syntopicon that it “­w ill take its place beside the dictionary and the encyclopedia in a triad of fundamental reference works” (Beam, A G ­ reat Idea, 92). At its launch in 1952, the “­Great Books” proj­e ct was described as “the most significant publishing event since Dr.  Johnson’s dictionary” (Beam, A ­Great Idea, 92). 23.  Mortimer J. Adler, ed., The Syntopicon: An Index to the ­Great Ideas, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990). 24.  To give the references to the ­actual passages would be even more complex, as the Syntopicon naturally refers by page to the “­Great Books” edition of the Life of Johnson. Seasoned readers of Boswell might be able to select appropriate passages themselves. 25.  I am grateful to Lisa Marr for checking (and correcting) my figures. 26.  For the pre­sent inquiry, it may also be instructive to list the “­Great Ideas” that Adler did not find in Boswell: 1. Angel; 5. Astronomy and Cosmology; 9. Chance; 10. Change; 18. Dialectic; 21. Ele­ment; 28. Form; 36. Hypothesis; 39. Induction; 41. Judgment; 49. Logic; 52. Mathe­matics; 54. Mechanics; 57. Metaphysics; 63. One and Many; 65. Opposition; 66. Philosophy; 67. Physics; 72. Prophecy; 75. Quality; 76. Quantity; 78. Relation; 82. Same and Other; 83. Science; 89. Space; and 102. World. 27.  The very first idea, “Angel,” seems an odd choice, perhaps explained by The Angels and Us (1982) being the title of one of many books written by Adler himself. Adler ­later conceded, “­There was nothing magical or sacrosanct about the number 102” (cited by Lacy, The Dream of a Demo­cratic Culture, 53). 28. Beam, A ­Great Idea, 88n. 29.  Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed the World (Chicago: American Library Association, 1956). 30.  Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed the World, 2nd ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1978). 31.  Clifton Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1960). 32. Adler, Syntopicon, 1:v. 33.  Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

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34.  F. Seymour Smith, An En­glish Library: A Bookman’s Guide, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963). It is described as the “fifth and fully revised edition” on the front flap. 35.  John Canning, ed., 100 G ­ reat Books: Masterpieces of All Time (London: Odhams Books, 1966). 36.  Ashcroft is described in his contributor’s note (back cover) as having “studied French lit­er­a­ture at Sorbonne; worked in Foreign Office and B.B.C. Eu­ro­pean ser­v ice 1951–64; author of biography of de Gaulle.” I have not been able (easily) to find anything more about him, nor anything about the volume editor, John Canning. 37.  Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). 38.  Adler and Van Doren contrast “definitive” (“final, exhaustive, scholarly”) in regard to biographies with “authorized” and “ordinary” (How to Read a Book, 238–240). 39.  For a historical survey of the contents of the Encyclopædia Britannica’s portraits of Johnson, up to Clifford’s revision of Roberts, see Tetsu Fujii, “How Samuel Johnson Has Been Described in Successive Editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica,” Studies in Eighteenth-­ Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, ed. the Johnson Society of Japan (Tokyo: Yusho-­Do, 1996). (I am grateful to Professor Noriyuki Harada for supplying me with a copy of this essay.) 40.  The ­whole was prefaced by a first volume, the Propædia, of which the central ele­ment is an “Outline of Knowledge,” designed by Mortimer Adler. 41.  The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1974); Macropædia, 10:244–252. 42.  But who knows? Perhaps the internet w ­ ill crash. 43.  Anthony Burgess, “Lit­er­a­ture,” in The Best of Every­thing, ed. William Davis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). 44.  In fact, as E. L. McAdam reported, Johnson’s repartee bears a striking resemblance to an exchange found in the account of a trial before Henry Fielding in 1723, recorded in The Annals of Newgate: or, Malefactors Register, 4 vols., by John Villette (1776), in which the defendant, when questioned, expressed the view that “keeping such a [bawdy] ­house is less objectionable than receiving stolen goods”; see Donald Greene, “A Johnsonian Retort,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 July 1961, 449. Th ­ ere is no rec­ord of Johnson owning The Annals of Newgate, but he is mentioned by name in the account of Baretti’s trial. 45.  Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, The List of Books (London: Mitchell Beasley, 1981). 46.  Philip Ward, A Lifetime’s Reading (London: Oleander Press, 1982). 47.  Philip Ward, A Lifetime’s Reading: The World’s 500 Greatest Books (New York: Stein and Day, 1983). 48.  Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading: 210 Favorite Books, Plays, Poems, Essays, Etc.: What’s in Them, Why Read Them (New York: Harmony Books, 1985). 49. Beam, A ­Great Idea, 133. 50.  Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World’s Best Authors and Their Works (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2008). 51.  Kenneth McLeish, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). 52.  Kenneth McLeish, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, new (4th) ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). 53.  Absolute thoroughness would require that I find (a) when Bowker took over Good Reading, signifying its transition from a popu­lar to a specialist text, and (b) why publication ceased altogether with the twenty-­t hird edition. But thoroughness within a context of randomness seems unnecessary, and would take us farther from the fortunes of the reputations of Johnson and Boswell, and further into the history of literacy. 54.  Arthur Waldhorn, Olga S. Weber, and Arthur Zeiger, eds., Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd ed., (New York: Bowker, 1990). 55.  Antonia Fraser, ed., The Plea­sure of Reading (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). 56.  Antonia Fraser, ed., The Plea­sure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books That Inspired Them, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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57.  Fred Bratman and Scott Lewis, The Reader’s Companion: A Book Lover’s Guide to the Most Impor­tant Books in ­Every Field of Knowledge, as Chosen by the Experts (New York: Hyperion, 1994). 58.  Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994). 59.  “The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. . . . ​ I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of t­ hings that should be t­ here and I prob­ably put in a ­couple of ­t hings that I now would like to kick out. . . . ​A ll over the world, including ­here, ­people reviewed and attacked the list and d ­ idn’t read the book” (Harold Bloom, interviewed by Jesse Pearson, Vice​.­com, 2 December 2008, http://­w ww​.­v ice​.­com​/­read​/­harold​-­bloom–431​ -­v 15n12. 60.  W. John Campbell, The Book of G ­ reat Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics (New York: Metrobooks, 1997). 61.  David Denby, ­Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 62.  Tom Payne, The A–­Z of ­Great Writers (London: Carlton Books, 1997). 63.  Thomas J. Craughwell, ­Great Books for E ­ very Book Lover: 2002 G ­ reat Reading Suggestions for the Discriminating Bibliophile (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1998). 64.  Robert Kanigel, Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World’s Best Books (Baltimore: Bancroft, 1998). 65.  Louise Cowan and Os Guinness, eds., Invitation to the Classics (­Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998). 66.  Martin Seymour-­Smith, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to T ­ oday (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1998). 67.  Anthony Burgess, “Post from Parnassus,” The Spectator, 6 March 1969, 124. Many thanks to the late Robert Nye for this information (personal email). 68.  Robert Nye, “Obituary: Martin Seymour-­Smith,” The In­de­pen­dent, 16 September 1998. 69.  Jay Walljasper and Jon Spayde, “The Loose Canon: 150 G ­ reat Works to Set Your Imagination on Fire,” Utne Reader 87 (May/June 1998): 52–59. 70.  Ronald B. Shwartz, For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999). 71.  Of the approximately 500 books, the most listed (according to my tabulation) are: (9) the Authorized Version of the Bible; (8) The ­Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Moby Dick, Proust; (7) War and Peace; (6) Catcher in the Rye, Shakespeare, Anna Karenina, Huckleberry Finn; (4) ­Great Expectations, Madame Bovary, Milton’s poems, Yeats’s poems; (3) Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Absalom, Absalom!, Hemingway’s Nine Stories, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leaves of Grass, Carry on Jeeves, and To the Light­house. 72.  James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 3:248. Boswell did not recall the name in his journals ­either, but the journal editors advise that Hester Thrale in her marginalia to the Life identifies him as the Rev. Mr. Edward Embry (Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle [New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1970], 250). 73.  Nick Rennison, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, 5th rev. ed., original author, Kenneth McLeish (London: A. & C. Black, 2009). 74.  Nick Rennison, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, 8th rev. ed. (London: A. & C. Black, 2009). 75.  Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding, and Linda Spalding, eds., Lost Classics (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). 76.  Terry W. Glaspey, Book Lover’s Guide to ­Great Reading: A Guided Tour of Con­temporary & Classic Lit­er­at­ ure (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). 77.  See my essay, “ ‘A Very Agreable Way of Thinking’: Devotion and Doctrine in Boswell’s Religion,” in Theology and Lit­er­a­ture in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, SJ (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2012).

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78.  Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (London: Fourth Estate, 2002). 79.  The editor, John E. ­Little, has also set up a website, W ­ ill Durant On-­line (www​.­w ill​ -­durant​.­com), which seems to be no longer maintained. 80. ­Will Durant, “The One Hundred ‘Best’ Books for an Education,” in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, ed. John L ­ ittle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). 81. ­Will Durant, “One Hundred Best Books,” American Magazine 108 (December 1929): 26–28, 109, 112, 115–116, 118. 82.  Durant’s magnum opus was the eleven-­volume series The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), co-­authored with his wife, Ariel, of which the tenth volume is Rousseau and Revolution (1967), of which book 6 is “Johnson’s E ­ ngland, 1756–89,” in which chapter 33 is devoted to Johnson. An audio recording of the chapter, by an unnamed reader, with the title “The Life of Samuel Johnson” can be found on audio-­file-­sharing websites, such as YouTube and Muzicwap. 83.  Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-­Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). 84.  Kelly Ana Morey, How to Read a Book (Wellington, New Zealand: Awa Press, 2005). 85.  Peter Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (London: New Burlington, 2006). 86.  The “full title” of Rasselas is said to be “The Full History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,” which must be a typo. 87.  Emma Beare, ed., 501 Must-­Read Books (London: Bounty, 2006). 88.  Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, eds., The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That M ­ atter Most to Them (New York: Gotham Books, 2006). 89.  Melvyn Bragg, 12 Books That Changed the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006). 90.  Michael Dirda, Classics for Plea­sure (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007). 91.  Joseph Epstein, ed., Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define En­glish and American Lit­er­at­ ure, with wood engravings by Barry Moser (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007). 92.  This is the cover title. The ­actual title page says simply Books, ed. Lucy Daniel (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2007). 93.  Anthony O’Hear, The ­Great Books: From the Iliad and the Odyssey to Goethe’s Faust: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007). The book was ­later published in the United States by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Wilmington, DE, 2011), where it circulated far more widely. 94.  “110 Best Books: The Perfect Library,” The Telegraph, 6 April 2008, http://­w ww​.­telegraph​ .­co​.­u k​/­culture​/­books​/­3672376​/­110​-­best​-­books​-­The​-­perfect​-­library​.­html. 95.  Julian Patrick, ed., 501 ­Great Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to the ­Giants of Lit­er­a­ ture (London: Apple Press, 2009 [2008]). 96.  Jane Mallison, Book Smart: Your Essential Reading List for Becoming a Literary Genius in 365 Days (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2008). 97.  Andrew Taylor, Books that Changed the World: The 50 Most Influential Books in H ­ uman History (London: Quercus, 2014 [2008]). 98.  “1000 Books Every­one Must Read: The Definitive List,” The Guardian, 23 January 2009, http://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­books​/­2009​/­jan​/­23​/­bestbooks​-­fiction. 99.  Jim Flynn, The Torchlight List: Around the World in 200 Books (Wellington, New Zealand: Awa Press, 2010). 100.  Marilyn Green Faulkner, Back to the Best Books: How the Classics Can Change Your Life (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010). 101.  Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You’ll Ever Read (New York: Harper, 2010). 102.  Sandra Newman, The Western Lit. Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, from Homer to Faulkner (New York: Gotham Books, 2012). 103.  Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty G ­ reat Books (and Two Not-­ So-­Great Ones) Saved My Life (London: Fourth Estate, 2014).

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104.  One of the “Not-­So-­Great” books is by someone named Dan Brown. 105.  Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Plea­sure of Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 106.  Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad, A History of the Book in 100 Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 2014). 107.  Kathryn Hennessy, sr. ed., with Michael Collins, et al., Books That Changed History, foreword by James Naughtie (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2017). 108.  Scott Christianson and Colin Salter, 100 Books That Changed the World (London: Batsford, 2018). 109.  It is not surprising that Jeff Bezos—­when looking for a way to exploit the retail potential of the internet—­hit upon books, not ­because he liked, valued, or was interested in them, but ­because the book industry was large, international, highly dispersed, and dealt with a huge number of products for which consumers had strong preferences. He realized it was uniquely suited to his par­tic­u ­lar form of exploitation. Thus we have Amazon​.c­ om. 110.  Michael Schaub, “ICYMI, the Oxford En­glish Dictionary Added New Words, and TBH, It’s Getting Wacky,” Los Angeles Times, 16 August 2016. “Listicle” is defined as “a piece of writing or other content presented wholly or partly in the form of a list.” 111.  Shane Sherman, The Greatest Books, website, http://­t hegreatestbooks​.­org​/­nonfiction. 112.  Justin Kau, Greater Books, website, http://­w ww​.g­ reaterbooks​.­com​/m ­ asterlist​.­html. 113.  Buckridge, “ ‘How to Read Books,’ ” 74. 114.  Letter of 25 September 1770, quoted in Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 5:116. 115.  Johnson agreed that “we must read what the world reads at the moment” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 3:332): however, this was in the context of his remarking that at pre­sent Virgil and Homer ­were less read than Pope. 116.  A frequent error, I find, of the slightly educated, such as journalists and school teachers, is to get Samuel Johnson tangled up with Samuel Pepys. 117.  As was pointed out by R. W. Chapman, ed., Samuel Johnson: Poetry and Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), vii. 118.  J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: From the Beginnings to 1984, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), gives details of 527 editions published in En­glish, 1789 to 1980.

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The Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox conducting a professional literary life in eighteenth-­century britain outside the bluestocking circle Susan Kubica Howard

Charlotte Lennox occupied many roles in the literary world of her day: novelist, poet, editor, literary critic, translator, adapter of plays. Her friendship with Samuel Johnson is well known, as are her relationships with other impor­tant men of letters and the arts, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. Her standing in the eighteenth-­century British literary community was high enough that Richard Samuel included her in his portrait of the Nine Living Muses of ­Great Britain, which he exhibited at the Royal Acad­emy in 1779. In this group portrait, Lennox shares the stage with her con­temporary Elizabeth Montagu and other Bluestockings, and yet she was never a member of their circle, which included both literary and learned men and w ­ omen.1 Thus, though it may be pos­si­ble to consider her a Blue ­under Sylvia Harcstark Myers’s expanded notion of Bluestockings as intellectual ­women,2 Lennox does not fit in with Susan Lanser’s narrower definition of Montagu’s Bluestocking circle as “a co­a li­tion of femininity, philanthropy, Anglican piety, En­glish propriety, and intellectual pursuit, all integrated into a public identity that could promote w ­ omen’s participation in literary culture as decorous, salutary, and safe.”3 This essay considers what it was to be a professional w ­ oman writer in mid-­to late-­eighteenth-­century Britain through the lens of Lennox’s professional c­ areer and personal life and in the context of literary patronage and mentorship. What kept Lennox outside the Bluestocking circle but allowed her inclusion in Johnson’s circle? In 1753, one prominent Bluestocking, Elizabeth Car­ter, wrote to another, Catherine Talbot, condemning the scandalous nature of Lennox’s early poem, “The Art of Coquetry.” Miriam Rossiter Small claims that the Bluestockings thus began 121

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“a feminine disapprobation which is steadily and impressively cumulative through [Lennox’s] life” (Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 10).4 What ­were the consequences—­ personal and professional, negative and positive—­for Lennox of such disapprobation? Her c­ areer was certainly commanding, colorful, and often contentious, as exemplified by her controversial mid-­century criticism of Shakespeare, which ran ­counter to ­earlier and ­later appreciations of Shakespeare by Pope, Montagu, and Griffith, though it was in the spirit of Johnson’s and Voltaire’s work on Shakespeare;5 by the apparent jealousy among other literary ladies, including Hester Thrale Piozzi and Frances Burney, over Lennox’s relationship with Johnson, who championed her and her work for thirty-­five years; by the willingness of scholars such as Dr. Gregory Sharpe and Dr. James Grainger to become her “noble and able Coadjutors” for her translation of The Greek Theatre of ­Father Brumoy when she was ill, thereby attesting to her “solid literary respectability and approbation” (Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 27); by the efforts of lords and ladies on her behalf;6 and by the negative comments, mostly from ­women, about her chaotic ­house­hold, her temper, and her unkempt cuticles.7 Th ­ ese many aspects of her life and ­career reveal her place in the literary community of her day to have been complex—­clearly significant, or why would Samuel have included her as one of the muses of the arts in 1779, but also fraught. Did male mentorship cost her female friendships within the Bluestocking circle?8 Did her unconventional and combative marital situation preclude her from the com­pany of ­t hese mostly widowed or single, socially conservative literary ­women? Did her penury and parental responsibilities deny her the leisure time necessary for forming and nurturing such relationships? Or was this group just not appealing to Lennox? Was she too busy being a professional writer to be the decorous, pious, feminine ­woman the Bluestocking circle seemed most comfortable with?9 Even without the approval and support of the Blues, Lennox’s ­career as an eighteenth-­century writer is remarkable for its longevity, quality, and breadth; might she possibly have accomplished even more with their support, or does she owe the complex and bold nature of her professional ­career to her status as an outsider of the Bluestocking circle? In order to arrive at answers to t­ hese questions, it might be helpful to begin by looking at Lennox’s literary and personal relationships and consider how ­t hese compare with relationships among the Blues. Just as the early meetings of the Blues included both men and ­women, so too did the literary cele­bration that marks the launch of Lennox’s literary ­career. Sir John Hawkins rec­ords that the party or­ga­ nized by Johnson and the Ivy Lane Club in 1751 and held at the Dev­i l’s Tavern enjoyed “pleasant conversation, and harmless mirth,” unfueled by alcohol, till the early hours. The eve­ning included Johnson’s ceremonial crowning of Lennox with a laurel wreath in honor of the “birth of Mrs. Lenox’s [sic] first literary child” (Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 10).10 Hawkins’s description captures the convivial tone of the party but also registers his discomfort with the resemblance that “the night’s entertainment . . . ​bore to a debauch” (quoted in Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 11). Clearly, such a party would have been at odds with the Bluestockings’ more sober and decorous emphasis in their gatherings on what Montagu, writing to Car­

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ter in 1765, termed “rational conversation” on such topics as religion, politics, and classical lit­er­a­ture.11 While the assemblies of Elizabeth Vesey ­were more informally arranged, with men and w ­ omen sitting in small groups, Montagu’s w ­ ere more formal and g­ rand, and she very much held sway as hostess. Hannah More’s poem “The Bas Bleu” (1782) specifically celebrates Montagu’s brand of Bluestocking gathering and captures the sense of such elegant assemblies that promoted what Susanne Schmid calls “sociable, intellectual companionship among ­women and men, likewise female friendship.”12 Schmid notes that t­ hese meetings w ­ ere conservative in nature as the Blues did not want to overthrow the social order through their mode of living any more than through their manner of writing. Patronage among the Blues was somewhat dif­fer­ent from the kind of mentorship Johnson gave his literary friends: cele­brations at taverns, with his club mates, most of whom ­were men (Hawkins notes one female companion with Charlotte Lennox that night at the Dev­il’s Tavern); practical support in introducing young writers to more established authors and to publishers; advice to authors over aesthetic issues in their works; the writing of dedications and proposals for their works, and so on. Montagu’s patronage was less professionally rigorous and took the form of attending theatrical per­for­mances of Hannah More’s Percy, subscribing to Car­ ter’s translation of Epictetus or, more notoriously, working with More to help Ann Yearsley publish her poetry and then setting up a trust to manage her earnings. ­These w ­ ere the actions of a wealthy w ­ oman who appreciated the arts, participated in them occasionally, and enjoyed a central role in London literary society.13 While Johnson had appreciated Montagu’s brand of patronage of the arts, at least u ­ ntil their falling out over her dis­plea­sure with his negative criticism of her friend Lord Lyttelton’s poetry,14 it was quite dif­fer­ent from the kind of mentorship he gave to his literary colleagues. His support of Lennox, even more than his support of Car­ ter, Burney, and More, was what one colleague, albeit a more experienced one, gives another; it was practical, dealing with the nitty-­gritty aspects of life and work for ­those who made their livings as professional writers. Johnson knew his way around the literary marketplace and advised ­t hose he mentored how to negotiate within this arena. As several critics have pointed out, ­because he could not help them financially, Johnson helped writers to help themselves, and much of what he did for them was done ­behind the scenes.15 In the case of Lennox, over the course of her lifetime, Johnson introduced her to other writers and to publishers and printers; he contributed chapters to The Female Quixote and to The Greek Theatre of ­Father Brumoy; he wrote dedications and proposals for, and reviews of, her work; he sent her ideas for translation work and, according to Anthony Lee, Johnson “most likely suggested the idea to her for Shakespeare Illustrated and assisted in its production.” Most significantly, he encouraged her, celebrated her successes, and commiserated with her over her failures while trying to offer her constructive advice.16 I use the term “mentorship” rather than “patronage” ­here to distinguish Johnson’s relationship with Lennox from Montagu’s relationships with the more impoverished Blues in her circle, such as Catherine Talbot and Sarah Fielding.

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Mentorship suggests a less unequal relationship than patronage, and in a mentoring relationship, it is professional advice that is given, not financial support usually. While the Blues read and, one presumes, bought Lennox’s books, and while they may have attended the productions of her plays, ­t here is ­little that suggests Bluestocking patronage of Lennox’s work or Lennox herself. Philippe Séjourné notes that “among Lennox’s protectors, we only find two w ­ omen, the Duchess of 17 Newcastle and the wife of Sir Robert Chambers”: the duchess offered Lennox a pension, which she turned down in f­ avor of a job for her husband, and Lady Chambers aided Lennox at the end of the writer’s life in her appeal to the Literary Fund for financial help in sending her son to Amer­i­ca. Lennox did, it seems, receive help early in her life from the Countess of Rockingham and her s­ ister, Lady Isabella Finch, when Lennox’s aunt proved unable to act as the guardian of Lennox upon her arrival from New York; that patronage, which prob­ably covered the time Lennox was writing her Poems, published in 1747, was brief and ended badly.18 ­These instances suggest that while titled w ­ omen helped Lennox with money m ­ atters, Lennox received professional help only from men.19 The distinctions in the nature of Lennox’s literary relationships and ­those of the Blues in tone, manner, and content can be seen as well in what remains of Lennox’s correspondence as compared with the correspondence of the Blues. As Harriet Guest notes, the Blues ­were linked not only by “social interaction in London, Edinburgh, and perhaps Dublin” but also by their correspondence, which allowed them to further strengthen the bonds of friendship.20 Members of Montagu’s Bluestocking circle prized politeness as a marker of their conversation and their correspondence, Emma Major notes, and according to Deborah Heller, this “true politeness” was achieved “through the friction of [what Shaftesbury termed] ‘amicable collision,’ ” which resulted ultimately in harmony.21 While Lennox’s letters—­ both personal and professional—­are often marked by friction, it is not always an amicable collision, and diverse views do not always resolve themselves harmoniously. In her letter to Garrick of 4 August 1774, for example, to explain her support for her friend, the actress Mary Ann Yates,22 over her theatrical rival Mrs. Barry, Lennox refers to her own “reputation for candor, which I do not think I have yet forfeited,” and notes that on the m ­ atter at hand, she was “a bold and daring schismatic,” though she admits that “this indeed following the rules of politeness, would not be fit to say to you.” She asserts she would never stoop to flattery, and writes that, “when I praise it is with warmth, with a kind of enthusiasm—­such is my natu­ ral temper, but I mean what I say, and it is well worth a life of habitual sincerity, to purchase the plea­sure of being believed when one gives vent to the effusions of one’s heart” (Correspondence, 147–148). The enthusiasm Lennox alludes to can be seen in the very syntax and punctuation of her letters, where dashes, exclamation marks, and short phrases proliferate. Séjourné terms this her “transatlantic vivacity”23 for which her upbringing in colonial New York was responsible, but it might just as easily be viewed as akin to the “spontaneity” that Isobel Grundy finds in Johnson’s professional letters to his literary peers, including Lennox. This spontaneity is achieved through a “tone of

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warmth, humor,” even teasing, which join with “expressions of affection, and more particularly of praise and gratitude.”24 It suggests an informality, an honesty that betokened intimacy and was at odds with that “air of relaxation that became the polite ideal in correspondence as in talk” and was equivalent in Johnson’s eyes with carelessness. The “purposefulness and fierce concentration on its object, . . . ​t hat conversational utilitarianism” that Grundy contends characterizes Johnson’s style can be seen in some of Lennox’s letters as well.25 Even Lennox’s letters to female friends are marked by the same enthusiasm, candor, and directness one finds in her more business-­oriented correspondence. She does not obfuscate, even when to do so might be more polite. For instance, when she writes to her friend Lady Clerke on 16 June 1777, she addresses the fact that Lady Clerke has not answered her last letters and explains that she has not written sooner ­because of this: “I can not palliate, nor disguise the truth, therefore I ­w ill honestly own that not having received any answer to two or three letters which I wrote to you,—­I thought I owd so much re­spect to my self, as to be ­silent for the ­f uture—” (Correspondence, 184–185). And yet, as Temma Berg suggests, Lennox’s letters to Clerke reveal real concern, a “spontaneous” sympathy; they show that Lennox felt deeply her friend’s disappointments and that she “sought the consolations of female friendship to ease the pains of her predicament, . . . ​[and that] female friendship was . . . ​v itally impor­tant to . . . ​Lennox.”26 In her letter of 30 August 1776 to Lady Clerke, Lennox alludes to the fact that Lady Clerke has unburdened herself to Lennox, that Lennox is in her confidence—­which suggests a certain capacity for intimacy in Lennox’s relationship with her. In that letter also Lennox is open regarding her personal difficulties—­“my necessities w ­ ill I fear oblige me to take up my pen again”—­and emphasizes the importance of Lady Clerke’s friendship when she notes that rather than poverty and ill health alone being responsible for her poor literary output, a lack of companionship has contributed to make her unable to write (Correspondence, 175, 185). Lennox was certainly able to imagine the kind of “sentimental friendship” Euphemia and Maria share in her final novel, Euphemia, and express such sentiment in her own letters, but even in her letters to Clerke, Lennox maintains a concern for self: her suggestion that the two w ­ omen pool their resources and set up h ­ ouse together could be interpreted as Lennox being cannily opportunistic in her financial need, and this possibility points to Lennox’s pragmatic nature. Lennox’s letters suggest an equality between herself and her correspondents, many of whom, like Lennox, led somewhat unconventional lives, and some of whom ­were of higher class or status than she. They lack the politeness, the ease, the witty sophistication of Car­ter’s letters to Talbot, for instance, or the “witty yet self-­deprecating persona” Betty Schellenberg observes in Montagu’s letters to Car­ ter, who was her superior in classical learning but social inferior.27 A good example of this self-­deprecating approach can be seen in Montagu’s letter to Car­ter of 21 October 1766 in which she denigrates Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare while declaring that, even with her own “unable hand,” she ­will attempt the task of venerating Shakespeare.28 Judith Hawley notes Montagu’s use of epistolary personas

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that let her fit her letters to her audience;29 this approach also runs ­counter to Lennox’s epistolary practice as Lennox did not use personas fitted to the audience she was writing to. Instead, she pre­sents a candid, au­t hen­tic self. One sees this candor,30 this edge, this secure pre­sen­ta­t ion of self, which her detractors viewed as an unfeminine aggressiveness, in both her personal and professional correspondence—in her letters to printers, to p ­ eople she has pressed into helping her with publishing by subscription, and to Johnson, her literary mentor and friend. Their correspondence in par­tic­u­lar alludes to misunderstandings and miscommunications; at one point, he actually suggests she not resort to letters when she is upset with her friends as it is too easy for her to say something she might l­ater regret (Correspondence, 74). Johnson is direct in his letters to her, admonishing her for her impatience, her seeming lack of gratitude, her unrealistic expectations, her readiness to take offense, her defensiveness; she is equally direct in expressing her anxiety, her disgruntlement, her disappointments, and making very specific requests regarding the publication or subscription of her work. While Johnson’s letters to her often have a humorous component, especially helpful in making the chastisement palatable, they are also often complimentary. Lennox’s letters, on the other hand, are serious, with ­little of the light touch so often found in correspondence between friends, and in par­tic­u­lar, in the correspondence between the Blues. The letters that circulated among the Blues ­were more conversational than confrontational, good humored, meditative, and ­were written to cement relationships rather than to clarify them (as Lennox’s business letters seek to do). Their subjects ranged from descriptions of places seen while traveling, to domestic concerns; their correspondence dealt with ­matters of health, shared social events, mutual friends, and often centered on discussion of con­temporary politics, educational theory, literary works, and ideas. Claudia Thomas points out that Elizabeth Car­ter’s letters, for instance, contain “critical analyses and domestic anecdotes,”31 which suggests that she achieved some balance in her life between her professional writing life and her personal life. Her letter to Catherine Talbot, 3 February 1764, for example, moves fluidly from joking about the roads Talbot has had to travel on her way to Kent to a conversation she had with Sir James Macdonald about Macpherson’s Ossian; such a letter is meant to entertain and to engage its recipient on a variety of fronts. Conversely, the bulk of Lennox’s letters reveal her to be a ­woman whose practical concerns usually dominated her agenda and often required a direct delivery and a forthright response. For Lennox lit­er­a­ture was a business, not a pastime. This too distinguishes her from the Blues, most of whom did not depend on the publication of their works to feed themselves or their families.32 A poor review was not simply a hit to Lennox’s pride, but had the potential to harm her pocket­book as well. Who can fault her for recognizing this and taking action to deal with it? For instance, when Johnson writes to Lennox on 30 July 1756 in response to her concern over what she interprets as negative reviews of her translation of the Memoirs of the Countess of Berci, he exhibits patience and perspective—­a result, no doubt, of his greater experience and consequently longer professional gaze—­and a care-

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ful attention to what the reviews actually say. He ends his letter with the assurance that Lennox’s literary reputation is significant enough to put her above any harm a poor review could do her. While critics might judge Lennox’s concerns in this instance as extreme, it is helpful to consider the context in which ­t hese concerns occur: as Duncan Isles points out, in this par­tic­u ­lar case, Lennox was upset over what she perceived as the critical neglect of her more significant work, Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, published eight months e­ arlier than Berci. And while she may have been, in Isles’s view, often “over-­sensitive to criticism,” Lennox was also able to accept it and move on (“Lennox Collection,” 44n72). Thus, although she may not have liked Garrick’s negative assessment of her Shakespeare Illustrated, that did not keep her from asking for his view of Henrietta and incorporating some of his suggestions in her revisions.33 ­Behind Lennox’s letters ­there is often a sense of urgency—­Johnson refers to this as “too much eagerness” in his letter to her of 2 May 1775 (Correspondence, 159)—­ that makes her brusque, rude even, and that Johnson, as another writer who often lived hand to mouth, understood. His patience with her throughout their correspondence is a result of this recognition, especially in the 1770s, when her literary output was diminished and her domestic concerns uppermost. Schellenberg contends that the “collegial” relationship between Johnson and Lennox reflects the “collaborative nature” of literary efforts in Johnson’s circle during the 1750s and 1760s.34 This collegiality extended to all manner of help on the part of Johnson in par­tic­u­lar but also Richardson: the letters between Johnson and Richardson show them actively engaged in helping her revise and publish The Female Quixote in the early 1750s.35 Not only did they advise her on her h ­ andling of the plot, as has been documented by a number of critics, but they also approached their friend John Boyle, the Earl of Orrery, to help with negotiations with the publisher Miller.36 Orrery continued to help Lennox with subsequent proj­ects; indeed, Duncan Isles claims that “Samuel Johnson excepted, . . . ​Orrery was Lennox’s most constant and useful helper” during the 1750s, before his death in 1762 (“Lennox Collection,” 36n47). Orrery’s letter of 9 May 1752 to Lennox about Shakespeare Illustrated exemplifies the qualities that made him such a staunch supporter: in it he is complimentary, helpful, and collegial. With the letter he sends her “some papers relative to Macbeth,” which ­were prob­ably Holinshed’s Chronicles, Isles notes—­Shakespeare’s major source for the play. He tells her t­ hese are hers to do with as she w ­ ill, since he had given up on the idea of writing on Shakespeare in the face of the critics’ adulation of the author. In giving Lennox his notes, Orrery places his trust in Lennox to articulate the alternative assessment he was not himself courageous or knowledgeable enough to take on. He ends his letter with the injunction: “Remember, Madam, Friendship knows no ceremony, no distance, no compliments. Treat me accordingly” (qtd. in “Lennox Collection,” 37). This phrasing mirrors his invitation to Johnson (15 February 1752) to “correspond with that friendship which is above ceremony” and “write to each other not when we o ­ ught, but when we please.”37 While Orrery’s grasp of the proj­ect was not as extensive as Johnson’s or Lennox’s and he therefore cannot be called her mentor, Lennox was fortunate to participate

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in such a truly collaborative relationship where friendship and professionalism could merge.38 It is impor­tant to realize that if Lennox’s extant letters to Johnson and Orrery are more businesslike than friendly, even so t­ here did exist between Lennox and Johnson in par­tic­u ­lar a close friendship: she was one of only three w ­ omen on a list Johnson composed in 1755 of forty-­one ­people he would drink tea with; while she cajoled and demanded his help, she and her husband also loaned him money during the 1750s; and Johnson and she continued to visit one another ­until his death in 1784. He often put her literary needs above his own, especially in 1757 and 1758, when he wrote dedications for two of her publications gratis but ended up in prison for debt. While he clearly stood in the role of literary mentor to her during the 1750s and 1760s, by the end of his life (she would live another twenty years), they ­were simply friends. Their friendship over the thirty-­five years they knew one another exemplifies Johnson’s conception of the term as he articulated it in his Rambler 64: “Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness, and its permanence from the other; and therefore requires not only that its candidates should gain the judgment but that they should attract the affections; that they should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gay in the hour of jollity; not only useful in exigences, but pleasing in familiar life; their presence should give chearfulness as well as courage, and dispel alike the gloom of fear and of melancholy.”39 Clearly, the length of their association, its continuation through their mutual adversities, suggests that Johnson felt that Lennox was a kindred spirit, and while Johnson respected Lennox, he also helped her ­because he knew she needed the help financially. Todd suggests that Lennox “did not evoke much pity” generally, but it is impor­tant to note that she did receive it from Johnson ­because he could feel for her poverty, having experienced it himself.40 Rather than evidence of her greed or insecurity as an author, Lennox’s use of a greater variety of help than some other writers of the time suggests instead her energy and determination to succeed in a literary marketplace that demanded such industry and fierceness:41 her efforts to publish, drawing on f­avors from anyone she knew, exploiting friendships, networking, instead of being seen as a negative, can be interpreted as suggesting that the system of publication, while demanding, could work if one put in the time and effort not only to produce literary works, but to nurture them on their way to the publisher and then public with proposals and dedications by the likes of a Johnson and, ­after his death, a Boswell. This was not the route most Bluestockings took to publication. While t­ here ­were exceptions such as Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Car­ter, and Catherine Macaulay, who published for profit, Blues’ publishing efforts, if they made them at all, w ­ ere much more genteel, less desperate, more highly networked; indeed, much of the literary work of the Blues circulated in manuscript form and never saw publication, and the literary publications of the Blues are not many compared with the number of works published by a Lennox or a Hayward in the e­ arlier eigh­teenth ­century or a Smith in the ­later part of the ­century. ­These writers published prolifically out of need at least to some extent, rather than solely out of egotism or ambition.42

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One of the reasons Lennox experienced financial difficulties was as a result of her marriage to Alexander Lennox, which began around the time of her first publication in 1747—­A lexander Lennox worked for her printer, Strahan—­and continued in some form or another u ­ ntil her husband died, prob­ably in 1797. Their relationship was fraught, and unlike most of the marriages of t­ hose few Blues who married, theirs did not provide her a source of financial or emotional stability. Alexander Lennox was often out of work and in debt—­many of Charlotte Lennox’s letters request help finding her husband a job—­a nd, according to Johnson, he treated his wife “harshly.”43 He was prone to the ­grand scheme and taking the easy way out, at one point ­going to court to make a claim to the ancestral Scottish lands belonging to the Lennoxes. While they never divorced, t­ here ­were evidently periods of separation when she needed to address ­house­hold ­matters with him by letter, and even when he was staying with her, he slept in another bedroom.44 Given this unhappy and unconventional relationship, Lennox’s domestic situation was strained: she moved h ­ ouse often, ­either to escape her husband’s creditors, or b ­ ecause of diminished circumstances, and was often reduced to begging her husband for money, as her frustrated letter to him regarding clothing her ­daughter for school painfully shows (Correspondence, 170–172). She had to take in lodgers and at one point was acting as governess to Johnson’s friend Saunders Welch’s ­daughters, something that appalled Lennox’s con­temporary, Laetitia-­Matilda Hawkins, who criticized Lennox’s home for its lack of “all order and method, all decorum of appearance, and regularity of proceeding.”45 ­These domestic difficulties also mark her as dif­fer­ent from the Blues—­especially such ­women as Elizabeth Car­ter, of whom Johnson once said, “My old friend . . . ​could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.”46 Both Susan Yadlon and Felicity Nussbaum note the importance of the domestic sphere for most female Bluestockings, as a construct that might constrict, but that could be reshaped to fit their needs and served, in Nussbaum’s estimation, as a safe haven in which to develop social skills that could then be used in Bluestocking meetings.47 It was the sense of the domestic nature of proper feminine activity that precluded many of the Blues from considering publishing their works and speaks to another divide between Lennox and the Blues.48 Her disordered domesticity would not have been fathomable to most of the Blues. Her unhappy, strained marriage with a man who co-­opted her literary earnings b ­ ecause it was his right to do so ­under the law; her poverty; her ill health; her sorrow over the death of her d ­ aughter and anxiety over the bad be­hav­ior of her son49—­t hese could not have allowed her much domestic repose, and the unconventional, untidy nature of her personal life would prob­ably have been judged negatively by the Blues as indications of a flawed character, just as Hester Thrale’s second marriage was not approved of and caused a rift between her and such Blues as Burney and Montagu. ­There are of course other ways in which Lennox stood at odds with the Blues. In his letter to Lennox on 2 May 1775, Johnson alludes to “some peculiarities with re­spect to religion, of which I have heard complaints” (Correspondence, 160).50

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What­ever t­ hese ­were—­whether she was a Catholic,51 a Dissenter like Barbauld, or an atheist like Wollstonecraft—­t hey set her apart from both generations of Bluestockings, who w ­ ere largely religiously conservative and generally staunchly Anglican.52 ­There are few religious references in Lennox’s works, beyond the superficial piety given to her more sentimental titular heroines such as Sophia and Henrietta. Largely, her professional output was secular, with an emphasis not on what awaited her heroines in the afterlife, but on worldly ­hazards and happiness. Perhaps that in itself could be enough to cause Lennox to be condemned as “indecent” by a society suspicious of the kind of religious questioning she apparently broached to Thomas Winstanley in 1787.53 Montagu, for instance, as representative of this par­ tic­u­lar perspective, wrote in 1779 that the absence of religious practices among freethinkers has “untied all the bonds of Society,” and she blamed the “wild uproar and disorders in publick and private life” in this period on them (qtd. in Major, “Politics of Sociability,” 185–186).54 Lennox’s class affiliation as well might have made her an unsuitable participant in Bluestocking gatherings. Unlike many of the participants at such gatherings, Lennox was not a member of the gentry. By birth the d ­ aughter of a military man, by profession a writer—­both suggested at best a tenuous gentility, which was further challenged by Laetitia-­Matilda Hawkins’s anecdote concerning Lennox’s appearance in court on charges of assault against her maid and anonymous letters about her lack of personal hygiene.55 ­Later in life, when she was asking for funds from the Royal Literary Society, Lennox put forth the story that her f­ ather had been lieutenant-­governor of New York in the 1730s, when in fact he was simply a member of the British military. Despite this and the fact that her heroines are usually genteel, Lennox does not seem to have worried overmuch about her class, and perhaps saw herself as inhabiting the same middle-­class literary life as her mentors, Johnson and Richardson, and her literary pre­de­ces­sors, Manley and Behn, both of whom sought legitimacy by aggrandizing their ­fathers’ positions.56 But the anecdotes that surround her and the written rec­ord of her own correspondence also suggest that her lack of decorum, femininity, and gentility would not have sat well with the female Blues in par­tic­u­lar, and her lack of funds and connections would have kept her from the upper-­class social events, f­amily estates, and spas where Blues often met.57 Indeed, Blues like Montagu might have seen Lennox’s birth, marriage, unsettled domestic arrangements, and aggressive, unfeminine be­hav­ior as indicative of her pos­si­ble association with the lower and m ­ iddle classes that Montagu in letters to her ­sister Sarah Scott and to Elizabeth Car­ter in the 1760s viewed as the “treacherous underclass” who ­were perceived as a threat to landowners like herself (Major, “Politics of Sociability,” 184). Frances Burney, a second-­generation Bluestocking, wrote in a letter to her ­sister on 27 August 1778 that while Lennox’s Female Quixote is “very justly admired ­here . . . ​Mrs. Thrale says that though her Books are generally approved, Nobody likes her.”58 This may have had something to do with their jealousy over Johnson’s friendship with Lennox, especially when he confided to Boswell that of the com­pany of ­women he’d dined with the day before—­Elizabeth Car­ter, Frances Burney, Hannah More, Bluestockings all—­only

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Lennox could have made a fourth, “superiour to them all.”59 The kind of literary ­women who w ­ ere well liked, who passed muster with the Blues, w ­ ere members of their circle, ­women like Elizabeth Griffith, whose reputation for feminine delicacy in her writing and personal life was crafted to sell her plays and novels. This discussion raises the question, just how unfeminine was Lennox’s be­hav­ior? E. J. Cleary notes that among ­women writers post-1750, the growth in the commercialization of writing called for a greater aggressiveness on their parts.60 Lennox may simply have been at the forefront of this greater female assertiveness, following Behn and Haywood and preceding Smith; hers would thus represent one mode of be­hav­ior in the literary marketplace and the Blues’ another. It might be that seeing Lennox through the lens of the Blues makes her appear unfeminine and unduly aggressive for a professional ­woman writer. Another potential stumbling block for a literary relationship between Lennox and the Blues may have been her politics. Major notes that Elizabeth Montagu’s assemblies ­were po­liti­cally impor­tant for their “patriotic and public sociability” (“Politics of Sociability,” 175). Indeed, Major suggests that from the late 1760s, “the po­liti­cal becomes central to the self-­definition of Montagu and her circle” (“Politics of Sociability,” 185), and the politics would have been conservative. Especially during the 1770s, when Britain was fighting to maintain its American colonies, Lennox, who had spent part of her childhood in New York, might not have held similar views as the Blues on the issue of American in­de­pen­dence.61 We do not have any specific articulation from Lennox on that ­matter since she seems to have kept her politics, like much e­ lse in her life, to herself, and as a m ­ other of and often sole provider for two young ­children, she may not have had much time to be po­liti­cally active. We can deduce from the fact that she sent her son out to Amer­i­ca in the early 1790s to a f­ amily that had remained t­ here, presumably from the time she had lived ­t here as a child, through the Revolution, that her po­liti­cal views might not have meshed with ­t hose of the patriotic Blues.62 More broadly, Lennox’s experience growing up in New York and her rendering of vari­ous cultures in her American novels in par­tic­u ­lar point to her appreciation of the Other. Her Scotch-­Irish ancestry may also have played a role in her sympathy for the colonized. With this in mind, Rachel Carnell argues that Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart can be read as expressing sympathy for the recently defeated Jacobites; one can imagine that such a reading of that novel would certainly be problematic for staunch supporters of the ­house of Hanover, which Montagu and many of her fellow Blues w ­ ere.63 Additionally, as I have argued elsewhere, Lennox’s final novel, Euphemia (1790), may also be viewed as showing the limitations of the British colonial view held by the novel’s po­liti­cally conservative, imperialistic, and quite unlikeable spokesperson, Mr. Neville, and offering a post-­Revolution path to reconciliation for the former colonies and Britain.64 Carnell extends this view to suggest that Lennox’s sentiments ­toward relations between E ­ ngland and France on the eve of the French Revolution w ­ ere similarly equitable, and that Lennox’s politics in the novel are the politics of conciliation that offer a way out of the imperialistic quagmires of colonies versus Britain and Scotland versus Britain, on the one hand, and the age-­old

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Eu­ro­pean conflict between E ­ ngland and France, on the other. Th ­ ese po­liti­cal sentiments would prob­ably not have sat well with the Blues’ more conservative and imperialistic po­liti­cal views. The breadth of Lennox’s work, her choice to work in vari­ous genres, sets her apart from the Blues—­who, if they published at all, did so in only a few genres, such as the didactic novel or prose essay or poetry, and lent their support primarily for poetry, translation, and nonfiction.65 Lennox’s generic reach, like her approach to many for literary support of vari­ous kinds, was clearly a result of her need to hit the literary market with every­thing she could—­and the two w ­ ere related: she was certainly cognizant that her mentors in the novel way (Richardson, Johnson, Fielding) could only give her so much of their time; hence the quick shifts through the 1750s and 1760s from poetry to novel writing to prose essay to translations to play adaptations to literary periodical and back to the novel again. Her translation work allowed her to approach men sich as Dr. Sharpe and Dr. Grainger for help and made her, Norma Clarke contends, the “reigning monarch of the booksellers in the 1750s.”66 Her theater work put her in contact with Garrick, Colman, and Goldsmith. She seems always to have relied heavi­ly on Johnson, but she sought out ­others, perhaps when he was unable to help.67 She also worked in many genres to ­counter the fact that, as noted ­earlier, not all of her works ­were well received. It is true that her satiric novel, The Female Quixote, continued in print throughout the c­ entury in vari­ous collections,68 that Talbot wrote to Car­ter in praise of Lennox’s Memoirs of Sully, and that Henrietta was well received as “one of the ‘genteel’ novels of the day,” according to Small (Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 24). Still, Car­ter and Talbot found fault with her 1747 Poems, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu attacked Harriot Stuart for its “ ‘monstrous abuse’ ” of her friend Lady Finch.69 Additionally and most significantly, Shakespeare Illustrated (1753),70 so at odds with the subsequent popu­lar, Blues-­approved readings of Montgagu and Griffith,71 proved an albatross around her neck well into the 1760s, when the production of her play, The ­Sister, was booed off the stage on its first night by crowds unhappy with her negative critique of Shakespeare’s ­handling of female characters.72 And while she translated works she thought would sell, her Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon (1757), which Susan Staves calls a “feminist exercise in recovering a heroine whose name and fame had suffered, not oblivion, but infamy,”73 and which Lennox prob­ably undertook b ­ ecause it paid decently, met with disapproval from ­women readers who felt the life of such a one need not see the light of En­glish day. Lennox’s choice of literary themes, her politics, her religion, her uncertain social standing, her personal, familial, and financial situations, her directness and candor—­a ll of t­ hese put her at odds with the Blues. Their literary patronage, however much it might have offered her a “safety net,”74 especially through the lean years ­after the mid-1760s, was not forthcoming.75 When in need l­ater in life, Lennox wrote to Boswell, as a friend of her late friend Johnson, to ask that he continue her mentor’s support, and to the Literary Fund, a group of middle-­class professionals.76 She never approached the Blues, that we know of, for patronage of any

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kind.77 Might she have accomplished more with the financial and intellectual support of the Blues? Perhaps, but such support would prob­ably have come with unacceptable costs, such as the loss of autonomy that Ann Yearsley experienced ­under the patronage of Montagu and More. While Lennox often needed help negotiating her way through the literary world, she was fiercely in­de­pen­dent: her letters suggest she barely knew how to tolerate, let alone appreciate, Johnson’s mentoring at times, and yet Johnson was tireless in helping Lennox to build a professional literary c­ areer, and remained convinced even at the end of his life as he continued to try to help her that despite her “many fopperies,” she was “a ­g reat Genius.”78 It might be pos­si­ble to read such a remark as condescending, but I think instead it is judgment that comes out of “esteem and love”79—to Johnson’s mind, the two requisites of friendship. Lennox was a worthy recipient of both ­because she worked at her craft, struggling to survive professionally amid the realities of a less than decorous literary marketplace. In such a place, she had need of friends who ­were involved in the same work she was and who could enter into the fray with her, as her colleagues, not her patrons.

notes 1.  Elizabeth Eger contends that the iconography of the portrait suggests a “classical humanist model of a harmonious society” of female artists (“Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses of G ­ reat Britain’ (1779),” in ­Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001], 107). However, along with Lennox, other ­women artists in Samuel’s work also stood outside the influence and patronage of the Blues. The actions and beliefs of historian Catherine Macaulay, whose second marriage to a much younger man and her revolutionary po­liti­cal ideals offended the Blues, caused Elizabeth Montagu to write to Elizabeth Car­ter in 1778: “I should not have thought it strange if Mrs. Macaulay had crossed the Atlantic to marry some arch rebel, or even the descendant of a regicide, but to unite herself with a boy,” and Hannah More criticized her in 1782 for not being “feminine e­ ither in her writings or her manners” (quoted in Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, Early Feminists and the Education Debates [Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2007], 134). As Lennox’s early biographer, Miriam Rossiter Small, notes, “Mrs.  Lennox is rarely mentioned among the ‘blues’ ” (Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, an Eighteenth-­Century Lady of Letters [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1935], 48). Given this, Eger’s contention that the nine muses “together . . . ​formed an impor­tant network of intellectuals” is not strictly accurate (Bluestockings: ­Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], 1). 2.  Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 244. 3.  Susan Lanser, “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economics of Desire,” in Reconsidering the Bluestockings, ed. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2003), 258. Betty Schellenberg interprets the term “bluestocking” as “refer[ring] to mid-­century men and ­women whose public personae ­were built around intellectual accomplishment (as reflected in textual production), female friendship, and Anglican-­centred piety, and social responsibility” (“Bluestocking W ­ omen and the Negotiation of Oral, Manuscript, and Print Cultures,” in The History of British W ­ omen’s Writing 1750–1830, ed. Jacqueline Labbe, 6 vols. [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], 5:64–65). 4.  Small does note that on occasion the Blues had a more favorable opinion of Lennox’s works, such as when Talbot, writing to Car­ter in 1755, praised Lennox’s translation of the Memoirs of Sully (Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 21). 5.  See Hannah More’s “The Bas Bleu”: “And she who Shakespeare’s wrongs redrest, [Elizabeth Montagu] / Prov’d that the brightest are the best” (The Works of Hannah More, 7 vols.

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[New York: Harper, 1835], 5:362). Clearly, the Blues’ perspective on Shakespeare criticism was pro-­Shakespeare, since that was Montagu’s take, though Eger points out that Lennox, Montagu, and Griffith similarly “share[d] a preoccupation with the moral teachings of . . . ​[Shakespeare’s] plays” (Bluestockings, 30). 6. ­These included Lady Isabella Finch and Lady Rockingham at the beginning of Lennox’s ­career, and the Duchess of Newcastle and John Boyle, the Earl of Orrery, through the productive ­middle period of her ­career. 7.  An anonymous letter written t­ oward the end of Lennox’s life suggests that her hands are in “horrid order” and that she “wash them & rub back the skin at the roots of the Nails” (Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents, ed. Norbert Schürer [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2012], 245). 8.  This is pos­si­ble, though several of Lennox’s mentors, including Johnson and Garrick, participated in the Bluestocking circles, according to More’s poem, where “Hortensius” clearly refers to Johnson and “Roscius” to Garrick (The Works of Hannah More, 5: 367). 9.  Ann Yearsley and Hannah Cowley also did not ultimately find a place with the Blues. Yearsley’s relationship with Blues More and Montagu was fraught, most likely b ­ ecause of their dif­fer­ent orientations: Yearsley’s rustic, impoverished background and in­de­pen­dent spirit jarred against the more affluent, upper-­class, urban situation of Montagu, who enjoyed the significance that comes from being a literary patron. Hannah Cowley pursued redress against More’s plagiarism of her play with unladylike vigor, and having achieved it, retired to Devon in 1801 to avoid literary society. 10.  Lennox published Poems on Several Occasions in 1747 but Harriot Stuart, published in December 1750, was her first published novel, and prob­ably the work for which she was being celebrated. James Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s M ­ iddle Years (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1979), 43. 11.  Quoted in Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, “Introduction: A Bluestocking Historiography,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, nos. 1–2 (2002): 2. 12.  Susanne Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eigh­teenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 10. 13.  As Dustin Griffin notes, “Elizabeth Montagu and the other bluestockings performed many of the traditional functions of patrons” (Literary Patronage in E ­ ngland, 1650–1800 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], 190). Chauncey B. Tinker, less appreciatively, suggests that the Bluestockings with Montagu at their head ­were trying to “set up . . . ​a patronage of lit­er­a­ture” and that Montagu’s “wealth and social talents” gave her a “minor position” in the literary world which she wished to expand through patronage (The Salon and En­glish Letters [New York: Macmillan, 1915], 201). 14.  Barry’s fresco on the wall of the Royal Literary Society, entitled “Johnson Pointing Out Mrs. Montagu as a Patron of the Arts,” may be an ironic comment on the relationship between Johnson and Montagu, post-­Lyttelton. 15.  Gae Holladay and O M Brack Jr., “Johnson as Patron,” in Greene Centennial Studies, ed. Paul Korshin and Robert Allen (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of V ­ irginia, 1984), 176; Isobel Grundy, “Samuel Johnson as Patron of ­Women,” Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 1 (1988): 59. 16.  Anthony Lee, Dead Masters: Mentoring and Intertextuality in Samuel Johnson (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2011), 113. Lee suggests that the reach of Johnson’s influence on Lennox was quite extensive: “So forceful was Johnson’s mentoring imperative, it invidiously infused itself into the minds of his protégés, often compelling and directing them beyond their own volition” (9). Lennox certainly benefited from Johnson’s help, and one may view her initial professional relationship with Johnson as that of a protégé and master, but I suggest the two left that relationship ­behind them as Lennox gained more experience and that in the end they ­were two writers engaged in negotiating the literary marketplace. 17.  Philippe Séjourné, The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox (Aix-­en-­Provence: Publications des Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, 1967), 24. 18.  Janet Todd, in The Sign of Angellica, suggests Lennox alienated ­t hese w ­ omen ­because they feared “to become the butts of satire in her novels” (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 152.

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19.  Dale Spender takes issue with the “constant intimation that Lennox was disliked by her own sex” ­because she was pretty and charming, suggesting it is irrelevant to a consideration of her ­career (­Mothers of the Novel [London: Pandora Press, 1988], 198), but why Lennox did not gel with other literary ­women is an impor­tant question, one this essay attempts to examine. 20.  Harriet Guest, “Bluestocking Feminism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, nos. 1–2 (2002): 60. Felicity Nussbaum makes a similar point in The Limits of the H ­ uman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 91. 21.  Emma Major, “The Politics of Sociability: Public Dimensions of the Bluestocking Millennium,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, nos. 1–2 (2002): 175–176; Deborah Heller, “Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 22 (May 1998): 66. 22.  Of Yates, one con­temporary critic noted her “noble presence, majestic gait, piercing eyes and voice, with manner and action so suitably ­great,” but found her unable to deliver the more understated emotions of tenderness or pity (Lennox, Correspondence, 149n4). Yates’s larger-­ than-­life approach, similar to Lennox’s boldness, may go a ways to explaining their friendship, which was outside the purview of the Blues. 23. Séjourné, The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox, 28. 24.  Isobel Grundy, “The Techniques of Spontaneity: Johnson’s Developing Epistolary Style,” in Johnson ­after 200 Years, ed. Paul Korshin (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 218. 25.  Grundy, “Samuel Johnson as a Patron of ­Women,” 212. 26.  Temma Berg, The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-­Century Circle of Acquaintance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 126–127. 27.  Schellenberg, “Bluestocking W ­ omen,” 68. 28.  Elizabeth Eger, ed., Elizabeth Montagu, vol. 1 of Bluestocking Feminism, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 173. 29.  “Elizabeth Car­ter and Modes of Knowledge,” in ­Woman to ­Woman: Female Negotiations during the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Carolyn Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2010), 160. 30.  According to Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, the candor prized in the eighteenth-­century familiar letter was best revealed via the writer’s interests in m ­ atters other than the self. They write that “the hallmark of candor was taken to be sponteneity,” but Johnson, as in his comments to Lennox suggesting greater self-­control, was not always at peace with this dictum: see “The Familiar Letter in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury: Some Generalizations,” in The Familiar Letter in the Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1966), 272. When Lennox could rise above her own immediate and pressing needs, as in the letter to Garrick championing Mrs. Yates quoted from ­earlier, she did indeed exhibit candor. 31.  Claudia Thomas, “Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Car­ter: Pudding, Epictetus, and the Accomplished ­Woman,” South Central Review 9, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 18. 32.  Myers observes that “Montagu, Car­ter, and Chapone w ­ ere all reluctant to seem to be writing for financial gain,” and she suggests that the opinion of the Blues was that “­women who relied on the profit from their work ­were regarded as needy and dependent” (The Bluestocking Circle, 155). It is ironic to note then that Hester Thrale, who managed to maintain friendships with both Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu and who was certainly considered one of the Bluestocking circle—at least ­until her marriage to Piozzi, ­a fter which Montagu dropped her—­chose to exploit her “familial intimacy” (Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, 254) with Johnson in publishing her Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson when Lennox, who could have used the money, and did at one time consider such a proj­ect, did not do so; see Duncan Isles, “The Lennox Collection,” Harvard Library Bulletin 19, nos. 1–2 (1971): 173n143. 33.  See Garrick’s letter of 12 August [1753], in which he accuses Lennox of an inappropriate “severe Levity & Ridicule” in her treatment of the Bard and his letter dated 29 May [1759] on Henrietta, in Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents, 47–48, 192. 34.  Betty Schellenberg, The Professionalization of W ­ omen Writers in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 97. This extends to his relationships with

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other ­women, some of whom w ­ ere in the Bluestocking circle: with Car­ter, in the early 1730s, when they both worked for Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and with Anna Williams and o ­ thers whom Johnson helped to publication. The relationship was a two-­way street: Norma Clarke points out that Johnson’s Rasselas was inspired by The Female Quixote; see her Dr. Johnson’s ­Women (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 90. Duncan Isles points to Johnson’s Rambler 115 (23 April 1751), which contains an Arabella-­like character called Imperia to suggest the intellectual reciprocity between Johnson and Lennox; Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), appendix, 419. 35.  Clarke states that this collegiality was typical of the times among men, that Richardson, for instance, used “interactive working methods,” but that ­women writers did not as readily engage in such methods, and that “Lennox’s ­career . . . ​is typical rather than unusual for the mid eigh­teenth ­century but it is not typical of w ­ omen writers” (Dr. Johnson’s ­Women, 80, 105). 36.  See letter of 10 December 1751, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994), 1:55–56, in which Johnson writes to Richardson that though Orrery’s good opinion of Lennox’s Female Quixote is “less ardent” than his own or Richardson’s, Orrery’s “endorsement—­communicated directly” to Millar—­ seems to have been the deciding f­actor in Millar’s decision to publish The Female Quixote. Eric Walker suggests that Orrery’s aristocratic status was responsible for Millar’s decision, having been more persuasive even than Johnson’s and Richardson’s literary standing; “Charlotte Lennox and the Collier ­Sisters: Two New Johnson Letters,” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 326. 37. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson, 92. 38.  Griffin argues that in introducing Lennox to Orrery, Johnson was “instrumental in reintroducing Lennox to the traditional source of patronage, the peerage” (Literary Patronage, 206). I would suggest, instead, that b ­ ecause Orrery was not simply an aristocrat using his money to help a starving author but was himself interested in lit­er­a­ture, and specifically in Shakespeare criticism, his relationship with Lennox was more that of a collaborator than a patron. 39.  Rambler 64, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr., 23 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–2018), 3:342. 40. Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 152; see also Spender, ­Mothers of the Novel, 198. 41.  Correspondence, xl. 42.  E. J. Cleary suggests that ­women writers in the eigh­teenth c­ entury “pioneer[ed]” a “new style of abstract or ‘disembodied’ authorship” b ­ ecause the “old-­style patronage systems, founded on homosocial bonds,” did not work for them (Authorship, Commerce and the Public [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], 12–13). Lennox used some of their tactics, but unlike ­t hose ­women who ­were successful with subscription publishing, she generally was not; she benefited far more from the bonds she shared with male writers. 43.  The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 3:353–354, for 10 July 1781. 44.  Lennox writes to Lady Clerke on 16 June 1777 that she has a spare room for her husband when he visits, suggesting they ­were not sharing a bed, or even a home, for that ­matter as “he has an apartment near the Custom House” (Correspondence, 185). ­There is no hint, however, that Lennox was unfaithful in her marriage or that her male friends, including Johnson, viewed her as single. 45.  Laetitia-­Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions, 2 vols. (London, 1824), 1:53. 46.  Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 2:11. 47.  Susan Yadlon, “The Bluestocking Circle: The Negotiation of ‘Reasonable’ ­Women,” in Communication and ­Women’s Friendships: Parallels and Intersections in Lit­er­a­ture and Life, ed. Janet Ward and JoAnna Mink (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Univ. Press, 1993), 122; Nussbaum, The Limits of the H ­ uman, 89–90. 48. Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, 10. 49.  Harriot Holles and George Louis. The Edinburgh Weekly Magazine for 9 October 1783, in its “Memoirs of Mrs. Lenox,” claims she had another unnamed son who died in infancy.

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Harriot died at age fifteen; George was sent to Baltimore to relatives in 1793 to escape the bad influence of his ­father. 50.  Isles suggests that the word “indecencies” was “heavi­ly deleted” by Lennox or someone ­else and the word “peculiarities” substituted in its place in the manuscript letter (“Lennox Collection,” 147n174). Schürer contends that the editorial hand “looks more like Johnson’s” (Correspondence, 161n12). 51.  Isles notes that Lennox’s fluency in French and references in several of her novels to Roman Catholicism might make one suspect some connection with that faith, though ­t here is no concrete evidence for this (“Lennox Collection,” 174n147). 52.  Lanser, “Bluestocking Sapphism,” 258. Judith Hawley calls Car­ter “po­liti­cally conservative and orthodoxly Christian” (Judith Hawley, ed., Elizabeth Car­ter, vol. 2 of Bluestocking Feminism, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols. [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], xv). Emma Major suggests that Talbot viewed conversation as “the vehicle of piety”; she lived a retired, religiously observant life ­until her early death (Madam Britannia [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012], 88). 53.  See his letter to Lennox of 30 August 1787 in Isles, “Lennox Collection,” 182. 54. ­These quotations are from Montagu’s unpublished letter of 10 June 1779 to Leonard Smelt, which is in the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library. 55.  Correspondence, 69n1, 245. Berg contends that Hawkins misinterpreted Lennox’s appearance in court, that rather than abusing her maid, Lennox had been trying to protect/rescue her ­daughter from a procuress (The Lives and Letters, 134). 56. Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 132; see Correspondence, xxxiv. 57.  Yadlon, “The Bluestocking Circle,” 117. Lennox seems never to have left London ­a fter arriving as a young girl from New York, and to have lived in rented accommodations throughout her life. Many critics have noted the “communal aspect of eighteenth-­century culture” (Nussbaum, The Limits of the ­Human, 86): the Blues met at Montagu’s home or the homes of other hostesses, or at estates or spas; Johnson and his friends formed clubs that met at taverns, or he visited his many friends and fans, as well as attending the Bluestocking meetings. Lennox, on the other hand, had less recourse to larger literary gatherings like t­ hose above and depended more on what Schellenberg terms “urban proximity” to business and social opportunities (Professionalization, 106). 58.  Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 3:105. 59.  Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 4:275. This comment, which Johnson made in 1784, at the end of his life, apparently caused Burney to proclaim that “­t hese occasional sallies of Dr. Johnson [­were but] . . . ​accidental assertions” (Early Journals and Letters, 4:476). Johnson’s remark on Lennox, coming late in his life, seems more a solid opinion than an accidental assertion, especially when supported by his long relationship with her and his written assessment in a letter written 10 July 1781 to an unidentified correspondent of Lennox: “She has many fopperies, but she is a ­great Genius, and nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura” (Letters, 3:353–354). 60. Cleary, Authorship, Commerce and the Public, 9. 61.  Séjourné contends that Lennox’s American experience and connections may be responsible for her lack of ac­cep­tance by eighteenth-­century En­glish society, which is evident from the relatively few references to her in con­temporary letters and diaries, and the disparagement that often accompanied ­t hose few (The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox, 11). 62. ­There ­were of course Blues who held more radical views of the state of relations between Britain and Amer­i­ca in the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century, such as Catherine Macaulay, whom James Bradley calls a “pro-­A merican . . . ​publicist,” but this may have been another ­factor in her dismissal from Montagu’s circle (“The British Public and the American Revolution: Ideology, Interest, and Opinion,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson [London: Longman, 1998], 129). 63.  Rachel Carnell, “Jacobite Ideology and the Emergence of British Identity in Charlotte Lennox’s Novels,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 22 (2012): 255–279. Montagu writes to Car­ter, 18 December 1788, regarding George III’s ill health: “I have visited only my most

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intimate Friends, and our conversation has been on the calamity of our Country, and the sad afflictions of the Majesties” (quoted in Major, “Politics of Sociability,” 182). 64.  David McNeil also finds that Lennox’s renderings of the En­glish/Mohawk and En­glish/ Dutch encounters in Euphemia are “analogous to the transgressive nature of colonial enterprise” and that the novel critiques Britain’s commercial exploitation of the Amer­i­cas, but he concludes that Lennox was “not imbued with a revolutionary spirit” and that instead Euphemia supports “a conservative ideology” (“Charlotte Lennox’s Fictionalization of New York: Gender, Curiosity and Colonial Venture,” in Transatlantic Crossings, ed. Donald Nichol [Newfoundland: Univ. of St. John’s Press, 1995], 45, 48). While it is true that Euphemia returns to ­England still married to Mr. Neville, her emotional separation from him and her financial control over her son’s education suggests to me a less than conservative ideology in evidence at the end of the novel. 65. Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 134. 66. Clarke, Dr. Johnson’s ­Women, 118. 67.  That her work was “less genre specific,” Schellenberg notes, also helped her literary reputation ­because the public had more than one work to associate her with (Professionalization, 101). 68.  Anna Laetitia Barbauld includes Lennox’s second novel in her fifty-­volume set, The British Novelists (1810), for instance, one of only seven novels published before 1755, and the only one by a ­woman. 69.  Quoted in Scott Gordon, “Disinterested Selves: Cla­ris­sa and the Tactics of Sentiment,” En­glish Literary History 64 (1997): 473. Gordon notes that Lady Montagu often read novels as if they ­were secret histories, assuming that characters in them stood for her friends in society. Given this, her reading of Harriot Stuart may have been biased and her accusations unfounded, though Clarke suggests that Lennox did use “her writing to revenge personal slights” (Dr. Johnson’s ­Women, 70). 70.  Lennox learned Italian in order to work with Shakespeare’s source materials for her Shakespeare Illustrated. This approach to education also shows her to have been pragmatic, as opposed to t­ hose Blues, like Car­ter, who learned languages throughout their lives b ­ ecause they had the desire and leisure to do so. 71.  Lennox’s study of Shakespeare’s sources did not do well commercially, while Montagu’s essay went into four editions by 1785. 72.  Isles suggests that the inferior quality of the play might have played some role in its failure (“Lennox Collection,” 168n133). 73.  Susan Staves, A Literary History of ­Women’s Writing in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 293–294. Staves notes that Lennox “generally dealt with racier and worldlier material in her translations from the French than she did in her original work” (295), as did both Elizabeth Griffith and Charlotte Smith, who also had a difficult time as translators ­later in the ­century. 74. Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 134. 75.  Griffin suggests that the patronage system failed her b ­ ecause she was not deferential enough and b ­ ecause her depiction of this system in her works, especially Henrietta and The Lady’s Museum, was negative (Literary Patronage, 210). 76. Griffin, Literary Patronage, 215. 77.  Nor did she write disparagingly of them directly in her extant letters, though Clarke sees an attack on Car­ter and Talbot in Henrietta’s satiric depiction of learned ladies (Dr. Johnson’s ­Women, 122). 78.  Letters, 3:354. 79. Yale Works, 3:342.

B

Punitive Injustice in Caleb Williams godwin’s vexed call for penal reform Suzanna Geiser

In the preface to ­Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), William Godwin articulates his objective: to provide “to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach” the “truth” of government’s intrusive “spirit and character.” He w ­ ill achieve this objective through “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.”1 One mode that is central to Godwin’s revelatory “review” is criminal law and the theories and systems of punishment on which it is founded and through which it is enforced. Through his eponymous narrator, Godwin foregrounds the narrative in the prosecution and punishment of both public crimes (i.e., be­hav­iors punishable ­under common and statutory law) and private “crimes” (i.e., be­hav­iors punishable ­under the rules established by a paternalistic society). Caleb’s autobiography turns on allegations of murder, theft, and debt, as well as acts of social insubordination, all of which provoke coercive mea­sures that cast doubt on the ethics and pragmatics of state-­and socially sanctioned punitive action. Godwin’s novelistic critique of contemporaneous penal doctrine succeeds his philosophical thought on punitive justice, as it is expounded in An Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793).2 Book 7 of Godwin’s radical po­liti­cal treatise, “Of Crimes and Punishments,” reflects its author’s utilitarian anarchism, which equates justice with rational individual liberty and injustice with institutional authority. The book also incorporates Godwin’s beliefs in the accessibility of universal moral truth and the prospect of h ­ uman perfectibility.3 Godwin introduces the po­liti­cal and moral issue of punishment by reference to “utility” and the notion that “what­ever is not attended with any beneficial purpose, is not just”: thus “It cannot be just that we should inflict suffering on any man, except so far as it tends to good” (Po­liti­cal Justice, 369–70). He then undertakes to dismantle society’s commitment to coercive punishment 139

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by arguing its absolute inutility—it does not deter, it does not reform, and it does not retribute. Rather, b ­ ecause punishment is in opposition to “any sound princi­ ples of reasoning,” its effect is to stymie individual and social development (Po­liti­ cal Justice, 370; see also 367–371). Penal reform—­specifically, a general prohibition on coercive discipline and a corresponding commitment to noncoercive mediation of problematic be­hav­iors—is therefore vital for individuals to achieve perfectibility and for society to live according to moral truths. Critics long have observed that the deeply imbricated issues of criminal justice, po­liti­cal oppression, and social corruption mark the relationship between Caleb Williams and Po­liti­cal Justice. Moreover, scholars have argued that an apparent connection exists between the novel’s punitive foundation and the treatise’s penal philosophy.4 Gary Kelly, for example, contends that Caleb Williams is “clearly related to Book seven of Po­liti­cal Justice,” by “presenting” as it does “a fictionalized case of that central aspect of the Enlightenment debate on po­liti­cal theory, the right of the state to punish, and to enforce its ‘contract’ by the sanction of the law.”5 Kelly does not, however, investigate this connection, focusing instead on the novel’s other philosophical, literary, historical, and religious contexts. James Thompson also addresses the thematic consistency, arguing that Godwin’s fictional narrative concerns itself with the “power of the state,” represented in the “wealthy squirarchy,” to institute the sort of punitive despotism recorded in his philosophy.6 Yet, rather than offering an examination of traditional punitive systems in Godwin’s writing, Thompson’s discussion concentrates on the author’s conflicted treatment of the emerging disciplinary practice of state-­sponsored citizen surveillance. In Thompson’s view, the novel’s “biographical form,”7 with its focus on “individual motivation,” tends to complicate Godwin’s abstracted insistence on the sociopo­ liti­cal inequities of coercive oversight. Caleb Williams, Thompson argues, “has the effect of legitimating surveillance” and its disciplinary intent, to the prejudice of Godwin’s absolutist philosophy in Po­liti­cal Justice.8 Other critics similarly have studied the points of variance between Godwin’s two most prominent works. In fact, the desire to account for how and why Caleb Williams fails (or seems to fail) both to represent the rational individuality and to imagine the utopian vision of Po­liti­cal Justice informs a significant portion of scholarship on the novel. Like Thompson, such critics as Gary Handwerk, Evan Radcliffe, and John Bender attribute the tensions between Po­liti­cal Justice and Caleb Williams (at least in part) to literary form—in Handwerk’s terms, to the novel’s “narrative and psychological realism”; in Radcliffe’s, to the treatise’s “austerely logical approach”; and in Bender’s, to the novel’s “formal narrative features.”9 That said, Handwerk argues that the treatise and the novel “need to be read in a complementary fashion as parts of a comprehensive perspective,” and Radcliffe likewise contends that the two works should be considered as a correlation of theory and experience.10 Other scholars, including Anna Maria Jones and Julie A. Carlson, return to Po­liti­cal Justice and ­others of Godwin’s theoretical writings to find a philosophical precept that re­u nites the two works. Jones considers Godwin’s approach to the doctrine of necessity, while Carlson examines his ideas about the

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relationship between fiction and sympathy.11 As this body of critical work suggests, literary reconciliation is often the objective and the outcome of intertextual Godwinian scholarship. This essay continues in this critical tradition by examining the idiosyncrasies of Godwin’s fictional and philosophical engagement with historically per­sis­tent patterns of punitive theory. Section 1 traces Godwin’s challenge to traditional penal doctrine, specifically eighteenth-­century conceptions of deterrence, reformation, and retribution. By investigating Caleb Williams and Po­liti­cal Justice within their juridical context, I demonstrate how the novel systematically works to affirm Godwin’s theoretical assessment of coercive punishment as an in­effec­tive and, therefore, unethical medium for regulating or reforming individual be­hav­ior. Notwithstanding this reformist agenda, section 2 reveals how Godwin’s fictional narrative complicates his large-­scale absolutist and rationalist claims on the injustice of punitive action and the efficacy of noncoercive communal intervention. By engaging with generic norms of fiction, including the psychological, the sentimental, and the po­liti­cal, Godwin’s novel suggests the limits of ­human reason and the moral value of both h ­ uman emotion and institutional discipline. Nonetheless, rather than read this tension between dramatic storytelling and po­liti­cal philosophizing as an outright failure of theoretical purpose, I argue that it follows from another of Godwin’s objectives: to develop the reader’s capacity for reasoned and rational judgment, the fundamental precursor to revolutionary juridical and po­liti­ cal reform.

1 Caleb Williams, a three-­volume fictional autobiography, interrogates the role of punishment in eighteenth-­century ­England, including its relationship to the prob­ lem of institutional authority. Volume 1 rec­ords the history of Caleb’s aristocratic master, Ferdinando Falkland, and introduces the crimes upon which the novelistic action is based. Barnabas Tyrrel, a local squire and communal tyrant, is murdered; Falkland is tried and exonerated for his murder; and the Hawkinses, Tyrrel’s former tenants, are found guilty of the crime and executed. Volume 2 recounts Caleb’s obsessive investigation into Falkland’s involvement in the deaths; Falkland’s admission of guilt to Tyrrel’s murder; and Caleb’s wrongful imprisonment and subsequent escape. Volume 3 details Caleb’s flight from Falkland and the law, and the postscript rec­ords the final ­legal confrontation, in which Caleb successfully prosecutes Falkland for Tyrrel’s murder. The novel ends with Falkland’s death and Caleb’s contrition.

Deterrence Theory For much of the eigh­teenth ­century, deterrence theory, in conjunction with retributive philosophy, dominated En­glish thought on punitive justice. The idea that punishment deterred criminal be­hav­ior was used by ­legal actors and theorists to justify severe penal sanctions, including corporal punishment, transportation to

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the colonies, and especially death.12 As Frank McLynn observes, conservative penal theorists such as Henry Fielding, William Paley, and Martin Madan argued for the deterrence effect of capital punishment and zealously advocated for its application, even against ­t hose convicted of minor property crimes.13 For ­t hese men, “the supreme penalty did deter and was the only barrier between civilization and order and the barbarism of the masses” (McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 256). Fundamental to this conservative position was the belief in working-­class envy. The idea that criminal activity was driven by “the rage for [upper-­class] ‘luxury’ ” was reflected in the classification of many nonviolent property offenses as capital crimes (McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 244, 243–256).14 Executions w ­ ere held in public spaces so that “ordinary men and ­women” could experience firsthand “the consequences of criminal behaviour.”15 In the prevailing ­legal conscience, the sheer number of capital crimes and the gory spectacle of public hanging would discourage common lawbreaking and render secure its privileged targets. Nonetheless, as the ­century progressed, objections to the deterrence rationale grew. Continental reformers Cesare Beccaria and Montesquieu argued that the deterrence effect of severe punishment was temporary, lasting only while the mode of punishment appeared unusual and, we might expect, unused: with familiarity, the intimidation faded (McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 250–253). Moreover, ­these reformers registered a serious ethical concern: ­because it is the perception of punishment that deters, an individual’s guilt or innocence, as well as the par­tic­u ­lar circumstances of his crime, are negligible. En­glish reformers Samuel Romilly and John Howard offered a third criticism: that “excessive punishment” (McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 254) has an effect opposite to deterrence. The public is made to sympathize with, rather than condemn, the offender; and it is, in some cases, motivated to act on, rather than abandon, its criminal impulses. Godwin, referring to Beccaria, confirms t­ hese progressive arguments in Po­liti­cal Justice where he describes “coercion for example” as both in­effec­tive and unethical: “It has long since been observed that this system of policy constantly fails of its purpose. Farther refinements in barbarity produce a certain impression so long as they are new, but this impression soon vanishes . . . ​[to be replaced by] murmurs and indignation against the injustice to which we are exposed. . . . ​It [punishment] may terrify; but it cannot produce in us candour and docility” (Po­liti­cal Justice, 380). What it does produce, he w ­ ill argue in Caleb Williams, is criminally or socially deviant be­hav­iors. Godwin’s fictional challenge to the deterrence rationale is highlighted in Caleb’s sojourn with a band of thieves. This group, which Caleb joins a­ fter his prison escape, demonstrates a subversive contempt for criminal law and its punitive reach. Once embedded in the offenders’ society, Caleb observes that his companions “­were at open war with their oppressors” and “wholly inattentive” to the impending horrors of state punishment (211). Moreover, he describes their internal characters as chaotic, “fluctuating” with the instability of life circumstance—at one moment, they w ­ ere disposed to “benevolence and kindness” and at another “harshness” and “brutality” (211). The group’s leader, Raymond, in speeches reminiscent of God-

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win’s philosophy, reveals the sociopo­liti­cal origins of this be­hav­ior, specifically “the partiality and iniquity of public institutions” and the cruel hy­poc­risy of t­ hose “who are thieves according to the law” (209). Raymond further alleges that ­these corrupt structures preclude the offenders’ reform: “They leave no room for amendment. . . . ​ If they discover at the distance of fourteen . . . ​or of forty years . . . ​a n action for which the law ordains that his [an offender’s] life ­shall be the forfeit, though the interval should have been spent with the purity of a saint and the devotedness of a patriot, they disdain to enquire into it. What then can I do? Am I not compelled to go on in folly, having once begun?” (220–221). As Hal Gladfelder observes, this community of thieves is, in point of fact, impelled to operate according to their own “sense of justice,” one that demands the protection of ­those who, like Caleb, are persecuted by “ ‘the tyranny of courts of justice.’ ”16 By portraying ­these men as victims’ defenders, Godwin arguably vindicates their criminal actions. Moreover, by suggesting that their problematic be­hav­ior is precipitated by upper-­class discrimination and corruption, rather than lower-­class envy, Godwin challenges the doctrine of punishment that supports ­t hese elitist practices. The failure of punishment as a deterrent is also emphasized in the novel’s portrayal of private offenses, specifically Caleb’s refusal to honor the rules of a patriarchal social order. Caleb’s first “crime” upsets the power dynamic of the master/ servant relationship. By determining “to be a spy upon Mr. Falkland” (104) and investigate his role in Tyrrel’s murder and the Hawkins’s executions, Caleb not only breaches his duty to rely on his master’s honor and goodness, but also seizes power from his social superior, ultimately securing Falkland’s confession to murder. Caleb himself suggests the criminality of t­ hose actions taken in defiance of social custom. He recalls: “I had myself just been trampling on the established bound­aries of obligation, and therefore might well have a fellow feeling for other [criminal] offenders” (134). Caleb’s violation of social convention excites Falkland’s crushing fear of exposure and prompts him to issue a threat of severe punishment: “If ever an unguarded word escape from your lips, if ever you excite my jealousy or suspicion, expect to pay for it by your death or worse” (133). Yet Caleb is not deterred. When Falkland commands Caleb to cease his intimacy with Falkland’s half-­ brother, Mr. Forester, Caleb resists the call for “servile submission” and goes “on to seek Mr Forester’s society with eagerness” (139, 140). His rebellion generates further attempts at deterrence: Falkland reminds Caleb of “the extent of [his] power” and the “hours and months and years of . . . ​torment” that Caleb can expect if he continues his subversive ways (140). According to Caleb, Falkland’s tyranny—­his attempt to use social privilege to take away Caleb’s “liberty of acting as [he] pleased”—­fails to incite “terror” and rather generates feelings of “indignation” and “hostility” (141). In fact, Caleb testifies that the “scaffold,” rather than a tool of prevention, is a punishment to be desired when set against the loss of one’s liberty through oppression justified as social rule (141). As “an En­glishman,” Caleb argues, he has “the privilege . . . ​to be sole judge and master of his own actions,” and no threats ­shall ever encumber his pursuit of this right (154).17 It is a compelling argument for the Enlightenment reader—­Godwin contending that national identity,

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and the rights that it affords, supersede social class, and the duties it proscribes, in the administration of justice. Even as his superiors challenge this privilege by staging a preliminary mock-­ hearing to determine ­whether to charge Caleb with the theft of Falkland’s property, Caleb continues to subvert social authority. Throughout the “trial” presided over by Forester in his magisterial capacity, Caleb insists on his innocence and charges Falkland, by whom he has been falsely accused, with “contrivance” (165). He does this in spite of Forester’s strong admonition that while “such insolent and intolerable insinuations” ­w ill ensure a criminal conviction, deference to Falkland ­will aid in Caleb’s defense (163): “Wherever you s­ hall repeat [the accusation against Falkland], t­ hose who hear you ­will pronounce you guilty upon that, even if the proper evidence against you w ­ ere glaringly defective. . . . ​You cannot better serve your cause than by begging ­pardon of your master, and ­doing homage to rectitude and worth even when they are employed in vengeance against you” (167). In response to this warning, Caleb reasserts his innocence and declares Falkland his “implacable ­enemy” (167). Caleb’s social insubordination seals his criminal fate: Forester, convinced of Caleb’s guilt by his irreverence, “follow[s] the course of justice” and has Caleb imprisoned in the local jail ­until he can be tried at the assizes (169). In this scene, Caleb’s vigorous re­sis­tance to Forester’s sovereign demands reinforces the notion that punitive threats often act to incite the very be­hav­ior they are employed to deter. More significantly, Forester’s determination that social deviance indicates criminal guilt emphasizes the way in which ­legal justice is frequently perverted by an elitist anxiety about lower-­class depravity and recalcitrance. Deterrence theory, Godwin reminds his reader, is not merely in­effec­tive; it is unethical, providing as it does justification for social prejudice in determinations of criminal culpability and punishment.18

Reformation Theory In the eigh­teenth ­century’s last few de­cades, deterrence theory was being supplanted by reformation theory. Rather than to deter through exemplary punishment, the objective was to rehabilitate through incarceration.19 J. M. Beattie locates the rationale for this change in doubts about the efficacy of deterrence and in progressive views on rehabilitation: The failure of the established penalties to prevent ­either petty crime or the serious and violent offenses weakened the hold of the complex of assumptions on which they rested. A view was emerging that neither pilferers nor robbers could any longer be merely frightened into obedience, and a conviction was being voiced that punishment should not only attempt to save the petty offender from beginning on the road to the scaffold but also to reclaim men who ­were already deeply corrupted and committing more serious offenses.20

As with deterrence theory, deep-­seated beliefs about the common ­people’s moral deficiency and their vulnerability to vice and corruption w ­ ere the assumptions upon which arguments for reformation ­were founded.21 Progressive penal theo-

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rists, such as Jonas Hanway and John Howard, argued that criminal rehabilitation was pos­si­ble if prisons instituted programs for religious education and discipline, as well as placed offenders in solitary confinement, away from the depravity of the general prison population.22 To borrow from Clive Emsley, t­ hese theorists i­ magined that “­t hose released from the rigours of the penitentiary would be accustomed to hard work, instead of idleness, while religious teaching and periods of solitary confinement would . . . ​[help] the offender to contemplate the evils of wrong-­doing thus inculcating morality and virtue.”23 The prison environment was also a fundamental concern to reformation advocates. Howard, in par­t ic­u ­lar, maintained that rehabilitation depended on superior physical accommodations: ventilation, ­running w ­ ater, nutrition, and cleanliness w ­ ere necessary for spiritual reflection and moral reform.24 In 1779 Parliament recognized Howard’s work and ­adopted the Penitentiary Act, which provided for the development of two model prisons.25 While the proposed penitentiaries ­were never built, the idea that men and ­women could be reformed through incarceration remained an impor­tant point of cultural interest throughout the period.26 Nonetheless, imprisonment and reformation w ­ ere not without their critics, Godwin among them. In Po­liti­cal Justice, Godwin terms jails “seminaries of vice,” emphasizing that, unlike the ideal prison ­imagined by reformers, the ­actual institutions “contribute to imbue [their inhabitants] with habits of indolence and vice, and [operate] to discourage industry” (403). In fact, he argues that only a man who was habituated to “the passion and the practice of injustice” or who was “of sublime virtue” could avoid emerging from the early modern prison “a much worse man than he entered” (403). Importantly, Godwin extends his critique of coercive rehabilitation even, it appears, to penal systems that follow the Howardian model.27 Godwin exhibits a par­tic­u­lar concern about the effects of solitary confinement and, as McLynn notes, he “pointed out . . . ​[that] no man could be reformed by solitude, since rehabilitation was a social pro­cess, a ­matter of persuasion and example rather than force” (Crime and Punishment, 314).28 Moreover, in the third edition of Po­liti­ cal Justice (1798), Godwin is explicit in his argument that coercion is absolutely adverse to reformation: punishment most often “alienate[s] the mind of the sufferer, from the individual that punishes, and from the sentiments he entertains.”29 For Godwin, any purported “conversion is the result of fear” and, therefore, poses no definitive or enduring benefit to society.30 Regardless of its material conditions or its corrective purpose, from Godwin’s perspective, prison has no reformative value precisely ­because treatment can never be conflated with punishment. As with deterrence theory, Caleb Williams represents Godwin’s concerns over the rising correlation between punishment and rehabilitation. Caleb’s narration of his own experience while imprisoned for theft demonstrates the way in which, for Godwin, imprisonment is at odds with reformation. Investing his description of the gaol with gothic undertones, Caleb constructs an institution incompatible with moral and social development. In its “massy doors, . . . ​resounding locks, . . . ​ gloomy passages, . . . ​grated win­dows,” and “keepers” who “steel their hearts against feeling and pity,” the prison is oppressive and offensive, its attendants impenitent

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(171). Rather than a place where the vice-­ridden can be isolated and cured from their moral “disease,” it is a place where they are further subjected, in Caleb’s words, to “putridity and infection” (171). As Caleb surveys the ­mental and physical health of his fellow inmates, the idea of rehabilitation becomes inconceivable: he notes, “their state was immutable. Existence was to them a theatre of invariable melancholy; ­every moment was a moment of anguish”; and, he observes, “the tangible misery of whips and racks” was preferable to “the ­silent, intolerable minutes” spent in prison (174). H ­ ere, Caleb argues, the prison is a symbol of the despotism of the elite—it “is the empire that man exercises over man” and “the end of h ­ uman reason” (175, 176). It is also, Godwin suggests, an absurd institution for enacting behavioral reform. As Caleb writes about the injustice and inhumanity in this mode of punishment, his narrative becomes overtly po­liti­cal. He calls upon his fellow En­glishmen to witness the real­ity of the En­glish penitentiary, equating the nonreformed prison system, in its “unwholesomeness, . . . ​fi lth, . . . ​t yranny of . . . ​governors, [and] . . . ​ misery of . . . ​inmates,” with the Bastille (175). This allusion to the emblem of the French Revolution provides a warning to Caleb’s readers: the prison system challenges the conception of the En­glish as an enlightened society and testifies to the potential for rebellion and revolution rather than reformation and reintegration. Falkland’s servant and Caleb’s former friend, Thomas, comes to represent the En­glishman whose eyes have been opened to the truth. When visiting Caleb in solitary confinement, the “usage” of which he claims “is too bad for a dog,” Thomas expresses outrage at what he perceives to be the machinations of the elite: “They told me what a fine ­t hing it was to be an En­glishman . . . ​and I find it is all a flam. Lord, what fools we be! ­Things are done ­under our very noses, and we know nothing of the ­matter; and a parcel of fellows with grave ­faces swear to us that such ­t hings never happen but in France, and other countries the like of that” (195). The affront Thomas feels leads to a small act of insurrection: he provides Caleb with the tools to escape his confinement (196). Thomas’s rebellion against the state, against the elite who develop and enforce the laws that punish, echoes that of the Bastille’s liberators and foreshadows the potential for revolt once common men realize that they too have been fooled into believing that the En­glish justice system is civilized and reformative. Godwin continues his investigation of reformation theory in his depiction of coercive punishment for private social offense. The first scene of punitive significance occurs when the tenant Hawkins refuses to honor his landlord Tyrrel’s command ­either to surrender his son to be a servant in Tyrrel’s home or to abandon the property for which he has a lawful lease. For his disavowal of what Nancy Johnson refers to as “feudal arrangements of power,” the lowly Hawkins is punished: Tyrrel damages his land, kills his livestock, and engages ­others to harass him (42).31 When Tyrrel’s punishments do not work and Hawkins decides to prosecute him for the damage, Tyrrel hires an attorney “to employ the ­whole series of his subterfuges” and, thereby, have Hawkins “reduced,” through l­egal fees and court costs, “to beggary” (43). As Hawkins hangs on, refusing to be rehabilitated (refusing to

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e­ ither deliver his son for ser­v ice or relinquish his property), Tyrrel barricades the land around his farm “so as to make Hawkins a sort of prisoner in his own domains” (43). Yet the injustice of this meta­phorical imprisonment and Tyrrel’s manipulation of the law to prosecute a putative crime against the social order only spur a rebellion, as Hawkins’s son commits a capital property crime in an effort to terminate the forced confinement. The second instance of unjust private coercion occurs when the orphaned Emily Melvile refuses to marry the man of her guardian’s, Tyrrel’s, choosing. To induce her reform (i.e., to “subdue” her “spirit”), Tyrrel imprisons her in her room and “deprive[s] [her] of all the means of communicating her situation to any one out of his own ­house” (66). Nevertheless Emily renounces Tyrrel’s attempts to claim her as his property and subject her to his absolute control. She demands, “What right have you to make a prisoner of me?” (67), and declares, “You may imprison my body, but you cannot conquer my mind” (68). As Nancy Johnson contends, the two engage in “a b ­ attle of ­wills”: Emily “tries to assert her in­de­pen­dence, and Tyrrel, through application to the laws of owner­ship, tries to claim Emily as his possession and thereby justify his control of her actions.”32 When Tyrrel realizes that private imprisonment w ­ ill not induce the desired conversion, he attempts public imprisonment. He has Emily “arrested . . . ​for a debt contracted for board and necessaries” (78). But criminal punishment works no better: rather than being reformed, Emily dies in confinement. In ­these scenes of private “crime,” Godwin again examines how the elite exploit the law to coerce compliance with social rule. As Marilyn Butler asserts, “Emily and Hawkins stand for the immediate social inferiors of the squirearchy,” and their punishment at the hands of their social superior “is meant to suggest the variety and range of circumstance in which the power of the upper o ­ rders can be felt by 33 other citizens” —­and, I argue, by Godwin’s readers. Moreover, t­ hese punitive episodes, in conjunction with Caleb’s prison narrative, raise doubts about the connection between incarceration and rehabilitation drawn by penal reformers. While Godwin’s Gothic portrayal of the gaol certainly leaves some opening for the curative possibilities of a Howardian prison model, his overarching depiction of coercive punishment as a tool of alienation and a catalyst for rebellion calls into serious question the reformative purpose and value of any punitive endeavor.

Retribution Theory The final, and perhaps most significant, theory of punishment that the novel addresses is retribution. Retributive doctrine posits punishment as just recompense for criminal offense and aims “to make the punishment fit the crime” (McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 249). In the eigh­teenth c­ entury, penal reformers often situated retribution in opposition to deterrence, denouncing the failure of the latter to accommodate considerations of degree and circumstance.34 As noted e­ arlier, ­t hese activists ­were particularly concerned about the growing body of legislation that provided punishment wildly in excess of the be­hav­ior that it sought to deter: ­under the Bloody Code, for example, poaching, forgery, and ­horse stealing ­were

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all punishable by death. Moreover, t­ hese reformers w ­ ere critical of the public per­ for­mance of exemplary punishment: punitive excess, they argued, encouraged a sympathetic and sometimes reactionary response from the audience.35 For t­ hese thinkers who w ­ ere focused on proportionality issues, retributive princi­ples w ­ ere an ethical defense against deterrence rationale. In Po­liti­cal Justice, Godwin emphatically dismisses retribution as a legitimate justification for coercive action against criminal offenders. He states, “­There is no such ­t hing as desert. . . . ​To punish him [the offender] . . . ​for what is past and irrecoverable and for the consideration of that only, must be ranked among the wildest conceptions of untutored barbarism” (370, my emphasis).36 He does, however, deliberate on the second objective, which is to ensure that, ­under any theory, the punishment is proportional to the crime. Exploring the tension between this objective and deterrence theory, Godwin argues that “no two crimes ­were ever alike; . . . ​ and therefore reducing them explic­itly or implicitly to general classes, which the very idea of example [i.e., deterrence] implies, is absurd” (383). In ­every criminal case, Godwin asserts, ­t here must be an attempt to discover the individual circumstances and to connect the offender’s culpability to the crime’s severity. Moreover, Godwin indicates that punishment should be reserved for t­ hose whose motives or intentions suggest “antisocial dispositions,” such that t­ here is a likelihood of f­ uture criminal action (see 384–385). Indeed, he dictates the following as the crucial questions to ask when contemplating punishment: “Was this an habitual state of his mind, or was it a crisis in his history likely to remain unique? What effect has experience produced on him; or what likelihood is ­t here, that the uneasiness and suffering that attend the perpetration of eminent wrong, may have worked a salutary change in his mind?” (387). Notwithstanding t­ hese administrative recommendations, Godwin insists on the impossibility of properly “proportion[ing] the degree of suffering to the degree of delinquency, when [or ­because] the latter can never be discovered” (383). He finds that b ­ ecause the current justice system has major administrative flaws—­where judges and juries have “no previous knowledge” of the accused and where witness testimony, the “veracity” of which t­here is “continual doubt,” is a valued form of evidence—­intention and the probability of recidivism are often undiscoverable (386, 387). Retributive justice is impossible b ­ ecause ­human judgment, and the public system through which it is called to act, are fallible. Godwin examines t­ hese philosophical objections to retributive theory in his portrayal of Caleb as detective and prosecutor of Falkland’s crimes. Although Caleb’s initial attempts to discover the truth of Falkland’s involvement in the deaths of Tyrrel and the Hawkinses are motivated by his “uncontrolable . . . ​curiosity” (104), rather than a wish to see Falkland punished for his actions, Caleb’s relentless and coercive pursuit is felt by Falkland, and, at a point, perceived by Caleb, as punitive and retributive. Falkland’s “punishment” begins soon a­ fter Caleb learns the history of Falkland’s altered demeanor from a fellow servant—­Tyrrel’s death and the Hawkins’s executions transformed him from a sociable, kind aristocrat to “a rigid recluse,” who often “displays the marks of a furious insanity” (102). Caleb becomes obsessed with proving his master guilty of murder, surveilling Falkland

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and leading him into discussions that might reveal his guilt. John Zomchick persuasively argues that Caleb’s obsession to discover Falkland’s secret is located in “the fantastic pleasures of power and control” that Caleb experiences as he gets closer to discovering the truth.37 I would argue that as Caleb pursues “the truth” (or, ­t hese “pleasures”), the punishment he inflicts begins to exceed the crime, and Falkland takes on the role of the criminal for whom further punishment becomes an injustice, while Caleb assumes that of the tyrant for whom power and control are intoxicating. This role reversal emerges in descriptions of Falkland’s deep contrition and corporeal decline, as well as in Caleb’s sympathetic response to his plight. Early on, Falkland explains that he is condemned by his guilt; further punishment is futile: “From the hour the crime was committed . . . ​I have not had an hour’s peace; I became changed from the happiest into the most miserable ­thing that lives. . . . ​The scene of that night, instead of perishing, has been a source of ever new calamity to me, which must flow for ever! Am I then, thus miserable and ruined, a proper subject for you upon which to exercise your ingenuity, and improve your power of tormenting? . . . ​Misery itself has nothing worse in store for me except what you have inflicted. . . . ​You have brought me low enough” (116–117). That Falkland feels the full, torturous weight of his crime is made tangible by the slow, painful deterioration of his physical body, which is alternately described as skeletal, “woe-­begone,” and “ghost-­like” (268). Even Caleb compassionates with Falkland’s suffering, asserting “I knew his misery so well, I was so fully acquainted with its cause, and so strongly impressed with the idea of its being unmerited, that, while I suffered so deeply, I still continued to pity, rather than hate my persecutor” (218). The words of the autobiographer himself suggest that the misery that has been, and has yet to be, inflicted on Falkland by Caleb is unmerited: Falkland’s just deserts already have been served. Godwin’s argument against retribution as a legitimate punitive theory fully materializes in the postscript. Having formally charged Falkland with murder, Caleb becomes the ­legal prosecutor of his social superior. It is a role that he alternately rationalizes as developing out of the need for “just revenge” or out of “necessary self-­defence” (295); yet it is also a role he soon regrets assuming. When Falkland enters the judge’s chambers, Caleb is once again struck by the degree of his physical deterioration, and Caleb’s immediate response is to abandon the image of Falkland as persecutor for the idea of Falkland as persecuted (see 298). As Falkland is so re-­placed, Caleb fully comprehends the evil in his obsessive pursuit: “How was it pos­si­ble for me to be so e­ ager, so obstinate in a purpose so diabolical?” (297). He reflects that, instead of seeking retribution, he should have reasoned with Falkland (300), echoing Godwin’s call in Po­liti­cal Justice to substitute reasoned discourse for coercive punishment (275–276). When Caleb is told of Falkland’s death (­after Falkland’s public confession of his crime), Caleb’s transformation from prosecutor to offender is complete. He exclaims, “I have been his murderer”; “I wantonly inflicted on him an anguish a thousand times worse than death” (302). Caleb’s punitive mea­sures, taken without consideration of Falkland’s motives or the

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likelihood of criminal relapse, produce another murder. In Falkland’s case, although his crimes w ­ ere serious, the punishment was too severe. This servant’s retributive persecution of his master, therefore, invites the reader to consider how punishment functions as a universal evil, as a way for any man (regardless of social class or ­legal authority) to become “the destroyer” of any other man.38

2 But is the reader persuaded of Godwin’s overarching philosophical argument that “Coercion [i.e., punishment] can at no time, ­either permanently or provisionally, make part of any po­liti­cal system that is built on the princi­ples of reason” (Po­liti­ cal Justice, 392, my emphasis)? Does the truth of the phi­los­o­pher’s utopian vision fully and convincingly emerge from the novelist’s realist proj­ect? As Godwin enters the fictional space of Caleb Williams, he turns away from the rational dialectic of Po­liti­cal Justice ­toward the instabilities of novelistic convention. His narrative of “­things as they are” is invested with diverse generic codes: the psychological depth and sometimes incoherence of the novel of consciousness, the deep sympathetic commitments and volatilities of the novel of sentiment, and the intensely pressurized ideologies of the po­liti­cal novel.39 The consequence of Godwin’s theoretical trial-­by-­novel is that a world devoid of coercive punishment emerges as an overambitious and potentially faulty enterprise. As Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, Caleb Williams reads within the “novel of consciousness” tradition, a popu­lar eighteenth-­century genre in which the “novelistic action” centers on “the consciousness possessed and experienced by an individual or individuals operating in relation to” the world (Novel Beginnings, 92; see also 225–228). Godwin’s narrative of persecution and punishment is filtered through Caleb’s psychological real­ity, which ostensibly penetrates the cognitive and emotional dimensions of Falkland’s subjectivity. Caleb’s documentation of “­t hings as they are,” therefore, captures not only the intricacies of the public (the social and po­liti­cal), but also the complexities of the private (the individual). Punitive action emerges as a projection of both class conflict and psychological energy: in other words, punishment is, for Caleb and Falkland, the consequence of social in­equality and of hyper-­interiority, the latter of which manifests in conflicting motives and emotions. Caleb describes himself as driven at one moment by an “insatiable curiosity” and at another by an urgent desire to achieve “freedom from . . . ​t yranny” (179, 233)—he is in one instance filled with veneration and love for his fellow man and in another with social apathy. Similarly, Falkland is narrated as si­mul­ta­neously motivated by a self-­centered chivalric ethos and an altruistic sensibility—he feels both excessive pride and charitable goodwill. The external expression of t­ hese internal tensions is troubling: both figures are plagued by “fits of insanity,” seizures of “frenzy,” and “paroxysms” of “resentment” or “exclamation” that transmogrify into the unbridled coercion of the one over the other (see, e.g., 120–121, 150, 295–296, 127). And while Godwin periodically writes this ­human condition as irresistible and inevitable—­“error” inexplicably begets “error,” and “sentiment” naturally

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“flows” into “sentiment” (109, 132)—he also imbues it with such hostility and vio­ lence that cause is often lost to effect. In fact, the fiercely conflicted consciousness that each character embodies engenders a characterological duality: Caleb and Falkland function both as protagonist and antagonist, persecuted and persecutor, victim and offender. Thus, their punitive contest becomes a site of sympathetic dissonance—­t he reader is invited to feel a lingering sense of injustice when t­ hese characters are punished and when they are not. Godwin’s application to another of the period’s popu­lar literary genres—­t he novel of sentiment—­further explains the per­sis­tent appeal of coercive punishment in Caleb Williams. R. F. Brissenden demonstrates that the principal theme of the sentimental novel is “virtue in distress,” symbolized in the persecuted or other­ wise afflicted virtuous character (77–95);40 and the intended effect of this treatment, as Spacks observes, is “to arouse as well as to render sympathetic feelings” (Novel Beginnings, 127). Godwin plots sentimentality in the novel’s early frame story of aristocratic oppression and chivalric obsession. H ­ ere, the victims of t­ hese authorities are positioned as moral exemplars whose suffering is an unequivocal injustice. The elder Benjamin Hawkins, a self-­described “plain working man” and small property owner, and the younger Leonard Hawkins, “a sober and industrious” youth with economic prospects above servitude, represent the bourgeois values of upward mobility and affective domesticity; while Emily Melvile, an orphan “with an extreme sweetness and easiness of temper,” materializes as the bourgeois feminine ideal—­a model of virtue, chastity, and sensibility (40–41, 49). In ­t hese moral archetypes, the staid re­sis­tance to excessive patrician power is admirable, just as the resultant punishment is tragic. Although neither Emily nor the Hawkinses appear as internally uneasy or despairing (in fact, their rebellion against the punitive mea­sures taken against them suggests remarkable moral strength), their hardships engender deep sympathetic identification on the part of the reader. This response is only intensified by Godwin’s portrait of despotism in Tyrrel and egotism in Falkland. As ­earlier discussed, ­t hese figures represent, to relative degrees, the chronic and incontrovertible corruption of social privilege and juridical authority. Tyrrel’s tyrannical be­hav­ior is described as “rooted” in his being, and Falkland himself admits his unwillingness to trade reputation for “virtue” and “honesty” (47, 132). Thus, when Tyrrel takes punitive mea­sures against the Hawkinses and Emily without consequence, he inspires w ­ holesale antipathy; and when Falkland secretly sacrifices the lives of the former to preserve his “spotless and illustrious name,” he excites feelings of repugnance (132). In ­t hese vignettes, the novel’s sentimental register becomes saturated with the ubiquitous emotional demand for victim and communal recompense through punitive means, troubling, once again, Godwin’s sweeping argument against coercive punishment. Godwin acknowledges the relationship between sympathetic identification and retributive action in Po­liti­cal Justice; yet he is also clear that his par­tic­u ­lar notion of penal reform nullifies the need for coercive action against criminal offenders. As ­earlier noted, Godwin unequivocally denies the utility of retribution in his philosophical work: taking any action solely with an eye t­oward recompense is

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inconceivable in his conception of a just society. He does, however, suggest that deterrence might be achieved by forming “small district[s]” and tasking members with communal surveillance (378). Once “­under the public eye” and subject to “the disapprobation of his neighbors,” the potential offender w ­ ill be forced “­either to reform or to emigrate” (378, see also 391, 393). Godwin further argues that reformation can be accomplished through reasoned and candid discourse: “Reason is omnipotent: if my conduct be wrong, a very ­simple statement, flowing from a clear and comprehensive view, ­will make it appear to be such, nor is ­there any perverseness that can resist the evidence of which truth is capable” (379). In the instance where an offender pre­sents an immediate threat to public safety, Godwin approves of communal restraint; however, he warns that restraint must be accompanied with nonaggressive rehabilitative tactics. Treating an offender “with kindness,” communicating the “reluctance” of the community “to employ . . . ​force . . . ​ against him,” and “pre­sent[ing] truth to his mind with calmness, perspicuity, and benevolence” ­w ill create a situation in which “his reformation would be almost infallible” (401). In the phi­los­o­pher’s noncoercive world, sympathy ­will align with reason, not retribution, and truth with reside in unbiased and rational judgment, not institutional commands. In the novelist’s realist world, however, a very dif­fer­ent picture emerges. As Spacks argues, Caleb Williams follows in the direction of other eighteenth-­century po­liti­cal novels, which give power­f ul voice to oppression and injustice but generally fail to model “po­liti­cal recommendations” (Novel Beginnings, 230, 229–231). The plausibility of Godwin’s political-­juridical vision is dispelled in the novel by the consistency with which Godwin draws his transgressive characters and in his rendering of public emotion and civic values. For example, neither Caleb nor Falkland develops significantly in the novel’s course—­reason begins and remains a state of instability for each protagonist/antagonist up to the b ­ itter end. Readers are left to won­der ­whether a “­simple statement” of wrongdoing or the fear of social censure would have dissuaded ­t hese men from further action or guaranteed their immediate reform. Moreover, Tyrrel’s condensed, but uniform, psychological narrative registers the possibility of man’s incapacity for rational thought and motivation. When Falkland beseeches the rural despot to “attend to reason,” Tyrrel professes his innate incompetence: “We are as God made us. I am neither a phi­ los­o­pher nor a poet, to set out upon a wild-­goose chase of making myself a dif­fer­ ent man from what you find me” (29). Significantly, Tyrrel also challenges Falkland’s right, as a concerned member of the community, to surveil his movements: “I want no monitor, and I ­w ill have none” (45). This intransigence paves the way for Godwin’s experiential analy­sis of deliberate and benevolent communal discipline, as the fatal events that follow Falkland’s failed deterrence efforts become subject to intense and erratic public judgment. Emily’s death elicits not benign discourse but “a long series of contempt, abhorrence and insult” t­ oward her ostensible murderer (89). Indeed, the “obsequiousness . . . ​and . . . ​unfeigned admiration” to which Tyrrel had been used rapidly collapses ­under the “inextinguishable vio­lence” of repressed “public resentment” (17, 90). Yet this impassioned response becomes

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entangled in the authority of aristocratic ideology, which exhibits as the common man’s reverence for his privileged neighbor. When Tyrrel appears at “the rural assembly” from which he had been banned ­a fter Emily’s death, the narrator observes: “The w ­ hole com­pany ­were astonished” and, though still offended by his be­hav­ior, “could not help admiring the courage and resources he displayed upon the pre­sent occasion” (90–91). In t­ hese fictive moments, reasoned judgment is elided by the tumult of ­human emotion and the deeply ingrained politics of social convention, and the phi­los­o­pher’s juridical prototype is lost in the morass of public sentiment and social dogma. The tension between class consciousness and communal justice is further emphasized in Falkland’s initial trial for Tyrrel’s murder. Falkland’s defense rests on the qualities reserved for his social class—he pre­sents reputation, honor, and virtue as fundamentally opposed to criminal culpability—­and his acquittal is guaranteed by t­ hese terms: “Nobody entertained the shadow of a doubt upon the subject” of his guilt (99–100). Moreover, the crowd’s fervent reaction to Falkland’s exoneration demonstrates in dramatic form the collective allegiance to traditional, socially determined norms of individual moral value: “When the verdict of the jury was given, a general murmur of applause and involuntary transport burst forth in the court. . . . ​As it was the expression of rapturous delight and an emotion disinterested and divine, so t­ here was an indescribable something in the very sound that carried it home to the heart, and convinced e­ very spectator that no personal plea­sure ever existed that was not foolish and feeble in the comparison. . . . ​It was a sort of sympathetic feeling that took hold upon all ranks and degrees” (100). This repre­sen­ta­t ion of ideological fortitude appears in direct contrast to what Gary Handwerk posits as “the central claim of Po­liti­cal Justice”: “that politics—­questions of power and government, of ideology and interests, which are rooted in historical circumstances—­can be subordinated to ethical considerations—­t hose questions of justice and fairness that o ­ ught to be determined objectively by abstract reason.”41 This contradiction appears again t­oward the novel’s end when Caleb begs Falkland’s steward and early biographer, Mr. Collins, to hear the truth of his master’s character. Collins’s response is significant for its utilitarian and ideological undertones: “I . . . ​have always admired [Mr. Falkland] as the living model of liberality and goodness. If you could change all my ideas, and show me that ­t here was no criterion by which vice might be prevented from being mistaken for virtue, what benefit would arise from that? I must part with all my interior consolation, and all my external connections. And for what?” (288). ­Here, Godwin’s public representative implicitly dismisses the civic advantage of juridical anarchy—­ institutionally prescribed princi­ples, even though illusory, are the foundations of private judgment and, therefore, necessary for maintaining individual stability and communal welfare. Reason, in this narrative world, remains contentedly subordinate to normative sociopo­liti­cal ideologies, and Godwin offers no sense that this imbalance can—or necessarily should—­shift. So what do we do with the conflicted space between Godwin’s philosophizing and fictionalizing on the issue of punitive justice? I would like to suggest that it is

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pos­si­ble to plot a compelling correspondence between Po­liti­cal Justice and Caleb Williams if we attend to Godwin’s stated objective, as it is presented in the novel’s preface and refined, as Pamela Clemit notes, in a subsequent letter to the British Critic.42 Again, Godwin’s prefatory remarks explain that the novel is intended to educate a popu­lar audience on the “truth” of government and, specifically, on “the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man” (312). Godwin clarifies this unpublished description in his published response to a contemporaneous review charging him with “ ‘throw[ing] an odium upon the laws of [the] country’ ”: the novel’s object “is to expose the evils which arise out of the pre­sent system of civilized society; and, having exposed them, to lead the enquiring reader to examine ­whether they are, or are not, as has commonly been supposed, irremediable; in a word, to disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and po­liti­cal enquiry.”43 Godwin understood fiction as a mechanism for communicating to the popu­lar reader what David McCracken terms “­grand truths.”44 In fact, in Po­liti­cal Justice, Godwin proposes lit­er­a­ture, for which he provides an expansive definition, as “the effectual way for extirpating . . . ​prejudices and ­mistakes” from, and for ushering in truths to, “the h ­ uman mind” (14–15).45 As Clemit argues, however, Godwin’s British Critic letter “redefines the ‘valuable lesson’ of the [novel’s] Preface as a moral enquiry which also poses an imaginative challenge.”46 The reader of Caleb Williams, Clemit contends, is called to undertake “the responsibility for seeing t­ hings as they ­really are”—­for developing “new possibilities of meaning” and for perceiving “possibilities of reform.”47 This responsibility is made all the more necessary and difficult by the fact that the novel itself, as Miriam Wallace suggests, neither pre­sents “a transparent ‘moral’ ” nor avoids the persuasive power of “ideological interpellation.”48 Thus, the reader is obligated to step outside of her ideological circumstance in order to see and feel the widespread prob­lem of punitive injustice and, in par­ tic­u­lar, its foundational justifications; but she also is empowered to arbitrate its significance and imagine its solution. Rather than a pure exercise in didacticism, therefore, the novel is a platform for the per­for­mance of reasoned judgment. The notion of intellectual ­labor as a gradual and necessary precondition to individual and social enlightenment is essential to Godwin’s thought in Po­liti­cal Justice. Mark Philp explains the phi­los­o­pher’s deductive argument: “The more citizens exercise their capacities for judgment and deliberation, the more t­ hese capacities expand and improve. Th ­ ese improved capacities allow them to recognize the true princi­ples of reason and morality and ensure that they w ­ ill increasingly act according to reason and justice. As this pro­cess advances, and as it spreads throughout the w ­ hole of a community, government becomes increasingly impotent. When its citizens no longer acknowledge its necessity, its capacity to rule and coerce them evaporates.” 49 For Godwin, rational exercise involves “time, reading and conversation”—­books are to be supplemented with discussion that introduces us “to a variety of sentiments . . . ​and gives freedom and elasticity to our ­mental disquisitions.” 50 Caleb Williams provides just the reading experience and opportunity for the discourse contemplated in Godwin’s philosophy. As the reader grapples

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privately and communally with the novel’s vari­ous pressures—­psy­chol­ogy and sentiment and social, po­l iti­cal, and moral ideology—­she is arguably cultivating intellect, emotion, and ethics. She is in the pro­cess of becoming the rational, discerning being who perceives moral truth and practices exceptional judgment—­ who understands the limitations of coercive punishment, generates the w ­ ill for its abolition, and resolves the idiosyncrasies between despotic be­hav­iors and penal reform. Even more significantly, if we accept Tilottama Rajan’s argument that po­liti­cal justice “is the pro­cess rather than the product of reflective judgment,” then Caleb Williams offers this reader a mode for ­doing the very work of Godwin’s philosophical idealism.51 It may just be that Godwin’s idea of punitive justice is proceeding through the reader’s contemplation of the novel’s content and her experience of its emotional register. Although scholars have argued about the relative success or failure of Godwin’s efforts at readerly development and po­liti­cal action, it is near impossible to know the extent of his impact.52 What we can appreciate is that neither Po­liti­cal Justice nor Caleb Williams matured into the ­g reat revolutionary penal proj­ect Godwin appears to have originally intended. In fact, in the over two hundred years since the texts’ publications, the core princi­ples and practices of the En­glish and American criminal justice systems have remained relatively unchanged. Deterrence, reformation, and retribution theories continue to underwrite national penal policy in both Britain and the United States. Moreover, imprisonment and, in the United States, capital punishment persist as the principal expressions of punitive authority. Nevertheless, critical discussion and debate on the efficacy and ethicality of coercive punishment is ongoing and in recent years has led to experiments in new penal models, including the restorative justice model, which seeks to reconcile victim, offender, and community through noncoercive means.53 Therefore, while Godwin’s call for the abolition of coercive punishment in Po­liti­cal Justice has proved, in the main, ineffectual, Caleb Williams remains valuable for thinking and talking about the ideologies, ethics, logics, and sentiments that influence our conceptions of criminal justice and drive our efforts for penal reform. For although it is of another historical moment, this eighteenth-­century masterpiece pre­sents enduring truths about the relationship between socioeconomic in­equality, po­liti­ cal oppression, and state-­sanctioned punishment, and it continues to invite the sort of critical meditation and conversation that engenders juridical change.

notes 1.  William Godwin, ­Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 312. The preface to the novel was initially suppressed due to concerns over its po­liti­cal implications (see the 1795 note to the preface, 312). 2. ­Unless other­w ise noted, all references to Po­liti­cal Justice are from the second volume of the first edition published in 1793 and reprinted in William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols, in Po­liti­cal and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 3 (London: William Pickering, 1993). In the first and second editions (1793 and 1796), Godwin refers to punishment as “coercion”; by the third edition (1798), he has changed most of t­ hose references to “punishment.” This essay uses the term “punishment” except when quoting ­t hose portions of the first

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edition, where “coercion” is used. For a comprehensive review of all variations among the first, second, and third editions, see Mark Philp, An Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice Variants, in Po­liti­cal and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 4 (London: William Pickering, 1993). ­Here Philp indicates that book 7 was not substantially revised among editions (9). 3.  Mark Philp, Godwin’s Po­liti­cal Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), helpfully connects Godwin’s argument for ­human perfectibility to his anarchism: “Both derive from his commitments in philosophy and ethics: in par­tic­u ­lar from his belief that moral truth is objective, that men and w ­ omen are capable of grasping this truth through the exercise of their reason and judgment, that perceiving this truth is sufficient to motivate the corresponding per­for­ mance, and that our capacities for reasoning and our grasp of t­ hese truths have improved through history and w ­ ill continue to improve” (2). 4.  In addition to scholarship noting the connection between book VII of Po­liti­cal Justice and Caleb Williams, t­ here is ample criticism examining how En­glish law and the En­glish criminal justice system function as critical sites in the novel. Gary Dyer, for example, reads the novel in light of eighteenth-­century blackmail and sodomy law in “The Arrest of Caleb Williams: Unnatural Crime, Constructive Vio­lence, and Overwhelming Terror in Late Eighteenth-­ Century E ­ ngland,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 36, no. 3 (2012): 31–56. Randa Helfield examines the novel’s engagement with the period’s treason law in “Constructive Treason and Godwin’s Treasonous Constructions,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Lit­er­a­ture 28, no. 2 (1995): 43–62. And Quentin Bailey investigates the novel’s relationship to con­temporary “discourse about lawlessness and public order,” including parliamentary bills to establish a police force and writing on prison reform in “ ‘Extraordinary and Dangerous Powers’: Prisons, Police, and Lit­er­a­ture in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 22, no. 3 (2010): 525–548. Bridget Marshall, The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), offers an excellent discussion of the novel as a Gothic critique of the administrative and procedural aspects of the eighteenth-­century criminal justice system (27– 64), while Jonathan Grossman, The Art of Alibi: En­glish Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), provides a compelling argument that the novel’s “trial scenes” reflect a contemporaneous movement ­toward “storytelling” in ­England’s “adversarial trial system” (37, 49, 37–61). Th ­ ere is also abundant scholarship on the novel as an experiment in ­legal rhe­toric and juridical truth. Critics are particularly interested in the way in which the novel’s multiple trial narratives redound to Godwin’s philosophical view of sincerity as a rhetorical device. See, e.g., Nicholas Williams, “ ‘The Subject of Detection’: ­Legal Rhe­toric and Subjectivity in Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 9, no. 4 (1997): 479–498; Cheryl Walsh, “Truth, Prejudice, and the Power of Narrative in Caleb Williams,” En­glish Language Notes 35, no. 4 (1998): 22–38; Jan-­Melissa Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Lit­er­a­ture, and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 94 and 89–100 generally; and Yasmin Solomonescu, “ ‘A Plausible Tale’: William Godwin’s ­Things As They Are,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 25, no. 5 (2014): 591–610. 5.  Gary Kelly, The En­glish Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 180–181. 6.  James Thompson, “Surveillance in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 186–187. 7.  Thompson refers to Lukács for the idea of “biographical form” (“Surveillance,” 190). 8.  Thompson, “Surveillance,” 190–191. 9.  Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH 60, no. 4 (1993): 940; Evan Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: Po­liti­cal Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,” Modern Philology 97, no. 4 (2000): 528; and John Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2012), 165–173. 10.  Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth,” 940; Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist,” 553. 11.  Anna Maria Jones, “ ‘What Should Make Thee Inaccessible to My Fury?’: Gothic Self-­ Possession, Revenge, and the Doctrine of Necessity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams,”

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Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 22, no. 2 (2011): 137–154; and Julie A. Carlson, “Romantic Poet Legislators: An End of Torture,” in Speaking about Torture, ed. Julie A. Carlson and Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012), 221–246. 12.  For additional classic and recent studies in the history of crime and culture, including the practice of capital punishment, see Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, and E. P. Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (New York: Pantheon, 1975); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1976); and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth-­Century (London: Verso, 2003). 13.  Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (London: Routledge, 1989), 242–256. See also David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in ­England, 1750– 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 124–140, and David Lemmings, Law and Government in ­England during the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century: From Consent to Command (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 94–99. 14.  See also Lemmings, Law and Government, 83–94. 15. Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment, 124. 16.  Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-­Century ­England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001), 210 (quoting Caleb Williams). Gladfelder is interested in Godwin’s dichotomous portrayal of the band of thieves: he notes that at the same time that they are depicted as violent offenders “irreconcilably at odds with their community,” they also are positioned as victims of and rightful challengers to an inequitable justice system (210). For Gladfelder, Godwin’s sympathetic repre­sen­ta­tion of their strug­gle against the criminal law and the institutions through which it is enforced, recalls Godwin’s “critique of the law and of the system of social relationships it supports” in Po­liti­cal Justice (210). 17.  This statement appears to be a direct rejoinder to Burke’s claim that in a civil society “no man should be judge in his own cause” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark [Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001], 218). 18.  In his depiction of Caleb’s social crimes, Godwin contends with Edmund Burke, who, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), defends the po­liti­cal and social hierarchies of eighteenth-­century France and E ­ ngland and asserts that the natu­ral order requires deference to ­t hose at the top (250–251). By portraying the aristocracy and gentry as prone to juridical corruption, Godwin challenges the legitimacy of Burke’s philosophy and subverts conservative notions of deference. For insightful discussions of Godwin’s engagement with Burkean ideals in Caleb Williams, see Jamison Kantor, “Burke, Godwin, and the Politics of Honor,” Studies in En­glish Lit­e r­a­ture, 1500–1900 54, no. 3 (2014): 675–696; Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 32, no. 3 (1982): 237–257; and David McCracken, “Godwin’s Caleb Williams: A Fictional Rebuttal of Burke,” Studies in Burke and His Time 11, no. 2 (1969–1970): 1442–1452. 19.  See McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 309. 20.  J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in ­England, 1660–1800 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1986), 557–558. 21. Lemmings, Law and Government, 99–106. 22. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 568–573. 23.  Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in E ­ ngland, 1750–1900, 4th ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2010), 275–278. 24. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 572–573; see also Lemmings, Law and Government, 100–101. 25. Lemmings, Law and Government, 100–101; see also Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 573–582. 26.  For an exploration of eighteenth-­century prison reform and contemporaneous fiction, see John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). 27.  Taylor also understands Godwin to have rejected the harsh “new regimes” that posited incarceration as a foundation for rehabilitation (Crime, Policing and Punishment, 148).

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28.  For example, in Po­liti­cal Justice, Godwin asks: “­Shall we be most effectually formed to justice, benevolence and prudence in our intercourse with each other, in a state of solitude? ­Will not our selfish and unsocial dispositions be perpetually increased? What temptation has he to think of benevolence or justice who has no opportunity to exercise it?” (404). 29.  William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice, with Se­lections from Godwin’s Other Writings, 3rd ed. abridged, ed. K. Codell Car­ter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 267. 30. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice, 267. 31.  Nancy Johnson, The En­glish Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 114–115. 32. Johnson, The En­glish Jacobin Novel, 119. 33.  Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” 245. 34.  See McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 249 and 250–256. 35. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 252. 36.  K. Codell Car­ter observes, in his introduction to an abridged version of the 1798 text (Enquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice, xxxii), that Godwin pre­sents two objections to retributive theory. First, he indicates that it “presupposes ­free ­will,” an assumption that conflicts with his belief (as Car­ter describes it) that “a man has no more control over what he does than a knife.” Second, he asserts that, in its purest form, retribution only seeks to avenge, a goal which has no utility to society. 37.  John P. Zomchick, ­Family and the Law in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 185. 38. See Caleb Williams, 312. ­There is abundant scholarship on the novel’s ending, including its juridical aspects. See, e.g., Gerald A. Barker, “Justice to Caleb Williams,” Studies in the Novel 6, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 377–388; and Sue Chaplin, “A Supplement, Godwin’s Case for Justice,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 19, no. 2 (April 2008): 119–124. 39.  I am indebted to Patricia Meyer Spacks’s work on diverse novelistic genres in Novel Beginnings: Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Fiction (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006). In her chapter on the po­liti­cal novel Spacks also reads Caleb Williams as a generic hybrid, specifically as a novel of adventure, a novel of consciousness, and a novel of development (222–231). 40.  R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974). 41.  Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth,” 941. Handwerk offers a masterful reading of the tension between ethics and ideology in the novel’s original and published endings. He argues that Caleb’s condemnation of self in the revised postscript demonstrates how “ideological forces” continue to shape his understanding of “ethical universals” (“Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth,” 954–955). 42.  Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 42. 43.  William Godwin, “To the Editor of the British Critic, 7 June 1995,” in The Letters of William Godwin. Vol. 1: 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011; Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 2015), 116–117. 44.  David McCracken, “Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Po­liti­ cal Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1970): 129. 45.  This discussion of lit­er­a­ture appears in volume 1, book 1, chapter 4 of Po­liti­cal Justice in vol. 3 of Philp’s edition of Po­liti­cal and Philosophical Writings. 46.  Pamela Clemit, introduction to Godwin, ­Things as They Are, 50. 47. Clemit, The Godwinian Novel, 69, 43. In her argument, Clemit underscores Godwin’s discussion of the liberating “function of imaginative lit­er­a­ture” in Po­liti­cal Justice, and she pays par­tic­u ­lar attention to the way in which the novel’s first-­person narrative performs this function (The Godwinian Novel, 42–43, 42–69). 48.  Miriam L. Wallace, Revolutionary Subjects in the En­glish Jacobin Novel (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2009), 50–51; see also 36–52. 49. Philp, Godwin’s Po­liti­cal Justice, 3; see also 5. For an argument that asserts Falkland and Caleb development of the ability to perceive “moral truth,” see Philp, Godwin’s Po­liti­cal Justice, 116, as well as 107–117 generally.

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50. ­Here I cite volume 1, book 4, chapter 3 of Po­liti­cal Justice, 118, 121. The page numbers refer to vol. 3 of Philp’s anthology. 51.  Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 120–121. 52.  Kristin Leaver, in “Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader,” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (1993): 589–610, pre­sents a wonderfully thorough analy­sis of what she ultimately perceives as Godwin’s failed attempt to use the novel to produce, in his primarily middle-­class reader, the radical individual development and po­liti­cal change envisaged by Po­liti­cal Justice. Nevertheless, Leaver argues that the novel is a valuable means for contemplating and pro­cessing the historically determined “tensions” of “middle-­class subjectivity” (610). Bridget Marshall offers a more optimistic assessment of Godwin’s effect on his readership, arguing that Caleb Williams successfully “train[s] the reader in methods of proper judgment”: “His novel provides examples that persuade the reader to question the authority of the law and ultimately to change the system” (The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 53, 60). 53.  For useful overviews of con­temporary punitive models, see Cyndi Banks, Criminal Justice Ethics: Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 103–126; and Roger Hopkins Burke, Criminal Justice Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 144–171.

B

Sensibility Reclaimed thomas blackwell, robert wood, and the “conjectural history” of homer Peter M. Briggs In the want of direct evidence, we are u ­ nder a necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon par­tic­u­lar occasions, of considering in what manner they are likely to have proceeded, from the princi­ples of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation. —­Dugald Stewart (1794)

From the point of view of modern classical scholarship, eighteenth-­century studies of Homer may seem part of the prehistory of the field. Over the past two and a half centuries scholars have brought to bear a wealth of new philological, archaeological, and comparative evidence that has put such investigations on a more solid basis. ­Today most interpreters accept that the Iliad and Odyssey ­were not composed by an individual poet named Homer; rather, “Homer” became a conventional way for naming and personifying what was in fact a long-­running Greek tradition of oral poets and singers whose heroic verses eventually coalesced and descended to posterity in the form of written epic poems.1 The continuing refinement of classical scholarship does not mean, however, that eighteenth-­century interpretations of Homer’s accomplishments lack critical interest. Where t­ here is less established knowledge, ­t here is more room for conjecture, and Homer received a generous share. Also, as might be expected, ­those who speculated often left a clearer impression of their own literary values, personal temperaments, and presuppositions about authorship than they did of Homer and his world. They wished to honor Homer by extending their own critical visions to include him and to embrace sensibilities evident to them in his poetry. In his magisterial introduction to Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s epics, Maynard Mack suggested that Pope’s rendering represented an impor­tant transitional moment in the development of Homeric studies: his translations (1715–1726) 160

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­ ere the culmination of an older personal vision of Homer as poet, while a more w modern, philologically and textually oriented understanding of his works began with the publication of Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer in 1795.2 Mack’s observation is certainly true, as the suppositions under­lying interpretations of Homer changed radically between 1700 and 1800. It is also limiting, however, insofar as it passes over two midcentury critics, Thomas Blackwell (1701–1757) and Robert Wood (1716/17–1771), who w ­ ere influential in their own time and contributed significantly to changing ideas of Homer and the epics. Neither was interested in offering line-­by-­line or scene-­by-­scene commentary on the works, which is something that Pope and his collaborators had already done well. In fact, it is surprising how l­ittle Blackwell or Wood wrote about Homer’s poetry specifically as poetry. Both clearly admired the gravity and sheer magnitude of the epics, and from time to time they allowed themselves moments of emotional engagement with Homer’s world, ­either through enthusiasm or nostalgia. For the most part, however, they preferred to raise what they considered broader, often more speculative questions about Homer and early Greek culture. What ­were the sources of Homer’s learning and of his poetic inspiration? What was his place in his own society and in relation to his original audience? How did his power­f ul epics come to be preserved and passed on? And what connections might be ­imagined between the values shadowed forth in Homer’s world and more modern values? Answers to such questions would surely help readers to understand and admire Homer’s unique accomplishments.

1 Foremost among Homer’s admirers, not surprisingly, w ­ ere his En­glish translators, who ­were happy to reaffirm a tradition of praise that extended back to classical times. George Chapman hailed Homer as “Prince of Poets” on the title page of his translation of the Iliad (1611), and subsequent translators—­John Ogilby (1660), Thomas Hobbes (1675), and Pope—­generally concurred. Pope in par­tic­u­lar, anxious to invest Homer with both poetic and moral authority, recommended the epics as exemplary: “Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring, / And trace the Muses upward to their Spring,” as he wrote in An Essay on Criticism.3 Thomas Parnell, one of Pope’s collaborators, added another dimension of praise by drawing attention to the scope of Homer’s evident knowledge: he was “the ­Father of Learning, a Soul capable of ranging over the w ­ hole Creation with an Intellectual view, shining alone in an Age of Obscurity.”4 To the extent that Homer seemed a unique bright light in a dark time, his preeminence in poetry was unassailable. Looked at more closely, however, many of Pope’s and Parnell’s comments reveal significant reservations about the exemplary status of Homer’s i­magined worlds. His gods and goddesses, for instance, could be impulsive, often arbitrary or unprincipled or vulgar, so they seemed undependable as ethical models or guarantors of a reasonable cosmic justice. Similarly Pope celebrated the drama and variety of Homer’s b ­ attles, but he also took sharp exception to the vio­lence of epic culture:

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“a Spirit of Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the Practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign’d thro’ the World.”5 In fact, it seems that Pope and Parnell had difficulty balancing idealistic and realistic views of the epic world. They w ­ ere well aware that early Greek civilization was less developed than their own but, like many eighteenth-­century interpreters, they tended to overpraise ancient “simplicity” in order to admire and envy it and then to incorporate it into a generalized nostalgia for the classical world. So, for example, Pope delighted in imagining the older world of Greeks and Trojans, at least in one aspect, as a place uncorrupted by modern habits and social distinctions: “­There is a Plea­sure in taking a view of that Simplicity in Opposition to the Luxury of succeeding Ages; in beholding Monarchs without the Guards, Princes tending to their Flocks, and Princesses drawing ­Water from Springs” (Poems, 7:14). Anyone enjoying such softened views could only experience recurrent episodes of epic vio­lence as shocking.

2 The baseline for a more realistic and unified approach to Homer and the Greek world is, oddly enough, an offhand remark by Richard Bentley. The foremost classical scholar of his day, he promised to write a book on Homer, and, had he done so, the course of eighteenth-­century Homeric studies might have been very dif­fer­ ent. Unfortunately he never completed the work. Still, some of his views are apparent in a brief critical aside he published in 1713. Responding to an enthusiast who over-­praised the extent of Homer’s learning, Bentley insisted that the Iliad did not display “a universal knowledge of t­ hings”; rather, it showed Homer an excellent generalist, “the ablest Jack of all Trades that ever was in nature.” He continued: “Take my word for it, poor Homer in ­t hose Circumstances and early times had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at Festivals and other days of ­ ese Merriment; the Ilias he made for the Men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. Th loose Songs w ­ ere not collected together in the form of an Epic Poem, til Pisistratus’s time about 500 years a­ fter.”6 Bentley’s brief remarks anticipate some impor­ tant conclusions of l­ater interpreters and should have been more influential than they ­were. His “Jack of all Trades” characterization suggested that the scope of the poet’s learning was largely an illusion: Homer knew a ­little about many subjects—­ trades, military affairs, faraway places—­and beyond that he, like Shakespeare, possessed the art of suggesting he knew much more. Then in a few sentences Bentley drew attention to the folk origins of some Homeric materials, to the relative informality of what­ever early forms such stories might have taken, and to the fact that what appeared finished epics had most prob­ably evolved orally and in separate segments over centuries. Since it took much of the eigh­teenth ­century for British critics to arrive at similar views, it is reasonable to ask why Bentley’s suppositions of 1713 did not take hold sooner. One answer is his own offhandedness: he did not explain his conclu-

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sions or supply evidence to support them. Moreover, his tone was dismissive—­ “small earnings and good cheer”—as if the vitality of folk culture and its ability to sustain popu­lar traditions over time had no special resonance for him. He seems also to have overlooked or considered unimportant the intriguing epic linkage between elite heroic values and popu­lar culture or the possibility that audience expectations might have ­shaped Homer’s tales as much as the poet did. Fi­nally, most readers and critics, though not Bentley himself, continued to be invested in what they took ­later epic tradition to imply, namely, individual authorship and written, not oral, composition—­t he conviction that ­great poems reflect the abilities and intentions of g­ reat poets, not an anonymous confluence of cultural energies more widely dispersed.7

3 Bentley’s failure to produce a book-­length elaboration of his views left the way open for o ­ thers. Two impor­tant successors came forward: first Thomas Blackwell, and then, a generation l­ater, Robert Wood. Blackwell served as professor of classical history and Greek at Marischal College in Aberdeen; his influential Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer appeared anonymously in 1735. Wood’s story is more complicated. He was known in his lifetime primarily as a traveler in the East and a pioneer in archaeological exploration. He visited the Troad as early as 1742 and undertook a fourteen-­month expedition collecting antiquities in Greece, Turkey, and the eastern Mediterranean in 1750–1751. Following this second expedition, he produced two carefully illustrated accounts of his field researches—­The Ruins of Palmyra, Other­wise Tedmor, in the Desart (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec, Other­ wise Heliopolis in Caelosyria (1757)—­which established his reputation as an archaeologist not only in Britain but across Eu­rope. It was only ­toward the end of Wood’s life that the public learned he had a second string to his bow, a serious and informed interest in epic poetry: his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, which he described self-­deprecatingly as a “­little farrago of Classical Conjectures,” appeared in 1769.8 In spite of the three de­cades that separated their studies, Blackwell and Wood shared many of the same goals. Both wished to assert the historicity of Homer himself and the events at Troy: they argued that the poet lived at an auspicious moment in relation to ­those events, when eyewitnesses might still have been available, even as the starkness and vio­lence of warrior culture had softened over time, tending (in Blackwell’s words) to “ripen into Fable, or at least be susceptible to it, from a skilful hand.”9 Both men also aimed to rescue Homer’s poetry, which they saw as naturalistic, based upon a real history and locality, from a tradition of overly ingenious interpreters stretching back to Heraclitus who found abstract ideals and allegorical meanings in the epics. Naturally enough, both ­were intrigued with Homer’s poetic creativity and, even as they admitted that t­ here was l­ ittle or no definitive information about Homer as an individual, they speculated freely about his personal character, the sources of his special abilities, his social place in his

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own culture, and his relationship with his original audiences. It is this conjectural dimension that gives their critical works special interest. Fi­nally, from time to time Blackwell and Wood allowed themselves to use commentary on Homer and his world as a vehicle to reflect critically upon their con­temporary culture. Now, however, it is time to address what made each critic’s thought distinctive. Blackwell could not know more about Homer than did other interpreters, but he worked harder to imagine the poet’s circumstances and to divine a personal sensibility for this most impersonal of poets. He began as Bentley had, with the supposition that Homer had been an ordinary citizen of the ancient world, “a stroling indigent Bard,” who lived closely with the p ­ eople for whom he composed verses (Enquiry, 103). The special qualities of his poetry arose from his insight into their inherited culture and the ­simple social world they inhabited, his acute powers of natu­ral observation, and his truthfulness: “He took his plain natu­ral Images from Life: he saw Warriors, and Shepherds, and Peasants, such as he drew; and was daily conversant among such P ­ eople as he intended to represent: The Manners used in the Trojan Times ­were not disused in his own: The same ways of living in private, and the same Pursuits in publick ­were still prevalent, and gave him a Model for his Design” (Enquiry, 34). At least initially, this figure seems more a chronicler of the times than the keeper of a heroic tradition. The keys to Blackwell’s transformation of this folk poet are his use of the term “bard” and the considerable rhetorical flexibility and indefiniteness he injected into that term. “Bard” allowed him to write about Homer sometimes as an individual singer and at other times to move t­ oward a more generic idea of the poet—­a lmost a cultural function rather than a specific individual—as if such a gifted creature might have existed across a range of premodern cultures. Of course Blackwell used such latitude to smooth the rough places in his arguments and to ­favor his own conclusions, but the conclusions themselves turn out to be most in­ter­est­ing. The bard as Blackwell constructed him stood forth as much more than a popu­ lar entertainer. First, he was part of a tradition of singers and bore the dignity of tradition to define and support him.10 Of course, he knew the history and culture he shared with his audience, but he also bent his efforts to discern how historical or mythological part fit with part to form deeper designs, ­causes, and consequences not apparent to o ­ thers. And then he set forth t­ hese designs in the doubly privileged media of m ­ usic and poetry.11 In short, such a bard—­Homer or another—­ became a singer capable of marshalling and harmonizing ele­ments of nature and received culture as instruments of his own social presence and power. He thus emerged as both an historian and a seer. Warming to his subject, Blackwell summarized the reach of the bard’s authority: A Man who has it in his Power to charm our Ears, entertain our Fancies, and instruct us in the History of our Ancestors; who informs his wond’ring Audience of the secret Composition, and hidden Harmony of the Universe, of the Order of the Seasons, and Observation of Days, such a Man cannot miss of

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Esteem and Attention: But if he adds a Sanction to his Doctrine and Art; if he pretends “That he is u ­ nder the Direction of the Gods; that he describes their Natures, announces their Names, and Decrees; that he does this by their immediate ­Orders, and then leads the way himself in the new Devotion”; he must needs become the Object of their Admiration and Reverence. (Enquiry, 105)12

The bard’s voice was self-­authorized and individual, but also sustained and given substance by the cultural resources he absorbed; he and the traditions realized through his singing empowered one another. Moreover, his powers extended into the f­ uture, as he was able to proj­ect cultural identity and inspire collective purpose. It is necessary to set aside the inconsistencies of Blackwell’s rhe­toric in order to draw attention to the next unusual turn in his argument. Having earned social power and popu­lar re­spect, the bard of course had ready access to kings and courts and was a welcome presence wherever he went. Why, then, would he not s­ ettle down to enjoy prosperity and the dignity of his office? Why would he continue his commitment to indigence and itinerancy? Blackwell argued that, although the bard came to prominence as a community resource, he himself was perhaps unwilling to take on the constraints of a full social involvement. He rather chose the personal in­de­pen­dence that went with moving on, “so ­f ree from Care, Business, or Want.” The high seriousness of epic themes, Blackwell supposed, did not prevent the bard from aspiring to be a f­ ree spirit: “It is exactly the easy, in­de­pen­dent State, that is unawed by Laws, and the Regards that molest us in Communities; that knows no Duties or Obligations but ­t hose of Hospitality and Humanity; that subjects the mind to no Tincture of Discipline, but lays it open to all the natu­ral Sensations, with which the vari­ous Parts of the Universe affect a sagacious, perceptive, mimicking Creature.” The fully realized bard was thus “truly a Citizen of the Universe” (Enquiry, 113–115). Clearly Blackwell had strayed far from thinking of Homer in par­ tic­u­lar and wished to imagine bardship in general; in fact, he was using his musings on bardic creativity to feel his way t­ oward a new theory of poetic sensibility. In his hands the epic bard was becoming a man of feeling. This new unencumbered style of life offered not only breadth of observation, but deeper thoughts as well. Blackwell returned to the supposition that Greek bards had been poets or singers “stroling” among ancient city-­states. It was highly likely, he maintained, that strolling itself, leisurely, nondirected walking, made a significant contribution to their poetical character: Their very stroling . . . ​wou’d enrich their Fancies. Solitude is a Friend to Thought. . . . ​When alone, we are obliged to furnish out our own Entertainment; We must recollect ourselves, and look within, if t­ here be any t­ hing ­there that merits our Attention. . . . ​The Man who lives plain, and at times steps aside from the Din of Life, enjoys a more genuine Plea­sure: He obtains ravishing Views of ­silent Nature, and undisturbed contemplates her solitary Scenes. He often turns his Attention upon himself, canvasses his own Passions, and ascertains his Sentiments of Humanity. (Enquiry, 120–121)

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Solitude and silence, closeness to nature, an inward turning, sentiments of humanity—­and a passage that starts with bards soon turns to “us”: we must turn away from the “Din” of a world that is too much with us in order to “recollect ourselves.” It is perhaps to stretch a point to suggest that Blackwell’s musings of 1735 anticipate a full-­blown Romanticism, but it is not a stretch to notice that his thoughts on bardic sensibility are much closer to Tintern Abbey than they are to the walls of Troy. While a strolling bard’s inspiration may have been grounded in private reverie, the ­actual per­for­mance of his office remained public. In fact, Blackwell argued, the modern habit of reading Homer privately in a book compromised the complex experience of sharing an epic. A bard’s poetry was meant to be recited or sung in com­pany, and the dynamics of public per­for­mance had significant stylistic and substantive implications.13 ­Because the bard worked ­under the “happy Necessity” of keeping his audience in mind, he was obliged to compose in a ­simple, direct style: “He might indeed tell wonderful Stories of strange Per­for­mances and Places strange: but they must be plainly told, and with a constant eye to natu­ral Manners and ­human Passions.” Over time, Blackwell supposed, a bard might attain a professional fluency and ease with epic expression and thereby find himself able to rise to “extemporary Strains” as a sign of his mastery of the craft (Enquiry, 116, 119). ­There was more to the bard’s art, however, than an assured craftsmanship. Blackwell wanted to convey heroic poetry’s vitality, and he deployed an energetic dramatic language to imagine the bard—­again, a generic figure—­engaged in ­actual per­for­mance: “While he was personating a Hero; while his Fancy was warming, and his words flowing; when he had fully entered into the Mea­sure, and struck with the Rythmus, and seized with the Sound; like a Torrent, he wou’d fill up the Hollows of the Work; the boldest Meta­phors and glowing Figures wou’d come rushing upon him, and cast a Fire and Grace into the Composition, which no Criticism can ever supply” (Enquiry, 117). At his best, the bard could snatch a grace beyond the reach of—­criticism. Blackwell’s enthusiasm for bardic ideas of poetry tended to overshadow his more sober and scholarly inquiry into the sources of Homer’s learning. He had relatively l­ittle to say about par­tic­u ­lar Homeric texts, for in the end he was praising and recommending an encompassing experience of the heroic world. The success of the bard’s efforts pointed the way ­toward a more participatory and empathetic idea of poetic art.

4 When Robert Wood addressed Homer a generation l­ ater, he brought a background and interests markedly dif­fer­ent from Blackwell’s. Like his pre­de­ces­sor Wood was well trained as a classicist, but what set him apart w ­ ere his extensive travels in Greece, the Troad, and the eastern Mediterranean, areas seldom visited by Eu­ro­ pe­ans.14 He had a romantic streak, as he aspired to visit all the places mentioned in Homer’s epics: “The Iliad has new beauties on the banks of the Scamander, and the Odyssey is most pleasing in the countries where Ulysses travelled and Homer

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sung.”15 More practically, however, he hoped to confirm through personal observation the topographical accuracy of the epics, which in his mind would also tend to confirm the historicity of Homer’s account of Troy.16 His firsthand experience of Eastern cultures gave him a perspective very dif­fer­ent from Blackwell’s, writing from Aberdeen. Consider the ­matter of bardic per­for­mance. Blackwell was able to infuse an i­ magined per­for­mance with considerable energy, but he had not seen one. Wood, on the other hand, had witnessed what he considered the modern counterpart of classical bards, “Eastern poets . . . ​recit[ing] in the open air, pointing out each object of description in an imaginary scenery of their own extempore creation, availing themselves . . . ​of ­every real appearance of nature within view of their Audience” to confirm the truth of their poetry.17 Landscapes had more to contribute than dramatic immediacy, however. Wood used his interest in topography to argue repeatedly that natu­ral landscapes tend inevitably to shape the ­human activities set in them, and, since landscapes and seascapes change l­ ittle over time, so too, h ­ uman customs and manners may persist from one era to another. In other words, his interest in topography allowed him to read landscape speculatively as an index of h ­ uman continuity. It seemed right to him, then, that t­ here should be a link between his own experiences in the East and t­ hose recorded in classical and biblical lit­er­a­ture: “We found the manners of the Iliad still preserved in some parts of the East, nay retaining, in a remarkable degree, that genuine cast of natu­ral simplicity, which we admire in [Homer’s] works and the sacred books” (Original Genius, xxxix). It was easy to suppose that such continuities might work both ways: if ancient manners lasted into modern times, might it not be pos­si­ble to infer personal attitudes and social mores in Homer’s world by examining the ways of traditional ­peoples living in modern times? ­Here, too, Wood’s own travels served him well. He had lived among Arabic ­peoples and was able to argue with conviction that many traits of modern Bedouins—­intense pride, tribal bonds, cultural isolation, patriarchy, and a lively oral culture—­made them seem quite comparable with classical Greeks. They too preserved their histories and celebrated their exploits in extemporaneous heroic verses: “The modern Arab, in whom I have seen the characters of Prince, Shepherd, and Poet united, retains, in his compositions of this kind, the wildness, irregularity, and indelicacy of his forefathers, with a considerable share of the same original glowing imagination, which we could discover, even in their extempore productions, and u ­ nder the disadvantage of crude and hasty translation” (Original Genius, xlv).18 Just such speculative connections ­were opening the way t­ oward a more ethnographic understanding of the epic as a genre. More on this hereafter. Wood’s knowledge of the workings of folk culture, ­whether Arabic or En­glish, also allowed him to offer a more nuanced account than Blackwell had of a Homeric bard’s relationship both with his audience and with traditional Greek culture. Recall Blackwell’s formulation: the epic bard mastered the subtleties of nature and prevailing culture and then wove them seamlessly together in order to establish and wield his special authority. Wood reconceived this figure less as a presiding

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presence and more as a mediator between established popu­lar beliefs and his own creative aims. For an example, Wood raised the question of why Homer included the misbehaviors of gods and goddesses in his epic: W ­ ere such superstitious tales ­really his beliefs? Not at all, Wood assured his readers: I should rather suppose that the liberties of poetical embellishment, which he may have taken with the popu­lar creed of his time, w ­ ere strongly engrafted upon vulgar traditional superstitions which had already laid strong hold of the passions and prejudices of his countrymen; an advantage which so perfect a judge of h ­ uman nature would be very cautious of forfeiting: for when the religion of poetry and that of the p ­ eople w ­ ere the same, any attempt of sudden innovation in the established system would have been a hazardous experiment, which neither a good Citizen nor a good Poet would care to undertake. (Original Genius, xxxv)

He pointed out in conclusion that Shakespeare had made many similar compromises with the popu­lar beliefs of his time. Wood’s most impor­tant critical contribution grew out of his willingness to entertain a radical speculative question: “­W hether or no the use of Writing was known to Homer?” He argued that the Iliad and Odyssey in themselves provide strong evidence that it was not: “It must appear very remarkable, that, in so comprehensive a picture of Civil Society as that which he has left us, t­ here is nothing that conveys an idea of Writing. . . . ​All composition was addressed to an Audience; nor is t­ here any allusion to Written Laws, Treaties, Contracts of any kind; no Written Rec­ords, no Monumental Inscriptions; in short, no Letters, or Alphabet” (Original Genius, lx).19 If Homer lived in a preliterate society and was unlettered himself, he could not have written the epics that bore his name. This unsettling conclusion led Wood to reconsider in a fundamental way the composition and transmission of the poems. How did poetry develop in a preliterate society? Wood’s answer differed significantly from the one offered by Bentley years ­earlier. Bentley had supposed that Homer’s epics became written texts only ­after an extended period of evolution and consolidation among many singers. Such a supposition set aside the idea of individual authorship, something Wood refused to concede. He maintained instead that the Iliad and Odyssey preserved Homer’s original intentions and that they owed their survival intact to “the fidelity of oral tradition” and the capacious memories of the best singers (Original Genius, lxi). Homer’s style of expression was direct and affecting, the Greek language of his time was flexible and down to earth, and both verse and ­music made the substance of poetry more easily memorable: “All was affected by memory; and the histories of ancient times w ­ ere commemorated in verses, which ­people took care faithfully to transmit to ­t hose, who came ­after them.”20 A shared orality sustained tradition, even as it contributed to civic coherence by bringing cultural energies and social authority into sharp focus: “Indeed all instruction, civil and religious was wrapt up in Melody and Verse, and the Priest, who was a Lawgiver, was also a Poet and Musician. This is agreeable to that rude state of society . . . ​when civilization was

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addressed more to the passions than the understanding, and men w ­ ere to be first tamed, in order to their being taught” (Genius and Writings, 269). Wood closed this speculative vision of classical unity by wondering ­whether ­t hose who lived in such an oral culture perhaps possessed retentive capabilities ­later lost—­“nor can we, in this age of Dictionaries, and other technical aids to memory, judge, what her use and powers w ­ ere, at a time, when all a man could know, was all he could remember” (Genius and Writings, 26). Wood’s thinking ­here seems divided or even self-­contradictory. His idealized notions of personal memory and cultural unity are at best theoretical, seemingly another version of critical nostalgia yearning for a simpler and more coherent antique world. Moreover, such nostalgia is at odds with his own apologies for the rough-­and-­tumble qualities of Homer’s world: “Such w ­ ere the times, that fell to Homer’s lot. To blame him for the manners of t­ hose times, and to find fault with the only materials he had to work upon, is highly unreasonable” (Original Genius, lxix). Indeed, neither nostalgia nor such apologies turned out to be critically useful: both attitudes, set apart from time and circumstance, w ­ ere essentially static, disengaged from any ideas of Greek historical and cultural development. Two of Wood’s critical thoughts, however, left room for useful expansion in new directions. His recognition that Homer must have been unlettered and his epics the products of oral composition and transmission created an impor­tant opening for his critical successor, Friedrich August Wolf. A ­ fter praising the “brilliant audacity” of Wood’s insight, Wolf went on to doubt his faith in the capacious memories of classical singers: it was extremely improbable that multiple singers over time could convey complex epics uniformly and intact, so the way forward for Homeric studies lay in rigorous comparison of available texts and thoughtful attention to textual variants.21 Beyond that, Wood’s audacious suggestion did not bear further significant fruit ­u ntil well into the twentieth ­century when Milman Parry and Albert Lord, using ethnographic comparisons akin to Wood’s, studied Serbo-­ Croatian oral poetry to recover the formulaic and metrical conventions that supported the composition and transmission of heroic poetry.22 Wood’s other major contribution was an augmented critical practice more than a new idea, and it was not Wood’s alone. It had long been customary, of course, for critics to compare Homeric verses with ­t hose of ­later poets, but such comparisons w ­ ere ordinarily literary or strategic: How did Virgil, for example, use epic similes or formal cata­logs as compared with Homer? Now, however, the critical attempt to imagine the social circumstances of the epics’ original creation, to understand Homer’s methods of composition and more about Greek customs in general, considerably broadened the range of potential comparisons and turned them in more ethnographic directions. Did the mores and traditions evident in Homer’s poetry have potential analogs in other cultures, ancient or modern, and might such analogs have explanatory value? ­Earlier Blackwell had recognized the troubadours of Provence as partial analogs to Homeric bards and supposed that ancient Greek oratory shared characteristics with modern ways of speaking in the East—­“Turks, Arabs, Indians” (Enquiry,

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112, 43–44). Wood’s broad reading and extensive travels gave him more diverse sources of comparison, which he now put to use in seeking to explain antique ways. Without apology he invoked Irish bards, Aztec histories, Italian singers, poetic Bedouins, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and even James Macpherson’s Ossian poems—­ all as potential keys to understanding facets of ancient culture reflected in Homer’s works.23 Even if such glimpses of similarity w ­ ere imperfect and merely speculative, in the aggregate they still served to bring Homer’s distant worlds closer, to include ancient Greek ways in an ongoing cross-­cultural conversation about ­human possibilities. To be sure, Wood had no mono­poly on that conversation; it was, in fact, g­ oing on all around him. As many contemporaries noted, the world beyond Eu­rope and the cultural past ­were richer and more intriguing resources than they had seemed ­earlier. “The ages, we call barbarous, pre­sent us with many a subject of curious speculation,” wrote the critic Richard Hurd in 1762. “Nothing in ­human nature . . . ​ is without its reasons. The modes and fashions of dif­fer­ent times may appear, at first sight, fantastic and unaccountable. But they, who look nearly into them, discover some latent cause of their production.”24 In Britain the revival of interest in Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk ways a­ fter 1740 ran parallel to a similar rise in interest in classical lore and antiquities, encouraged by the Society of Dilettanti; both broadened the bases of speculative comparisons. In the same years readers across Eu­rope feasted on details of the ongoing excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, new accounts of travels and archeological explorations in Greece, Turkey, and the Levant, a proliferation of reports on the lives of vari­ous Native American p ­ eoples, and, of course, Captain James Cook’s intriguing accounts of indigenous life in the far Pacific.25 The range of ­human possibilities was becoming better documented and more vari­ous, and a lively speculative comparison of both similarities and differences was laying the basis for what would eventually be formalized as cultural anthropology. Wood was g­ oing with the current of his times, then, when he chose to pre­sent Homer in a comparative social perspective rather than a narrower literary one.

notes Epigraph: From Stewart’s commentary on Adam Smith’s “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages” (1761), quoted in Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of In­equality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 93–94. 1.  For a clear account of this development, see John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999), 50–58. 2.  The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–1969), 7:lxxi. 3. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 126–127, in Poems, 1:253. 4. Pope, Poems, 7:80. For a clear account of the intellectual contentions concerning Homer in Pope’s time see Joseph M. Levine, The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 75–107. 5. Pope, Poems, 7:14; compare “An Essay on Homer’s Battels,” 7:252–262. Pope amplified, perhaps unintentionally, the dissonance of Homer’s ­battle scenes by, on the one hand, con-

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veying the carnage faithfully while, on the other, playing up the pathos of the vari­ous deaths—­ anxious relatives, empty hearths, promise cut off, and the like. Pope’s ambivalence ­toward battlefield heroism perhaps reflected the views of his admired pre­de­ces­sor in En­glish classical translation, John Dryden; see James  A. Winn, “ ‘Thy Wars Brought Nothing About’: Dryden’s Critique of Military Heroism,” Seventeenth ­Century 21, no.  2 (Autumn 2006): 364–382. 6.  Richard Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-­Thinking (London, 1713), 18. For broader appreciation of Bentley’s contributions to classical scholarship, see Kristine L. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011); C. O. Brink, En­glish Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1986), 21–83; and John  L. Myres, Homer and His Critics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 49–53. 7.  For a persuasive perspective on the eigh­teenth ­century’s gradual “rediscovery” of oral resources, see Nicholas Hudson, “Oral Tradition: The Evolution of an Eighteenth-­Century Concept,” in Tradition in Transition: ­Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-­ Century Canon, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 8.  Quoted in T. J. B. Spencer, “Robert Wood and the Prob­lem of Troy in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957): 78. 9.  Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 315. For a clear analy­sis of Blackwell’s attempts to balance primitive passions with social order, see Duane Coltharp, “History and the Primitive: Homer, Blackwell, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 19 (1995): 57–69. 10.  Kirsti Simonsuuri argues that he ­adopted the my­t hol­ogy of Orpheus to provide a poetic genealogy for Homer in her “Blackwell and the Myth of Orpheus,” in Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, ed. Jennifer J. Car­ter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1987). 11. In Homer’s Traditional Art, 1–34, Foley argues persuasively that Homeric singers came eventually to possess an entire stylistic “register,” a special epic idiom and system of signification which cued an informed audience how to hear and receive heroic utterance. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs point out that such a system of epic signification also makes it easier to improvise verses (Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of In­equality [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003], 95–96). 12.  The embedded quotation comes from a description of Pan’s altar in Sannazaro’s Arcadia. 13.  For thoughtful elaboration of this theme, see Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 113–141. 14.  For Wood’s itineraries, see C. A. Hutton, “The Travels of ‘Palmyra’ Wood in 1750–51,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies 47, no. 1 (1927): 102–128. The Society of Dilettanti consulted Wood as an expert on Near Eastern travels; see Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 120–143, and Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2008), 49–53. For con­temporary admiration of Wood’s travels, see Claire Pace, “Gavin Hamilton’s Wood and Dawkins Discovering Palmyra: The Dilettante as Hero,” Art History 4, no. 3 (September 1981): 271–290. 15.  Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra (London, 1753), “The Publisher to the Reader,” n.p. David Constantine notes that many early travelers to Greece saw the landscape through the lens of already familiar classical lit­er­a­ture; see “The Question of Authenticity in Some Early Accounts of Greece,” in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the En­glish Imagination, ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 10–12. 16.  For an account of Wood’s difficulties with this approach, see John Butterworth, “Robert Wood and Troy: A Comparative Failure,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 32 (1985): 147–154. 17.  Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London, 1769), xi. 18. In The Ruins of Palmyra Wood similarly described Arabs taking their ease at day’s end: “When the business of the day was over, coffee and a pipe of tobacco made their highest luxury, and while they indulged in this, sitting in a circle, one of the com­pany entertained the

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rest with a song or story, the subject love, or war, and the composition sometimes extemporary” (35). 19.  One pos­si­ble exception to the assumption of pre-­literacy occurs at Iliad 6.168, when Bellerophon carries a message to the king of Lycia. Wood urged that the communication was prob­ably a pictogram and cited a message to Aztec emperor Montezuma as an analog. For critical discussion of this crux see Foley, Traditional Art, 1–5. 20.  Sometime between the publication of Original Genius in 1769 and his death in 1771, Wood significantly amplified his praise of the retentive powers of memory. Original Genius was reprinted in 1775 with the amplification and with a new title, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (London, 1775); commentators have speculated that the addition “and Writings” to the title was an editor’s way of distancing himself from Wood’s most controversial idea. Quotations on memory are from the amplified edition: Genius and Writings, 253. 21.  Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer (1795), trans. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1985), 71. For a balanced estimate of Wolf’s contributions to Homeric studies, see Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 101–129. 22.  For a good account of their contributions, see Adam Parry’s introduction to Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); John Miles Foley, “Oral Tradition and its Implications,” in A New Companion to Homer, ed. Ian Morris and Barry Powell (Leiden: Brill, 1997); John Miles Foley, “ ‘Reading’ Homer through Oral Tradition,” College Lit­er­a­ture 34, no. 2 (2007): 1–28; and Johannes Haubold, “Homer ­a fter Parry: Tradition, Reception, and the Timeless Text,” in Homer in the Twentieth ­Century: Between World Lit­er­ a­ture and the Western Canon, ed. Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 27–46. 23.  For extended discussion of the pairing of Homer and Ossian, see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-­Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 108–132. 24.  From Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, in The Works of Richard Hurd, D.D., 8 vols. (London, 1811), 4:237–238. 25.  See Christopher Charles Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), particularly 153–198, and G. W. Bowersock, “The Rediscovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” in From Gibbon to Austen: Essays on the Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 66–76. Travelers’ accounts of the Near East include Richard Pococke, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (London, 1743–1745); Wood’s own books on Palmyra (1753) and Balbec (1757); Richard Chandler, Nicholas Revett, and William Pars, Ionian Antiquities (London, 1769); and Richard Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor, 1764–65 (London, 1775). On Native Americans, see Troy Bickham, “American Indians in the British Imperial Imagination, 1707–1855,” in British North Amer­i­ca in the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries, ed. Stephen Foster (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 227–254; Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Lit­er­a­ture, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 41–98; and P. J. Marshall and Glyndour Williams, The G ­ reat Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 187–226. On Cook’s explorations, see Brian W. Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2005), 78–135.

B

Organ­izing a Life and the “Lives” samuel johnson and the yale edition of johnson’s lives of the poets David Venturo Samuel Johnson. The Lives of the Poets. Ed. John Middendorf. Vols. 21–23 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Gen. ed. Robert DeMaria Jr. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010. Pp. lvii + 1–508, xv + 509–1023, xvi + 1025–1583.

From the Dictionary of the En­glish Language to the Plays of William Shakespeare to the Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson spent most of his professional life engaged in massive proj­ects that, although they took much longer to finish than anticipated, proved extraordinary accomplishments. The publication in 2010 of John Middendorf ’s three-­volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets likewise marks an extraordinary long-­term achievement. Its publication signaled that, ­after almost sixty years in the making, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (the “Yale Johnson”) was nearing completion. The pro­gress of Middendorf’s Lives of the Poets over fifty-­five years encapsulates the evolution of the Yale Johnson, and its publication marks a high point of con­temporary scholarly accomplishment. Indeed, it occupies a special place in modern eighteenth-­century scholarship. Given declining support—­public and private—­for university presses and humanities scholarship in the United States, we may never see its like again.

1 Question: How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. Samuel Johnson would have approved of the wisdom that informs this old joke. He followed it from the beginning to the end of his professional ­career. Indeed, Johnson’s ­career as a writer is punctuated—­perhaps defined—by a series of ambitious, long-­term proj­ects, the success of which depended on Johnson’s talent for breaking them 175

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down into smaller, more chewable portions. We can, moreover, witness Johnson’s reputation rise as we trace t­ hese enterprises, culminating in The Lives of the Poets. They began in the early 1740s with the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliput (1741–1744), reconstructed from notes smuggled out of Parliament (publishing ­actual transcripts of parliamentary debates was illegal) and written for the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Harleian sale cata­logue for the second Earl of Oxford’s library (1742–1745), compiled by Johnson and William Oldys for Thomas Osborne, who had purchased the recently deceased earl’s g­ reat book collection for the extraordinary sum of £13,000. ­After an abortive attempt at an edition of Shakespeare (1745), Johnson started work on the Dictionary of the En­glish Language, the book that made his reputation. In June 1746, he contracted with a group of London booksellers to compile a dictionary of the En­glish language in exchange for 1,500 guineas (£1,575). Working on his own, assisted only by half a dozen amanuenses, Johnson finished the Dictionary in just ­under nine years, on 15 April 1755, though he had hoped to complete it in three. The g­ reat de­cade of moral essay writing began halfway through the lexicographical proj­ect, with Johnson composing the Rambler twice weekly from 1750 to 1752; the Idler once a week from 1758 to 1760; and, in between, from 1753 to 1754, contributing twenty-­nine essays to John Hawkesworth’s twice-­weekly Adventurer. In June 1756, Johnson returned to Shakespeare, with his Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, Corrected and Illustrated. Jacob Tonson, who had stymied Johnson by threatening to sue him for copyright violation in 1745, now agreed to publish his Shakespeare. Working by subscription—­one guinea up front, the second to be paid by subscribers when the edition was printed—­Johnson expected to finish his Shakespeare by December 1757. But he rapidly fell ­behind and his eight-­volume edition, which endeavored to establish a sound text for each play and to provide interpretive and historical glosses and an incisive end comment for each, was not published u ­ ntil 10 October 1765. Johnson’s circumstances improved in 1762, when he was pensioned by George III, thanks largely to the good offices of the Earl of Bute and Thomas Sheridan. No longer compelled to write for a living, Johnson did not immediately offer the public a third major proj­ect to follow the Dictionary and Shakespeare. Instead he bided his time, revising the Dictionary and Shakespeare in 1773, and touring Scotland with Boswell the same year, which inspired A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), but undertaking no new major works. Approached by a group of London booksellers in 1777, Johnson agreed to write “­little lives” and “­little prefaces” for a new edition of En­glish poets from Chaucer to the pre­sent.1 This proj­ect grew into the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the En­glish Poets, l­ater renamed the Lives of the Poets, the final, and crowning, achievement of Johnson’s c­ areer, which occupied him for six years, through the third edition, printed in 1782, though not published u ­ ntil 1783. The earliest proj­ects—­the Parliamentary Debates and the Harleian Catalogue—­ reflect Johnson’s Grub Street roots. Such proj­ects almost certainly provided reli-

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able income at a time when money was very scarce for the young, unknown writer and his wife. The Dictionary gave Johnson new standing (although money remained a serious prob­lem): it earned him a reputation as a scholar as well as an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford and made him a London celebrity: “Dictionary Johnson.” Shortly a­ fter the Dictionary appeared, Joshua Reynolds painted his first, albeit unfinished, portrait of his friend. Though not as popu­lar as the Tatler or the Spectator, the moral essays of the 1750s added to Johnson’s luster. Written to deadline once or twice a week, they also brought in badly needed money and prob­ ably salved Johnson’s conscience: when he was not forging ahead with the Dictionary or the edition of Shakespeare, he was nevertheless writing, and writing regularly. We now know that all t­ hese proj­ects, besides their remunerative value and their role in establishing Johnson’s literary reputation, also almost certainly helped him manage his psychological fears and obsessions. They w ­ ere therapeutic. A generation ago, W. J. Bate in his Pulitzer Prize–­winning biography put Johnson on the Freudian couch. But Freud’s repression, displacement, and unconscious have yielded to modern neuroscience, and we now recognize that with Johnson’s twitches, rocking, and cooing, his touching of lampposts and his care in crossing thresholds with a favored foot, and his acute fears of damnation are indications that Johnson prob­ably suffered from what we would now call Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-­compulsive disorder (OCD) and, more specifically, morality OCD. Johnson himself knew that his anxious and intense ruminations and lacerating scrupulosity w ­ ere excessive and contributed to his fears of madness. Still, he worried u ­ ntil his “late conversion” in February 1784, that, despite what many considered an exemplary life, he would, when he died, as he once blurted to his friend, Dr. William Adams, be “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.”2 Psychologically self-­tormenting when not actively engaged, he must have regularly scrutinized the thousand peccadillos that he convinced himself ­were signs and symptoms of his own damnation. Johnson’s advice in a letter to Boswell about scruples grows from his own experience: “Be not solitary; be not idle. . . . ​If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle” (Life of Johnson, 3:415). Thus, large proj­ects that could be broken into smaller ones must have been comforting. They ­were guaranteed to fill Johnson’s mind and occupy his attention for long stretches of time, helping him to resist the terrifying pull of his greatest fears. When Percival Stockdale told Johnson, in 1774, that he had rejected an offer to revise Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia, his Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, Johnson demurred. He insisted that if Stockdale would not accept the offer, he would. When Stockdale “express[ed his] astonishment” that, “in his easy and happy circumstances,” he should “think of preparing a new edition of a voluminous, tedious, and scientifick dictionary,” Johnson countered, “Sir, . . . ​I like that muddling work.” When Johnson learned that another editor had been found, he sought out Stockdale and groaned, “It is gone, sir.”3

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2 The work now called The Lives of the Poets was the last of the g­ reat pachyderms that Johnson broke into many bite-­sized chunks. The man who had made his reputation by compiling the Dictionary of the En­glish Language and cemented it with his edition of Shakespeare had not undertaken a major proj­ect in more than a de­cade when Thomas Davies (who had introduced Boswell to Johnson), William Strahan, and Thomas Cadell approached him on 29 March 1777, proposing that he contribute to an impor­tant new publishing venture. John Bell had begun to print in Edinburgh and market in London a new edition of the Poets of G ­ reat Britain, beginning with Chaucer and ending with Charles Churchill. To assert their copyright claims, a consortium of about forty London booksellers countered, planning a rival edition of the Works of the En­glish Poets. If Samuel Johnson would lend his name and endorse the proj­ect by writing brief prefaces, this would, they hoped, boost the appeal, authority, and sales of their edition. Not especially good at bargaining with booksellers for his ser­v ices, Johnson agreed to write prefaces in exchange for two hundred guineas. Perhaps feeling qualms, the publishers added a third hundred. They l­ater threw in an additional one hundred guineas for the revised 1783 edition. (For comparison, we should recall that Johnson was paid 1,500 guineas for the Dictionary three de­cades ­earlier when he was still relatively obscure.) Johnson initially agreed to write forty-­seven prefaces, increased to fifty-­t wo when he persuaded the Londoners to add poems by Blackmore, Pomfret, Thomson, Watts, and Yalden to the proj­ect. Hester Thrale claims that Johnson objected to Churchill; Goldsmith was excluded ­because of copyright prob­lems. John Bell’s Poets of ­Great Britain and the London consortium’s Works of the En­glish Poets largely, though not completely, overlapped, if one discounted Bell’s inclusion of Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne. Neither proj­ect involved living authors, to avoid diminishing ­t hose poets’ sales. Two interwoven, complementary stories can be told of The Lives of the Poets. One centers on the pro­cess by which Johnson wrote his prefaces (or lives) from 1777 to 1781; the other, on the product: the lives themselves as they emerged from the empirical, trial-­and-­error pro­cess of reading, note-­taking, writing, reflection, consultation with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and ­others with knowledge of the poets, and revision, including the correcting of proofs. Originally, Johnson’s “purpose was only to have allotted to ­every poet an advertisement, like that which we find in the French miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character” (21:1). The essays w ­ ere to have been written in chronological order of each poet’s death and inserted in the appropriate volumes as prefaces preceding each poet’s works. Johnson thus began with Cowley, who died first, and then turned to Denham, the next to die. As he wrote, however, Johnson soon swerved from strict chronology. As with the Dictionary and Shakespeare, he also fell b ­ ehind schedule. Instead of printing the essays as prefaces, then, the booksellers, to hasten their venture, de­cided to publish them separately from the poetical works, collecting the first twenty-­two in four octavo volumes in 1779, and the final thirty in six addi-

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tional octavos in 1781. Still, the consortium never intended to sell the ten volumes of Johnson’s prefaces separately from the fifty-­six volumes of poems and two-­ volume index. To the annoyance of many buyers, t­ hese books w ­ ere always part of a big, expensive set (21:xxvi). As Johnson began his biographical research, he almost certainly found himself at home in the muddling work that he had praised to Percival Stockdale. He always loved biography, as he had explained more than twenty-­five years ­earlier in Rambler 60, and though he generally relied on standard biographical dictionaries such as the Biographia Britannica and the Lives of the Poets of G ­ reat Britain and Ireland, credited to Theo­philus Cibber, but mostly written, as he acknowledged in the “Life of Hammond,” by his old Dictionary scribe, Robert Shiels, Johnson drew from a variety of sources, printed and oral. He was especially fond of biographical facts and anecdotes. He was fascinated by “the minute details of daily life,” provided that they ­were morally instructive and revealed character.4 He was proud that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he could “write trifles with dignity,” as he confessed to an admirer (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4:34n5). For example, anecdotes told to Johnson fifty years e­ arlier by his first mentor, Gilbert Walmesley, in Lichfield, made their way into the “Life of Smith”; two anecdotes that he learned from his ­father, Michael Johnson, one about the popularity of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, and the other about a congregation’s reaction to a Thomas Sprat sermon, appeared in ­those authors’ lives; another anecdote that young Johnson heard from his waggish cousin, the Reverend Cornelius Ford, about how Ford, William Broome, and Elijah Fenton sweet-­talked their way into a per­for­mance of Merry Wives of Windsor, graces the “Life of Fenton.” Moreover, as the first preface on Cowley emphasizes, Johnson was determined from the start of this venture, as he declares in the opening sentence, to write history, not panegyric: The life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of En­glish biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of lit­er­a­ture; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life of Cowley; for he writes with so l­ ittle detail, that scarcely any t­ hing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick. (21:5)

Johnson knows that panegyric runs ­counter to his aims. He seeks biographical truth, which is best illustrated by the ­little details of his subject’s life, its “domestick privacies.”5 When he compares panegyric to a magnifying mist, Johnson prob­ ably recalls Pope’s observation in An Essay on Criticism: “As t­hings seem large which we thro’ Mists descry, / Dulness is ever apt to Magnify.”6 As Johnson also surely remembered, the Goddess of Dulness in The Dunciad: Book the First is known for her indifference to truth. When the “cloud-­compelling Queen” surveys the “cave of Poverty and Poetry” and admires its “Chaos Dark and Deep,” she peers “thro’ fogs, that magnify the scene.”7 Like Dulness, poor Dr.  Sprat is prone to

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exaggerate. Johnson then begins to cut through Sprat’s euphemisms and obfuscations: “Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eigh­teen. His ­father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals u ­ nder the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would prob­ably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan’s parish, gives reason to suspect that his f­ ather was a sectary” (21:5). When the first volume of the Prefaces was published in 1779, Johnson noted in his diary that they w ­ ere “written I hope in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of Piety” (Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, 294). It is unlikely that Johnson had the “promotion of Piety” foremost in mind when he met with Davies, Strahan, and Cadell in 1777. But, in grappling with his biographical sources, and in trying to winnow truth from panegyric or separate it from rumor, tradition, or good storytelling, he elevated biography to a moral enterprise. Johnson loved biography ­because, as he explained to Boswell in the Tour of the Hebrides, we can “turn [it] to use” by learning from it (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 5:79). By contrast, encomium and exaggeration may cause the reader to give up in despair; to abandon attempts at emulation, for who can compete with a paragon? Thus, as Johnson applied his almost lawyerly skepticism to his task, he promoted piety in two ways: by telling the truth about his subjects instead of flattering them and by offering them as exempla whose be­hav­ior o ­ thers could copy or avoid, as the situation warranted. Johnson’s thoughts on biography evolved as he wrote. At first, he sought to separate myth from fact in order to reveal truth. He regretted that details about the lives of some of the e­ arlier poets, such as Cowley, Denham, Butler, Otway, and even Dryden, ­were lost in the dark backward and abysm of time. As Johnson approached ­later poets, however, he faced almost the opposite prob­lem. He reports forthrightly in the “Life of Addison” about his heavy drinking and also recounts the unseemly squabble over the Peerage Bill that shattered Addison and Steele’s long friendship, shortly before Addison died. Still dwelling on Addison, though, Johnson hesitates over what details to reveal about a poet’s life, lest “a pang should be given to a w ­ idow, a ­daughter, a ­brother or a friend.” ­Here, the biographer confesses a complicated moral dilemma: “As the pro­cess of ­t hese narratives is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself ‘walking upon ashes u ­ nder which the fire is not extinguished,’ and coming to the time of which it ­will be proper rather to say ‘nothing that is false, than all that is true’ ” (22:637). Something e­ lse also prob­ably occurred to Johnson as he composed the lives of Cowley, Denham, Waller, Milton, and Butler in 1777 and 1778: he could write not just “­little lives” and “­little prefaces,” but the literary-­critical history of G ­ reat Britain from the En­glish Civil Wars to his own time. Despite Macaulay’s crack that, “of history, he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance,” Johnson soundly grasped the history of the period—­literary and po­liti­cal.8 The many apt allusions to seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century persons and events—­English and European—in The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes alone demonstrate the sure command of Johnson’s historical knowledge. George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham; Archbishop William Laud; Thomas Went­worth, Earl of Strafford; Oxford

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mathematician Thomas Lydiat; the Civil Wars; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon; the Restoration Settlement; Charles XII of Sweden; the B ­ attle of Pultowa; John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; the War of the Spanish Succession; Jonathan Swift; Edward Harley, First Earl of Oxford; Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria; Empress Maria Theresa; the War of the Austrian Succession; Anne Vane; and Catherine Sedley—­Johnson knows t­ hese favorites, clerics, generals, scholars, authors, monarchs, government ministers, and royal mistresses, and the events with which they are linked, and in the Lives of the Poets, he drew on his extensive knowledge of po­liti­cal history to survey the literary history of the nation. At first Johnson’s intentions, as with the biographical sections of the lives, ­were prob­ably quite modest, but then he saw ways of putting his critical skills and literary historical knowledge to use. Instead of short critical notes on individual poets, he could, over the course of the fifty-­two lives, address impor­tant themes, trends, and movements. As a result, in the lives of Denham, Waller, and Dryden, Johnson traces the development of the heroic couplet; in the “Life of Milton,” the challenges of composing blank verse; in “Butler” and “Dryden,” the prob­lems of writing occasional poems; in “Denham,” the invention of “local” or “landschape” poetry; in “Waller,” the pitfalls of amplified rhe­toric in devotional verse addressed to a God who transcends not only description but ­human understanding (21:93). In the “Life of Milton” Johnson attacks “Lycidas” for what he regards as its pastoral puerilities: “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting,” though the poem offends him more for mixing the “trifling fictions” of classical my­t hol­ogy with “the most awful and sacred truths [of Chris­tian­ity], such as o ­ ught never to be polluted with such irreverend combinations” (21:176–177). ­These are all subjects to which he frequently returns in l­ater lives. When history takes him to the aristocratic wits of Charles II’s reign, many of whose poetic reputations survived into the Hanoverian era, Johnson demolishes them. In brief lives, he sweeps aside the lackluster poems of dead noblemen: Dorset, Granville, Roscommon, and Sheffield, no longer protected by class and deference. The “Life of Halifax” exposes the pathology of patronage, flattery, and inflated literary reputations as powerfully as Johnson’s 1755 letter to Lord Chesterfield. In the lives of Fenton and Broome, who w ­ ere paid by Pope to translate half the books of the Odyssey for Pope’s Homer, he considers the intersection of Grub Street and high art. L ­ ater still in his enterprise, as he moves from the early eigh­teenth ­century’s “rage of party” to the era of Walpole and fi­nally to his own historical moment, Johnson questions the value of poetic imitation as a genre, ­whether Pope’s Horatian epistles and satires or Prior’s and West’s Spenserian revivals. For Johnson, both kinds of imitations are lesser poems: pale copies rather than vigorous creations; uncouth mixtures of old and new that only readers who have studied the originals can fully appreciate. Johnson especially admires Milton, Dryden, Addison, and Pope, as the length and sophistication of their four lives suggests. They are the keystones, the anchors—­ along with Cowley, Swift, Butler, and Waller—of the proj­ect. While castigating Milton for being “an acrimonious and surly republican,” he lauds him for the sublime achievement of Paradise Lost: “His work is not the greatest of heroick poems,

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only ­because it is not the first” (21:171, 205). Dryden shines for lifting the En­glish language out of “savageness” by establishing a poetical diction: a “system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestick use, and ­free from the harshness of terms appropriated to par­tic­u ­lar arts.” As Johnson explains: Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From ­t hose sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions or delightful images, and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to t­ hings. ­Those happy combinations of words which distinguish poetry from prose, had been rarely attempted; we had few elegances or flowers of speech, the roses had not yet been plucked from the bramble, or dif­fer­ent colours had not been joined to enliven one another. . . . The new versification, as it was called, may be considered as owing its establishment to Dryden. (21:445)

Addison is not a distinguished poet or playwright; Johnson deems his poetry polished, pure, and correct, but lacking strength: “the product of a mind too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence” (22:673). Johnson has enormous re­spect for him, however, as a critic, essayist, and social and moral arbiter. Addison’s Tatler and Spectator essays served as ­little conduct manuals that refined En­glish manners as Castiglione’s Courtier had done in Re­nais­ sance Italy. Moreover, Addison’s short critical papers, more congenial to common readers than Dryden’s lengthy prefaces, “made Milton an universal favourite, with whom readers of ­every class think it necessary to be pleased” (22:675). In other words, Addison’s essays transformed Milton from a writer’s writer into a popu­lar, national poet: no easy feat. According to Johnson, Pope surpassed even Dryden by writing the greatest translation of the era, his Homer, and by perfecting Dryden’s poetic diction. Indeed, any further refinement, Johnson warns, would be “dangerous.” In his extraordinary comparison of Pope and Dryden, a­ fter ecstatically and vertiginously weighing their merits, his judgment swaying back and forth, Johnson fi­nally decides that, “Of genius,” the “superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden.” Still, he closes the “Life of Pope” by asserting that Homer himself “would assign a very high place to his translator, without requiring any other evidence of genius” (23:1227, 1190, 1228). Johnson’s opinions of minor poets sometimes surprise. He adores Nicholas Rowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia: “one of the greatest productions of En­glish poetry; for t­ here is perhaps none that so completely exhibits the genius and spirit of the original” (22:594). He praises Blackmore’s Creation for its “ratiocination” and “description” and commends Congreve’s plays, but not his poems, though he also confesses, with a wink, of Congreve’s novel, Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled, “I would rather praise it than read it” (22:775, 736). Johnson’s judgment rarely betrays him. Only the “Life of Swift” feels charged with hostility. At the end of a long essay, Johnson musters two scanty paragraphs

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on Swift’s poetry and criticizes Swift for nurturing “singularity”—­what we would now call “eccentricity”—­a nd for treating the ­women who loved him, Stella and Vanessa, poorly (22:1003, 1016, 979, 995–997). Johnson’s Swift secretly marries Stella and never publicly acknowledges their bond and leads Vanessa on despite his marriage to Stella. Although many critics have speculated that Johnson’s dislike stems from a fear that, deep down, he shared Swift’s alienation and anger, I suspect almost the opposite: Johnson dislikes Swift b ­ ecause the dean indulged his singularity. Swift enjoyed being what we would ­today call “a character.” By contrast, Johnson, whose own singularity resulted from his odd tics and gesticulations, strug­gled hard to fit in and not call attention to himself. When Christopher Smart’s ­little niece asked him why he so twitched and started, he replied, “From bad habit.”9 Johnson perhaps found fault with what he may have regarded as Swift’s self-­exculpations and cultivation of bad habits. Perhaps the theme that runs most consistently through the fifty-­t wo lives is Johnson’s confidence in the critical judgment and good taste of the “common reader.” He most eloquently expresses this sentiment in the “Life of Gray,” ­after spending most of the essay criticizing Gray for his difficult, esoteric poetry. The Elegy Written in a Country Church-­Yard was dif­fer­ent: “In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, a­ fter all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be fi­nally de­cided all claim to poetical honours” (23:1470–1471). This declaration is consistent with Johnson’s assertion in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare that “­t here is always an appeal open from criticism to nature,” and that ordinary readers are often better served by their own responses to lit­er­a­ture than the opinions of a Dennis, a Rymer, a Voltaire, or other professional critics.10 Common readers, Johnson avers, turned the fastidious and reclusive Gray into a popu­lar poet and Shakespeare and Milton into national heroes. Of all the lives, Johnson was most proud of “Cowley.” Although he did not fully grasp the significance of the Metaphysical Poets’ analogical thinking, his analy­sis of Metaphysical wit in the “Life of Cowley” was a milestone. No critic before Johnson had attempted to compare Augustan and Metaphysical wit and had so vividly illustrated the differences. If he sometimes uses the Metaphysicals to exemplify the art of sinking in poetry, he also revived interest in their work. Johnson prob­ably changed his original plan to write “­little lives” and “­little prefaces” early—­while drafting the lives of Cowley, Denham, Waller, and Butler. When Boswell visited Johnson in the summer of 1777 at Ashbourne, where Johnson was staying with his old friend, John Taylor, Boswell found no sign that he had even started writing. (Johnson’s reading of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars that summer may have been to jolt himself into action.) Boswell left Ashbourne on 24 September, and then perhaps, facing fewer distractions, Johnson got to work. He noted in his diary on 11 October, “Finished the life of Cowley,” and on 13 October, “Finished the life of Denham” (Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, 279). Returning to London on 6 November, Johnson dedicated himself to the lives of Waller and

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Butler. ­Later, John Nichols, printer for the Lives, recalled that “Cowley” went to press in December 1777, and, at that time, “Butler” was the life of which Johnson was most proud. In March 1778, Boswell read with ­great delight proofs of “Denham” and “Cowley.” In the spring and summer of 1778, Johnson turned to the “Life of Dryden.” Yet, on 27 July 1778, he wrote to Nichols, “You now have all Cowley. I have been drawn to a ­great length, but Cowley or Waller never had any critical examination before. I am very far advanced with Dryden, who ­w ill be long too” (Letters, 3:122). Milton, he promised, would be next. Why does Johnson refer to “all Cowley” in July when Boswell had read the “Cowley” proofs in March? Perhaps, ­after completing “Cowley,” “Denham,” “Waller,” and “Butler,” Johnson had reconceived the proj­ect and expanded it. Roger Lonsdale confirms this conjecture with a letter that he discovered in the Hyde Collection, now in Houghton Library, Harvard University. When Thomas Cadell, on behalf of the London booksellers, wrote to Johnson three months ­later, complaining about his slow pro­gress, Johnson replied: “I am exceedingly sorry for the delay, but you see I have taken a course very dif­fer­ ent from what I originally thought on. I thought to have given four [or] five pages to an author, and to three of them I have given l­ittle volumes.”11 The three w ­ ere “Cowley,” “Butler,” and “Waller.” “Dryden,” of course, would also be long, as would “Milton,” “Addison,” “Swift,” and “Pope.” Evidently, Johnson had de­cided against brief essays in the French style, offering a few dates and a short character. The dissertation on Metaphysical wit, the analy­sis of Hudibras, and the long discussion of Waller’s poetry, culminating in the reflections on his religious verse all must have been l­ater additions. The inconsistencies in the “Life of Butler” between the encomiastic opening—­“Of the ­great author of Hudibras”—­and the more reserved conclusion with its doubts about burlesque, suggest that the life was written in two parts at dif­fer­ent times, and that Johnson changed his mind in composing what Fanny Burney in her journal called his “dissertation on Hudibras.”12 Not u ­ ntil many months into the writing of the Lives, then, did Johnson decide on the three-­part format of his prefaces, consisting of a writer’s biography, including the writer’s schooling and any impor­tant teachers, a chronological analy­sis of the writer’s poetry, and a discussion of the writer’s character. (For this structure, Johnson had a number of pre­ce­dents.) Character, a subject of g­ reat interest since the times of Aristotle and Theophrastus, gives Johnson the opportunity to explore an author’s habits, tendencies, and predilections, ­t hose qualities of mind that distinguish that writer from ­others. This format, of course, is malleable. Johnson, not surprisingly, bestows his most mature, sophisticated, and extended attention on Milton, Dryden, and Pope. In some of the short lives, we find only a brief discussion of the poetry and l­ittle discussion of character. But even lesser writers, such as Halifax and Edmund Smith, elicit keen judgments from Johnson. Indeed, his willingness to be “drawn to a g­ reat length” opened up more space for Johnson to work on many of the briefer lives. Shorter gems, such as “Akenside,” “Blackmore,” “Congreve,” “Gray,” “Ambrose Philips,” “Prior,” “Rowe,” and “Thomson” sparkle ­because Johnson no longer felt obliged to confine himself to four or five pages.

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3 The gestation of the Yale edition of The Lives of the Poets took fifty-­five years, slightly more than twice as long as it took Johnson to give birth to his three major literary pachyderms, the Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and The Lives of the Poets, combined. As the website of the Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson explains, the edition was founded in 1955 to replace Francis P. Walesby’s Oxford edition of 1825. It was to be published in nine volumes, and its accurate texts of Johnson’s complete works w ­ ere to be made widely available. The editors, evincing an optimism similar to Johnson’s about his major ventures, predicted that the Works of Samuel Johnson would take two years. In 1955, Frederick W. “Ted” Hilles was charged with editing The Lives of the Poets. An expert on eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture best known for his edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Letters (1929), he worked on the Lives for twenty years before he died in 1975. Hilles deputed work on five major lives to James L. Battersby (“Addison”); John A. V. Chapple (“Dryden”); John P. Hardy (“Milton”); Clarence Tracy (“Savage”); and Henry J. Pettit (“Young”). A few years a­ fter Hilles died, John H. Middendorf of Columbia University succeeded him as editor. When Middendorf reviewed Hilles’s work, especially in light of the editorial committee’s evolving textual and annotative policies, he realized that despite his pre­de­ces­sor’s pro­gress, much work lay ahead. The task was further slowed by the deaths of Tracy and Pettit, who ­were replaced by James L. Gray and James E. May. J. P. Hardy left the proj­ect ­because of other commitments, and Stephen Fix assumed responsibility for the “Life of Milton.” Along the way, Middendorf also became general editor of the Yale Johnson, succeeding Allen T. Hazen. Fortunately, as general editor Robert DeMaria Jr. reports in an opening note to the Lives, Middendorf lived long enough to submit the completed manuscript to Yale University Press, to establish copyediting princi­ples with press editors, and to finish his review of the copyediting of the first two volumes. He died on 14 August 2007. Middendorf’s friend and fellow editorial board member, James L. Gray, supervised the copyediting of the third volume. The Yale Lives ­were published in 2010. The three volumes of the Yale Lives of the Poets are a monumental achievement—­a splendid jewel in the crown of this edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Printed in Baskerville type and bound in handsome dark blue boards, t­ hese books include 1,583 pages of text and index, 57 pages of preface and introduction, and 7 illustrations. The text is large and readable with generous margins. All notes are set in smaller type at the bottom of the page. The introduction to the edition is short, sharp, and focused, as stipulated by the policies of the editorial committee. In twenty-­eight pages, Middendorf provides a wealth of information about the Lives. He chronicles the history of Johnson’s negotiations with the booksellers and the writing of the Lives, offers background on Bell’s Poets, and touches on the evolution of the title of the work from Prefaces to Lives. He reminds readers that Johnson had l­ ittle to do with the choice of the poets

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in this publishing venture and that he “wrote his prefaces in the usual fashion, by fits and starts” (21:xxxv). He acknowledges Johnson’s reputation for disliking detailed research and ­counters with Johnson’s love of morally illustrative “trifles” (21:xxxiv). Middendorf treats Johnson’s chief sources in a single, incisive paragraph: from the standard biographical dictionaries (Biographia Britannica and the Lives of the Poets of ­Great Britain and Ireland), to biographical introductions to works (Tickell on Addison, Sprat on Cowley, Hawkesworth on Swift), to biographies (Ruffhead on Pope, Orrery and Delaney on Swift, Goldsmith on Parnell), to letters (editions of Gray’s, Swift’s, and Pope’s), to manuscripts (the Duke of Newcastle’s manuscript of Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes of Pope and other eminent men) (21:xxix–­x xx). He also succinctly touches on some of the friends and acquaintances who supported Johnson with encouragement and information: Hester Thrale, Joseph Warton, Joseph Cradock, Richard Farmer, and especially James Boswell, John Nichols, Isaac Reed, and George Steevens, only the last of whom Johnson formally acknowledges in the opening advertisement. Middendorf also reminds us of another ­great source: Johnson’s prodigious memory. When Johnson gave Nichols the “Life of Rowe,” he remarked, “The criticism was tolerably well done, considering that he had not read one of Rowe’s plays for thirty years” (21:xxxi). Middendorf concludes that the Lives “are now chiefly admired” for “their psychological, moral, and critical penetration” and he reminds us that Johnson “viewed lit­er­a­ture in relation to life and, in turn, life as the essence of poetic history” (21:xxxvi). In separate sections, Middendorf lays out his annotative policies and, fi­nally, discusses textual history and editorial decisions. He uses two forms of annotation: headnotes and explanatory footnotes. Each life is prefaced by a short headnote, giving “dates . . . ​and circumstances of composition; the chief printed sources used by Johnson; details about proof sheets”; and commentary on Johnson’s biographical and critical opinions (21:xxxvi). Explanatory notes “point to Johnson’s errors of fact, but more importantly . . . ​his uses of sources for anecdotal material, critical opinions, and general observations on each poet’s character, style, and subjects” (21:xxxvi–­x xxvii). For his copy-­text Middendorf chose the first edition of 1779–1781, with the order of the poets returned to the original date-­of-­death plan (to which the booksellers also returned for the second and third editions, renamed The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works). He introduces “occasional corrections and adjustments made in the second edition” and “Johnson’s substantive revisions for the third edition, with notes recording the reading[s] replaced” (21:xli). He helpfully reviews the history of the extant proof sheets and lists their pre­sent homes. Many are “second stage” proofs, generously marked with Johnson’s corrections and emendations. Not many final proofs or “Revises,” as John Nichols called them, are known. Fortunately, two of Johnson’s holograph Lives survive: the “Life of Rowe” in the Hyde Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the “Life of Pope,” in the Pierpont Morgan Library (21:xliv). According to Middendorf, the proof sheets emphasize the extent to which Johnson relied on his printer, John Nichols, for help and on how deftly they collabo-

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rated. ­Because Johnson’s and Nichols’s hands are usually distinguishable, we can appreciate how much Johnson depended on Nichols not just to correct minor printer’s errors but to supply “dates, titles, and factual information.” The printer also “querie[d] Johnson’s facts or meaning and respond[ed] to his request[s] for information.” In turn, the proofs show that Johnson was not lax; he corrected the text for “felicities of style, clarity, and force of meaning” (21:xlvi). In one of his most entertaining paragraphs, Middendorf discusses Johnson’s sometimes notoriously difficult-­to-­decipher handwriting. The proofs demonstrate how frequently compositors w ­ ere challenged by Johnson’s cursive. In “Prior,” “a boastful Frenchman” was originally set as “a bashful Frenchman” and “obscure authors” as “obscene authors.” In “Gray,” “bards; but their” was misread as “barbarians where.” My favorite compositor’s shot in the dark appears in proofs from the “Life of Pope,” where the poor typesetter read Jean-­Pierre de Crousaz’s Of Logick as Of Gogreli. Middendorf cites an anecdote from Boswell’s Life: Johnson refused to read a proof sheet marred by errors and furiously summoned the compositor to berate him for his m ­ istakes. When the compositor showed Johnson how difficult his handwriting was to read, he relented: “Mr. Compositor, I ask your ­pardon. Mr. Compositor, I ask your ­pardon, again and again” (21:xlvii). My chief complaint about Middendorf’s text is a common one. Middendorf was obliged to follow the editorial committee’s policy to modernize capitalization, possessives, and typography. I assume that the editors believed that they w ­ ere making Johnson more accessible to that era’s common readers. The McGraw-­Hill trade edition of Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, published in 1950, had attracted a popu­lar audience. But J. D. Fleeman’s paperback edition of Johnson’s Complete En­glish Poems (1971) and Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, and Marshall Waingrow’s anthology, Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (1969), amply prove how easy it is to read texts that retain most of their eighteenth-­century spelling, typography, and capitalization. Johnson’s criticism of Pope’s Imitations of Horace, “neither ancient nor modern,” resonates ­here (23:1223). The experience of reading the headnotes, text, and explanatory footnotes of Middendorf and his contributing editors is a plea­sure. The editor and his colleagues have delivered exactly what the introduction promised. The headnotes run from a paragraph (for some of the brief lives) to five pages (for Pope) and eight pages (for Young), and provide background on composition and information on Johnson as biographer and critic. The explanatory footnotes are individually succinct and collectively encyclopedic. They reflect broad knowledge of all Johnson’s works, especially the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler essays and the Dictionary, that most handy tool for clarifying meaning in any seventeenth-­or eighteenth-­century En­glish text; full command of the fifty-­t wo poets whose lives and works Johnson discussed; familiarity with Johnson’s seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century biographical and critical sources from Anthony à Wood to Zachary Grey; and an impressive grasp of the critics and critical debates of Johnson’s era and our own. Occasionally Middendorf nods. In the “Life of Cowley,” when Johnson remarks, “Language is the dress of thought” (21:76), he prob­ably alludes to the famous

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passage in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism that begins, “Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still / Appears more decent as more suitable.”13 Middendorf leaves the reference unglossed. In the “Life of Smith,” Johnson recounts how Smith lost the election for the position of “censorship, an office of honour and some profit” at Christ Church, Oxford, to one Mr. Foulkes, his ju­nior. Incensed, Smith composed a lampoon about Dr. Henry Aldrich, the dean of the college, who prob­ably favored his rival. Of this poem Johnson remarks, “I once heard a single line too gross to be repeated” (22:524–525). Middendorf refrains from commenting, though Roger Lonsdale tracked down what Monty Python might call the “naughty bits” of Smith’s lampoon for his 2006 Oxford edition of the Lives.14 The text of the Yale Lives is remarkably mistake-­free, as one might expect when the proofreaders included the contributing editors of the lives of Addison, Dryden, Milton, Savage, and Young, plus O M Brack Jr., Robert DeMaria Jr., James Engell, James Gray, and Howard Weinbrot. This was a formidable team of proofreaders. I noticed only a handful of typographical errors in all three volumes. The text’s scholia are unimpeachable, and the index is very full, clear, and helpful. It is, however, primarily a name index. I wish that the index had included separate subject headings on topics such as blank verse, epic, genius, the heroic couplet, imitation as a poetic genre, occasional poetry, originality, poetic diction, the Pindaric ode, style, translation, and versification. To be sure, all of t­ hese can be found ­under the headings for individual poets as well as ­under Johnson, Samuel. Still, it would have been useful to highlight ­t hese subjects separately. As I close, it may be fair to ask, how does the Yale edition of The Lives stack up against the Oxford Lives edited by Lonsdale? The scholarly world is big enough, I believe, to accommodate both editions, which complement one another. Although both are exemplary, neither is definitive ­because both, as Johnson would prob­ably agree, are subject to time: “The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks” of all scholarly editions, ­will eventually transform ­t hese two into period pieces, as well (Johnson on Shakespeare, 7:70). As Johnson wrote to William Strahan in 1774, “in fifty years almost e­ very book begins to require notes ­either to explain forgotten allusions and obsolete words; or to subjoin ­t hose discoveries which have been made by the gradual advancement of knowledge; or to correct ­t hose ­mistakes which time may have discovered” (Letters, 2:131). What is true of works of lit­er­a­ture also applies to scholarly editions. ­Until that happens, however, t­ here is much to celebrate in both Lonsdale and Middendorf. I ­w ill compare the editions briefly, broadly, and generally, lest I emulate “the pedant in Hierocles,” who, as Johnson smilingly recounts in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, “when he offered his ­house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen” (Johnson on Shakespeare, 7:62). Navigating Lonsdale’s edition of the Lives is a bit like reading Middlemarch. With an introduction the length of a monograph and commentary and endnotes that sometimes burgeon and sprout into essays, Lonsdale is always pre­sent, the critic g­ ently nudging as well as informing. He lets you know when he thinks Johnson has overreached or said something questionable. For example, when Johnson calls Milton the “one-­eyed

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monarch of the blind,” Lonsdale raps his “questionable taste.” (Lives of the Poets, 1:396). (I d ­ on’t mind the quip, since the badly nearsighted Johnson once joked that he could become a botanist only if he “ ‘first turn[ed] [him]self into a reptile’ ” [Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1:377n2].) The reader is befriended by Lonsdale as well as Johnson and willingly interrupts perusal of the text to consult notes in the back of all four volumes. Lonsdale’s endnotes for each “Life” are preceded by sections of commentary on Johnson’s pro­cess of composition, his sources, the date of first publication and ­whether any proofs of the “Life” survive, and occasionally on the reception of that “Life” by Johnson’s contemporaries. He also lists modern scholarly sources on each of the poets. Numbered notes follow. By contrast, reading Middendorf is more like encountering The Waste Land. Instead of a long introduction, the editor provides fifty-­two short, discrete headnotes succinctly addressing composition, sources, reception, and any surviving proof sheets; instead of chatty endnotes, a wealth of brief, impersonal, digestible footnotes. The editor keeps his eye on Johnson: ­t here are no lists of modern books and articles on the fifty-­two poets. Lonsdale is garrulous and provides an antiphonal voice to Johnson’s. Middendorf puts Johnson center stage and does all he can to minimize his own presence. For example, Lonsdale dedicates a page-­long endnote to paragraph eight of “The Life of Gray,” in which Johnson discusses Gray’s reclusiveness at Peter­house College, Cambridge, and William Mason’s “fondness and fidelity” to Gray, which may have impaired his critical judgment of the poet (Lives of the Poets, 4:177, 485). Middendorf disposes of the paragraph with a footnote: “SJ’s usual coolness t­ owards Gray was h ­ ere accentuated by Mason’s gush” (23:1455). Lonsdale’s edition is comprehensive, expansive, ample; Middendorf’s, precise, mea­sured, restrained. Both have their virtues and their faults. From Middendorf, one sometimes wants more; from Lonsdale, less. Both editions, though, are works born of im­mense love, patience, and erudition. Everywhere one looks, one finds evidence of editorial genius. While I prefer the more succinct Yale Lives, we are lucky to have the l­ abors of both Roger Lonsdale and John Middendorf.

notes 1.  Samuel Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Univ. Press, 1992–1994), 3:20. 2.  Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, vol. 1 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., with Donald and Mary Hyde (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), 417–418. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 4:299. 3.  Percival Stockdale, The Memoirs of the Life, and Writings of Percival Stockdale; Containing Many In­ter­est­ing Anecdotes of the Illustrious Men with Whom He Was Connected (London, 1809), 4:182–183. 4.  Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vols. 3–5 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 3:321. 5. Johnson, The Rambler, 3:321.

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6.  Alexander Pope, 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), lines 392–393, 285. 7.  Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, vol. 5 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 2nd ed., ed. James Sutherland (London: Methuen, 1953), lines 77, 32, 53, 78, pp. 68, 64, 66, 68. 8.  Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Boswell’s Life of Johnson: The Edinburgh Review, 1831,” in Critical and Historical Essays, vol. 6 of the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay, intro. by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 737. 9.  Christopher Hibbert, The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 203. 10.  Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, vols. 7–8 of The Yale Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo with intro. by Bertrand Bronson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 7:67. 11.  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), 1:30. 12.  Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988–2012), 3:105. 13. Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, lines 318–319, 274. 14.  For the punch line, see Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Lonsdale, 2:381.

B

Is Historical Fiction Still Revolutionary? Two Novels Set in Johnson’s World Eric Bennett Philip Baruth. The ­Brothers Boswell. New York: Soho Press, 2009. Pp. 336. Michael Dean. I, Hogarth. New York: Overlook Press, 2012. Pp. 272.

In the last hundred years, critics and scholars have made some big claims for historical fiction. The most ambitious have suggested that if history is the field of pro­ gress, then the imagination can till it and, with plausible hope, broadcast seeds of change. This task for lit­er­a­ture is very dif­fer­ent from, say, tracing royal power back to Troy, as Virgil was ­doing before the birth of Christ and the Franks ­were ­doing a millennium ­later. In the 1930s the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács recognized revolutionary potential even in the conservative novels of Sir Walter Scott. According to Lukács, Scott and his realist successors, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, revealed the contingency of what ­we’ve got and the power of ­human action in the strug­gle for what we want. Tolstoy, another conservative, could be in this way an honorary progressive. Fredric Jameson is perhaps the most vis­i­ble living theorist to have sustained and expanded such high leftwing hopes. The Antinomies of Realism (2015) celebrates David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas for fulfilling “one of the g­ reat indispensable functions of ideological analy­sis: namely to show the contradictions in which we ourselves are imprisoned, the opposition beyond which we cannot think.”1 Throughout his ­career, Jameson has aspired to blaze trails out of the dark forests of bad reifications, and it should please anybody devoted to lit­er­a­ture that he places the odd novelist in the vanguard of the scouts. In the late 1980s Linda Hutcheon introduced the term “historiographical metafiction” to describe texts that revealed not only the contingency of history but also the contingency of telling it—­the Quixotic nature of historiography.2 As with many 191

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postmodern interventions, this one disturbed both the integrity of par­tic­u ­lar edifices and the integrity of edifices in general. Epistemological doubt (“Can I know the nature of the universe?”) tips readily into ontological doubt (“Does it even have an intelligible nature beyond the one I give to it?”). Get that far, and ­you’re on the brink of attaining a radical freedom to remake the world. Since the 1980s, of course, the po­liti­cal right has rivaled and, to some, surpassed the left in its appetite for such remaking. Climate change is denied; Bruno Latour recants. And yet, even in 2019, a savvy novelist can make us see the good that such theorists w ­ ere getting at. Philip Baruth’s novel The B ­ rothers Boswell, a work of historical fiction in the best sense, succeeds first of all at a modest level. It gives Boswell and Johnson fresh solidity, animates them, and reminds us viscerally that they once upon a time actually lived. But it also invents and retrofits contingencies that unsettle them and place them a stone’s throw from our moment. In the climactic pages of the thriller, the years between the mid-­eighteenth ­century and the early twenty-­first ­century both ­matter and cease to m ­ atter. That double effect is dizzying and exhilarating. The novel h ­ andles a brief fraction of their famous lives. In December 1762, a young James Boswell, in London to make his fortune, anticipates the realization of three dreams. He yearns to consummate a love affair with the actress Louisa Lewis, receive a commission in the Guards, and meet Samuel Johnson. All seem likely to happen, though the young James is ner­vous they ­won’t. The first goes as planned, with gonorrhea appearing fast in tow; the second ­doesn’t; the third not u ­ ntil l­ater that spring. And long before Boswell tries to woo Johnson, his younger ­brother arrives in town. John Boswell has spent the autumn at Plymouth Hospital recovering from an illness of the mind. James is embarrassed and hides him from his acquaintances while d ­ oing his best to be kind. Mad but keen, John senses James’s embarrassment. The deranged ­little ­brother feigns a departure from London, then lurks in the streets, stalking the social-­climbing James, and planning a violent confrontation. His aim? To force all secrets from the darkness. In this addendum to the vast archival material on Boswell and Johnson, Baruth asks readers to think about what Boswell failed to mention. But what could that be? I­ sn’t the London Journal nothing if not frank? And d ­ idn’t Dr. Johnson keep a log about his urine in the final days of his life? We know t­ hese men, do we not? Late at night, in a shed in a lumberyard on the deserted banks of the Thames, John commands James at gunpoint to read to Johnson from a self-­addressed memorandum—­one of the scripts that Boswell wrote at bedtime to guide his social campaigns next day. John, a snoop, knows what James’s memoranda contain. Younger ­brother forces elder to lay bare the private calculations, the cunning with which he works the levers of flattery. Johnson also has secrets, and John ­will expose ­t hose, too. Within the fantasy of the novel, Johnson has cruised London Bridge at night, plucked James’s ­little ­brother from the shadows, and taken him home. They have lain together, slept side by side, shared bodily warmth and the solace of com­pany, if never ­going so far as to have sex. James has known nothing of the tryst.

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Staring down the barrel of the dag, Johnson explic­itly disavows the acquaintance and implicitly repudiates the homoeroticism that pervades his being. Rage instills bravery, or the specter of the unspeakable does. “Love you, sir? Love you? I could sooner love a maggot curling in my porridge” (314). The reader, though, has accepted John’s claim. Johnson has slept with John. It’s an emotional truth, outside history but also somehow of it. Johnson lies to himself and to the world, perfecting a picture by narrowing it coercively. The outburst distills to a single moment and proj­ects on a famous figure the rancor of a power­f ul man who refuses to cede control of his image. Johnson not only rejects the other; he rejects an unarticulated portion of the self. “You have—­you have fattened somewhere in the dark on your own poisonous envy,” he tells his lover, “and you slither into London in like the Devil himself, to destroy us, to pervert our understandings of one another, of our very selves.” A reader certainly d ­ oesn’t have to consult 1763 to learn that men get angry when you demand that they admit to sex they ­won’t admit to. Baruth does not simply write homo­sexuality into the dark margins of an ostensibly transparent history. He pathologizes every­one involved—­both the agent of exposure and the victims of it. John is unstable, violent, and obnoxious, as well as curiously sympathetic. The truth he unearths feels at once righ­teous and meddling. The reader desires irreconcilable t­hings: for Johnson and Boswell to be left alone in their sunny bullying-­and-­being-­bullied rapport, but also for the fibs and dissimulations to be revealed as at best half true. Nobody is purely what he pre­sents himself to be in a ­century of Enlightenment and unpre­ce­dented self-­disclosure. Like a good modern novelist, Baruth refuses to come down on the side of repression or the defrocking of repression. He loves the men he rattles. Samuel Johnson lies to keep his dignity. ­W hether he does so in literal fact (within the fictive real­ity of the novel) or only in the crazed imagination of the narrator, he certainly does so in fulfillment of the demands of verisimilitude. The gunpoint moment feels ­actual: Johnson and Boswell confronting bound­aries that their frankness and self-­ consciousness ­won’t cross, a preserve of shame somehow foundational to all they take pride in. To love a dead eminence is to love a mess. This knowledge allows Baruth to show off his genius. John Boswell, in the weird experiment, could stand in for Baruth— as the unwelcome third in an imaginary love triangle. ­Isn’t that what anybody is, who delights in Boswell’s Life? Baruth has found a brilliant, self-­effacing way to pay homage. The absolute real­ity of two men who once lived is conjured; their moment is rendered contingent; but that contingency, the chimera of retrospect, reflects as much on us as on them. To read the sexual mores of the early twenty-­first ­century into 1763 would be shallow and dense. Baruth, too smart for easy simplicities, heightens the tension that exists between a past fully evoked and a pre­sent at odds with it. The ­Brothers Boswell captures our immersion in both. The excellence of the novel i­sn’t l­imited to this. The detritus in Boswell’s vast pockets; the rank muck of the Thames; the gloomy royal hall abandoned beneath modern Greenwich; the crowd at a sordid pump in Edinburgh—­every detail loads

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­ atter with feeling. Some of the best passages stage, in real time, the intuitions m and reflexes of literary history’s greatest ingratiator. In a scene of seduction, having said just the right t­ hing to the lady, Boswell feels calculation slide seamlessly into true sentiment. He hears his own words as “the expected, the flattering, possibly even the fished-­for response; but that is entirely secondary to the fact that he means it. . . . ​A nd in a way already familiar to him at twenty-­t wo, this flood of momentary sincerity from somewhere deep inside him bears the moment of flattery along before it, rendering it inexplicably genuine” (161). The delight he takes in his successes is not purely the delight of a hardened womanizer. It is artful and hopeful and gregarious. “He can see that he has managed to reflect her life back to her in precisely the terms she might wish, and her expression is now tinged with gratitude and fresh affection” (161). Equally delightful is Baruth’s account of Boswell’s social daring, of his capacity to say the ­t hing that propriety forbids but that nevertheless is apposite: When he so chooses, he can render himself agreeable simply by receiving the acute impressions of need that underlie conversation, any conversation—he does this a hundred times a day without effort. And when he must, Boswell can focus ­t hese intuitions more actively, to the limits of his own perception and understanding. But more rarely still, when pressed to the utmost, when his own inner needs take complete possession of him, Boswell’s intuitions w ­ ill urge him out well beyond the calculable, beyond any recognizable social logic. With very ­little warning, he ­will hear himself begin to say ­things that should not, properly speaking, be said. Th ­ ese ­t hings w ­ ill be dictated entirely by intuition, and framed in language almost before Boswell himself—­his waking, calculating self—­can censor or suppress them. (178–179)

In this passage and many ­others, Baruth has thought his way into the eigh­teenth ­century using novelistic techniques developed ­later, both the sinuous psychological excavations and the sensory distillations of the best modernist fiction. Has Baruth shattered reified social forms? For me, for a moment, sure. History shudders u ­ nder my feet, becoming both more real and more protean than it was last week. Granted, when the next revolution comes, Baruth’s words ­w ill prob­ably not have played a central role in its fomentation. But almost no other kind of writing can shake so powerfully our enduring gut sense that how t­ hings are is how ­t hings are and always w ­ ill be. Jameson remains right about that. Philip Baruth, in short, provides a power­ful positive example of the eleventh-­hour legitimacy of some ­grand old theories. Michael Dean, meanwhile, in the superficially similar I, Hogarth, delivers a whopper of a negative example. His fictionalized first-­person account of William Hogarth’s life seems to offer some charms. Dean has researched his subject carefully and in­ven­ted with verve. Scenes that actually could have happened are mingled with diverting flights of imagination. The set pieces are dramatic: a f­ ather with ­great expectations and slim prospects; the f­amily’s brush with debtors’ prison; William’s youthful romps in naughty places; his apprenticeship to the Serjeant

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Painter John Thornhill; his rocky courtship of Thornhill’s ­daughter, Jane; the triumph of A Harlot’s Pro­gress; a fast ascent in London society; ­battles with thieving printers; nights of pub talk at Old Slaughter’s with artists starving and full of vision and life; the transformation of a sordid park into the high cultural Vauxhall; the painting of late c­ areer masterpieces; the triumph of the portrait of Captain Thomas Coram; the embarrassment of the Sigismunda; a body that falls apart; a last gasp of love for Jane. Such material, though, is more fun to list than to encounter in Dean’s novel. Dean’s Hogarth remains unreal. Only Dean seems real—­t he author and his love for his subject. It is in fact this love that stunts his subject from the inside. Dean praises Hogarth by having Hogarth praise Hogarth, a novelistic move that reflects a failure of psychological insight. The last person we trust to report fairly on a person’s excellence is, well, that person. Hogarth on Hogarth induces the deepest cringing when ­women are concerned, which is often. Encountering a shop clerk, the hero seduces her almost with a glance. “Sarah followed me to the store room, which had a key on the outside. Once the door was shut ­behind us, I confirmed my impression of her complete submissiveness to me by kissing her hard on the lips.” Dean shows no awareness that a con­temporary reader w ­ on’t vicariously savor the conquest and might find dreams of complete submissiveness completely disturbing. It’s not that the reader doubts that Hogarth forced himself on store clerks. It’s that the violent occlusions of Hogarth’s life need to be dramatized with some self-­consciousness about that vio­lence. That is the rich material neglected before our eyes. The shop girl “was small of stature fortunately, no taller than I was. Her eyes opened a l­ ittle in surprise but she responded con brio, as they say” (66). As who says? Ronan Farrow could tell us. When Dean’s Hogarth seduces Jane, he is twenty-­t wo and Jane is fifteen. (Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s biographer, puts Hogarth at twenty-­seven at the time.) No skirts are raised at first, but Jane “laughed u ­ ntil her eyes sparkled with tears” (72). We are not reminded that t­ hose are the tears of laughter of a virtual child or that it’s the same girl in the next chapter who “gobbled my prick . . . ​chewed away like a grenadier on a saveloy, u ­ ntil fi­nally I loosed my load in her mouth” (74). The other blowjob in the chapter is performed by a consenting adult, the Frenchman Felix Pellett, who did not chew like a grenadier but “only moaned and groaned in that foreign way of his” (76). Long before and long a­ fter Hogarth’s day, twenty-­seven-­year-­old men courted fifteen-­year-­old girls with social sanction. Long before and long a­ fter, middle-­class men assaulted maids and shop girls with impunity. Some maids and shop girls might even have enjoyed it now and then. But that enjoyment has been dramatized enough for all eternity. And in no de­cade of any ­century has lover ­after lover gazed on aggressor with pure adoration. In “letting me fill the silence with my own chatter and blather,” Dean’s Hogarth tells us, the young Jane “achieved the revelation of my own opinion to me.” In other words, she became a mirror. L ­ ater, an older Jane asserts herself, as if Dean belatedly sensed the novelistic interest that could arise from hearts at odds. But by the time it happens, verisimilitude’s ship has sailed.

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In an author’s note, Dean laments that Hogarth receives no more recognition on the streets of London than “a small bust diagonally opposite the public toilets in Leicester Square” (261). This may be true, though his ­house in Chiswick, now a part of London, is certainly well known. Regardless, the worst way to aggrandize a figure from history is to make him boast of his own greatness. This fictional fantasy neither raises nor lowers the ­actual Hogarth’s stock in history. He simply lowers Dean’s stock in con­temporary lit­er­a­ture. Dean’s relationship to history is pornographic even outside the pornographic moments. I, Hogarth evokes a past where p ­ eople live without consequence, seem weightless and cheerful as they love, paint, fall ill, and perish. For all its evident ambition, I, Hogarth proj­ects on the past the complacencies of an un-­self-­critical pre­sent. It is to Hogarth, the real Hogarth, as Epcot is to France. It gussies up an ideological prison rather than suggests a way out. It makes you believe once again in the dire importance of ways out, even of the now superannuated literary ones for which Lukács once posited such high hopes.

notes 1.  Frederick Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2015), 308. 2.  Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 105–123.

Michael Schmidt. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 1,172. Although I ­don’t mean it as praise, I know of no other book that is even remotely like Michael Schmidt’s enormous door-­stopper of a volume, some 1,106 pages of small print, excluding the “Timeline” of novelists he treats and the index (although we can be grateful that one of his friends advised him to cut his manuscript back from 660,000 words). His tome weighs in at eight pounds (on my bathroom scale), thus making it impossible to h ­ andle as a normal book that one can read comfortably in an armchair. And in addition to its demands as an object to be held in a relaxed reading position, Schmidt’s staggeringly ambitious proj­ect challenges the reader to comprehend a detailed survey of the history of the novel, mostly its En­glish and American prac­ti­tion­ers, but also many of its Eu­ro­pean masters of the last few centuries such as Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, and Kafka, and a host of ­others from the wider English-­speaking world created by the British Empire such as Naipaul, Achebe, Gordimer, Coetzee, Soynika, and Okri—­a ll told nearly 400 novelists by my count, including at one point in a chapter labeled “Genre” popu­lar novelists such as Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Cartland, Zane Grey, and Stephen King. So the demands this astonishing encyclopedic proj­ect makes on a reader are exhausting and, in the end, mostly unprofitable, vertigo-­inducing, too much to take in. And yet one can learn a lot from Schmidt’s tour de force; t­here are many moments of real and fresh insight, and Schmidt actually opens with a winning modesty by saying that he began his book “without an overarching theory of the novel” and that he read “in a spirit of committed curiosity” (3). His enthusiasm for the salutary and inspiring effects of the best fiction matches what I think of as my own experience: “A few novels ask to be re-­read and become living parts of memory that affect how we hear, speak, see, feel, and act” (7). And a few pages ­later in his introductory musings, Schmidt offers an insightful aphorism about the essence of novelistic narrative as he distinguishes, shrewdly and compactly, between 199

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story and plot, with the former being the sequence of events and plot the “reordering of ­t hose events for effective telling.” Thus he concludes with some wit, “plot evades story, and that evasion is the novel’s subject” (16). But Schmidt’s modesty and pithy critical insight at the beginning c­ an’t ­really help over the long haul through the next thousand pages. My reactions to the book over the sometimes wearying slog of reading it varied from awe and occasional delight at the author’s epic feats of reading and remembering to frustration, annoyed impatience, and confusion over Schmidt’s attempts to survey and summarize a vast continent of novel writing over four and a half centuries that eludes such synthesis, to the point of making the reading experience of his book in the end confusing, even disorienting. I came away from the several weeks of reading the book required somewhat dazed, wondering just what I had gained or actually learned. The novel in Schmidt’s pre­sen­ta­tion of its multifarious expressions in many lands and cultures is just too diverse and vari­ous to yield anything as coherent or memorable as a “biography.” Let me confess that, as I read Schmidt’s book, I kept thinking of the (prob­ably apocryphal but wonderfully apt) anecdote about Johnson at a concert where he displayed such inattentive impatience that a friend observed to him that what the musician did was very difficult. “Sir,” Johnson replied, “I wish it w ­ ere impossible.” Like all of us, I have been reading novels for all of my adult life. Books are now conventionally divided, absurdly, into fiction and nonfiction, so novels are inevitably on all our reading lists. But, despite being eight years older than Schmidt, I am far, far b ­ ehind him in the number I have read (or indeed remembered well enough to write about them), and of course I know that I w ­ ill never catch up with Schmidt. This disparity made me won­der just what the audience for such a book can be. Does Schmidt intend his prodigious reading (and meticulous remembering) of novels to serve as a goal or perhaps a goad for his necessarily less-­widely read or less alert and ambitious audience? Does he imagine that any of his readers can match the incredible range and careful note-­taking of his lifelong reading of novels? What kind of reader cannot feel guilty or at least embarrassed about not having read as much as Schmidt? He is in fact showing off his knowledge in a rather unseemly or at least excessive manner. Or is his book designed to inform and perhaps inspire ­those who have read only a small percentage of the novels he discusses? Is his book a sort of “The Novel for Dummies”? To be sure and to be fair, I learned a fair amount from parts of Schmidt’s book, for which I am grateful. And if he has many other readers, surely they w ­ ill like me be drawn to read novels that he discusses but that are new to them. And yet, despite the potentially benign effects Schmidt’s book may have for some readers, I have deep reservations about the relevance and usefulness of his proj­ect for a­ ctual and fairly thoughtful readers of novels like me. I also have some skepticism about his critical methods. His book seems in its grandiose ambitions a successor to Edward Casaubon’s failed proj­ect in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, his projected “Key to All Mythologies,” even if, unlike Eliot’s tragically ineffectual scholar, Schmidt has succeeded in actually producing a comprehensive volume that claims to be the key to all novels.

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Like biographies of individuals, Schmidt’s book claims to trace a chronology that features growth and development t­ oward maturity (or is it decline and death?), more or less, as he follows the novel’s early exemplars and describes its development over the centuries up to our own times, although strict chronology is quickly ­violated. For example, chapter 6 is headed “Impersonation” and features Defoe with Capote and Coetzee. Th ­ ese pages are a mixture of shrewd, even original observations, along with a fairly detailed biographical summary of Defoe’s life and writings that I regret to report includes some factual errors and breezy over-­simplifications: he calls Crusoe a Scot when of course he is a Yorkshireman, and he claims, erroneously, that Defoe wrote his novels “to restore his reputation and his estate a­ fter bankruptcy” (79), when a glance at even a cursory biographical sketch of Defoe’s life would have told him other­w ise. Defoe restored himself to affluence and prosperity largely by other writings, by his work for Harley as a secret government operative, and by renewed commercial success. In fact, Schmidt’s biographical summary of Defoe’s life is fairly slapdash. He calls him with journalistic flash a “malleable wordsmith, trying to maintain his f­ amily at Stoke Newington” (82), when in actuality he lived in bourgeois splendor in a large ­house in that part of London. A ­ fter he emerged from bankruptcy, apparently paying all his creditors in full, he was for most of his life a prosperous burgher and businessman as well as a prolific journalist and po­liti­cal operative. I ­don’t mean to pick on Schmidt about his lack of exact biographical knowledge about Defoe, since his task in ­t hese opening chapters is to place Defoe’s narrative fictions in the larger story of the development of the novel. But small ­mistakes in an enormous book tend to erode its larger purposes and contribute to one’s sense that Schmidt is necessarily a wildly (or grandiosely) ambitious generalist rather than an exact scholar. The largeness of that ambition leads at times, inevitably, to facile generalizations. Thus in this chapter ­t here is in his extensive discussion of Defoe’s life and writings not only a number of factual inaccuracies but a somewhat unattractive and ahistorical moral superiority and condescension t­oward the morality of Defoe’s novels as he begins by comparing his work with Aphra Behn’s: “What Defoe has and Behn lacks is a developed dissenting conscience. This gives his novels, in a first person that is dogmatically rooted, focus and direction. Like her he writes for effect, but the effects he strives for are moral, a morality anachronistic and problematic, not only in Robinson Crusoe but in Moll Flanders, Col­o­ nel Jack, and Roxana. . . . ​Defoe is not consistent, but he is aware of spatial and causal imperatives that also constrain and shape his moral realism. We want to trust him even when he contradicts himself ” (74). Schmidt seems not in t­ hese remarks to grasp the elementary point that the inconsistency and contradiction of the narratives are not in Defoe but a crucial and fascinating aspect of his characters. And I am further puzzled by his calling the morality in Defoe’s narratives “anachronistic”: since their morality is three hundred years old, how could it be other than anachronistic? In the rest of this chapter, Schmidt offers a comparison between Defoe and other authors, including Capote and Coetzee. Such striking and in this case illuminating

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pairings are the pattern for many of the thirty-­nine chapters that follow and the five chapters that precede it. Often enough his groupings are unexpected, defying strict chronology and conventional affinities, juxtapositions that are sometimes inventive and provocative and sometimes merely clever. For one example, the last chapter in the book, “Pariahs,” lists the following: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, Mordecai Richler, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Paul Auster, and Martin Amis, and he’s especially suggestive on Kafka’s influence on American Jewish writers, as he links Bellow and Roth with Kafka’s anguish in Mitteleuropa. And as he did for Defoe, Capote, and Coetzee, he offers potted biographies of all ­these novelists, just as the rest of the book provides brief biographical sketches of hundreds of novelists. When he gets to critical commentary, Schmidt likes to begin by quoting in leisurely fashion from a stable of critics whose views he admires, especially ­Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, and V.  S. Pritchett, as well as some ­others such as Graham Greene, John Updike, and E. M. Forster (an odd sort of critical jury, to say the least). This might work in a series of lectures but, as a feature of an enormous book, it rather quickly becomes tiresome. It feels like padding—­ the last t­ hing readers want in a book over a thousand pages long. For readers of The Age of Johnson whose main interests and knowledge of the novel most likely lie in the British eigh­teenth c­ entury, some parts of Schmidt’s book may be occasionally and specifically illuminating, better for the most part in my view than his discussion of Behn and Defoe, in part for what they reveal about what a nonspecialist has to say about British novels in that c­ entury and just how ­t hose narratives fit according to Schmidt in the story of the novel’s early development. Chapter 7 deals with, among o ­ thers, Swift, Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Schmidt’s encyclopedic thoroughness is obtrusive, with potted biographies of all of them that are hardly necessary or pertinent. His comments on Swift are at times supererogatory. Thus he informs readers that the lands Gulliver travels through are allegorical, whereas Crusoe’s “are insistently literal” (100). Is ­there a reader somewhere who is not aware of that? A c­ ouple of pages on Johnson’s Rasselas culminates in banality rather than analy­sis: “The reflections of the characters (who are barely characters) are philosophical. The confessional and the personal hardly obtrude even at the level of symbol” (105). Did it not occur to Schmidt to think of Johnson’s tale as a moral or philosophical fable, as anything but a novel? He is better on Goldsmith and correctly calls The Vicar of Wakefield “a modern Job story,” although his brief treatment of it is just plot summary, and most of what he says about Goldsmith is biographical in the most trivial sense. Chapter 8—­“Sex and Sensibility: Richardson, Haywood, Barbauld, Cleland”— is a mixed bag, with some insights and shrewd observations about the nature of epistolary fiction (“a kind of halfway h ­ ouse between private and public utterance” [115]), including a brilliant two pages on Diderot’s intense reading of Cla­ris­sa. But a few pages l­ater ­t here is also a crucial small error, one that tells you something about the haste that inevitably accompanies an enormous endeavor like this: “ ‘Sir,’ Doctor Johnson declares, ‘­there is more knowledge in a letter of Richardson’s than in all Tom Jones’ ” (117). The missing words a­ fter “knowledge,” as e­ very reader of

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The Age of Johnson ­will know, is “of the heart.” The omission is central to Johnson’s profound appreciation of Richardson’s Cla­ris­sa; the “heart” in this case evokes his profound understanding of what we can identify as the psycho-­sexual depths that the novel explores. Schmidt, it seems from this butchered quotation and some other howlers, has taken poor notes on Richardson’s masterpiece; he refers to one “Mr. Soles” as the man Cla­ris­sa’s f­ amily wants her to marry. Wittily, but to my mind offensively so, Schmidt says that the heroine returns “home in a box,” making light in distasteful fashion of Cla­ris­sa’s powerfully and pathetically protracted holy d ­ ying. Fielding is a large part of the next chapter, which begins with perceptive comments on Don Quixote, in which Cervantes “subverts the rules of decorum and writes in a mixture of languages” (129). He moves to the novels of Le Sage and Smollett as well as Fielding and then to Marryat, Richard Dana, C.  S. Forester, and Patrick O’Brian, the last four included b ­ ecause of Smollett’s naval scenes in Roderick Random, which seems a specious link. He also scans O’Brian’s wonderful novels in his brief, more or less accurate, but condescending comments on what I consider a major achievement. However, despite the breezily superficial thematic connections between Smollett and ­t hese ­later sea novelists, let me emphasize that Schmidt has a real talent for memorable, and in this case exactly correct and helpful, critical generalizations. He says of Tom Jones that for “the first time in En­glish the picaresque was raised to the level of high art” (137) and finds in its structure a symmetry that as he says makes it almost “stanzaic,” architectural (138). His biographical summary of Fielding is thorough about his difficult ­family background and his strug­gles in his early life, but journalistic superficiality sets in as he starts his commentary on the composition of Tom Jones: “Now a chief magistrate, [he] found his head filled with narratives; constant contact with London’s underworld gave him voices and incidents,” a statement purely imaginary and speculative, however plausible. Schmidt is also informative in describing the Fielding–­Smollett rivalry, although at one point he misspells Humphry Clinker’s name (a common error of course). Uniquely, Sterne gets a w ­ hole chapter, 10, “ ‘A Cock and a Bull’ ” (149), and I think it is the best account of an eighteenth-­century novel in Schmidt’s book, and perhaps one of the best discussions in the book overall, as it eloquently explicates Sterne’s dramatic originality. Schmidt engages as is his wont in productive conversation with other critics, in this chapter with Graham Greene (who hated Sterne but loved the book) and Gabriel Josipovici (who sees Tristram Shandy as offering readers “a fascination with the pro­cess of annotation” [151]). For once, the potted biography Schmidt offers of Sterne is fascinating and thorough, although he tends to make connections between the life and the fiction that are glib and facile. Describing Sterne’s adding features to Shandy Hall such as paneling, Adam fireplaces, and alcoves, Schmidt observes that “­Uncle Toby followed the same impulse, through maps and construction, recreating the place where he received the wound that provided so much of his identity” (157). Interior decorating is not at all, one wants to protest, like recreating con­temporary ­battles in miniature on the bowling

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green. And yet despite ­these facile journalistic gambits, Schmidt’s chapter deserves to be read by e­ very student of the eighteenth-­century novel and of Sterne. He comments near the end of the chapter that Tristram Shandy is “less a parody of the novel form” than “an appraisal by example of the limitations and shortcomings of the art of factual or fictional biography” (160). Unfortunately, ­t here are nearly a thousand more pages facing the reader at this point in the book, and such brilliant moments are outnumbered by the facile and glib ones, journalistic flourishes that cause the heart to sink. My wish for Michael Schmidt would be for a book half or a ­little less than half its current size with nothing but the scintillating moments and sharp perceptions, quality over quantity. John Richetti University of Pennsylvania

David Alff. The Wreckage of Intentions: Proj­ects in British Culture, 1660–1730. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 239. No less an authority than Daniel Defoe proclaimed in 1697 that his was “a projecting age.” The projector—­part entrepreneur, part philanthropist, part scientist, part cap­i­tal­ist, and part crank—is a familiar figure of the period. Defoe himself, whose ­career as a pamphleteer and poet in the 1690s ran in parallel with ventures in brickmaking and civet cat breeding, exemplifies the type. Readers w ­ ill likewise recall the madmen of the “Acad­emy of Projectors” in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels (1728). One has the proj­ect of extracting sunshine from cucumbers, while another seeks to plow cropland with hogs. A third kills a dog with the experimental medical treatment of pumping air into its anus with a bellows, a signature piece of Swiftian grotesquerie that is also an inversion of Robert Boyle’s celebrated vacuum pump experiments of the 1650s. Indeed, though the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century may be the highwater mark of British projecting, proj­ects have a much longer history. When an “artist” immured in the Happy Valley of Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) asks the prince to “favour [his] proj­ect” of building human-­sized bat wings, he joins a tradition that reaches back to the Tudor era. Wreckage of Intentions is not the first book to take up the theme of projectors and proj­ects: Maximilian Novak edited a distinguished volume on the topic more than a de­cade ago (The Age of Proj­ects, Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008). But the subject is ripe for further scholarship, and Alff begins his monograph with an elegant and promising insight. A proj­ect, as Alff defines it, describes a vision for the f­ uture. But unlike fiction and utopian writing, two other early modern discourses that invite readers “to explore hy­po­t het­i­cal worlds for immediate plea­sure and the promise of moral and monetary gain,” the proj­ect seeks to bring the world it imagines into being: “It endeavored not just to describe real­ity or modify be­hav­ior, but to make real the precise vision it advanced” (7). By definition, a proj­ect describes that which does not yet exist. Making oil out of beech mast, as Aaron Hill secured a patent to do in the 1710s, is a proj­ect, while making oil out of olives is just agriculture. 205

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Most proj­ects ­were, like Hill’s beech oil, failures, and proj­ects that did succeed, like the penny post, ceased to be proj­ects. This is why Swift’s cucumber breeder and Johnson’s aeronaut manqué work as satiric figures. But reading the pamphlets, treatises, and poems of projectors at three centuries’ remove is for this very reason a distinctive ontological experience. We encounter a world that did not yet exist at the time, and now never w ­ ill. For Alff, proj­ect lit­er­a­ture thus offers the opportunity to practice a “hermeneutics of salvage,” diving into the wreck of the past to recover that which capsized before it could arrive at its original destination (8). Wreckage of Intentions explic­itly renounces the teleological desire to find in its period “the birth and rise of empire, capitalism, the novel, the self, the public sphere, the nation, and enlightenment” in f­ avor of recapturing the singularity of the late Stuart and early Hanoverian period and of the discourse of proj­ects that flourished within it (14). This introduction is compelling. Alff’s argument-­by-­definition for early modern proj­ect discourse as “­f uture realism,” an attempt to make real that which does not yet exist, is a significant contribution to the scholarship, at once original and also rich in potential for cross-­pollination with other recent accounts of the period. ­Future scholars writing on such topics as reform, politeness, improvement, Latitudinarian theology, Newtonian science, and the financial revolution ­w ill gratefully avail themselves of Alff’s concept of the proj­ect. To give a single example: Richard Steele, whose periodical papers w ­ ere one of the greatest successes of late Stuart letters but whose attempt to bring fresh fish to the London market with a fleet of partially submerged ships was an abject failure, does not appear in Wreckage of Intentions. But to see Steele as a projector in Alff’s sense has enriched my understanding not only of the ill-­fated “Fish Pool” but of the Tatler and Spectator as well. The structure that Alff promises is ingenious: his “chapters confront the proj­ ect’s conceptual slipperiness by dividing the idea into concrete stages: the articulation, circulation, undertaking, and reception of ideas for a new enterprise.” Each chapter takes up a dif­fer­ent stage of the proj­ect, guided by a dif­fer­ent set of critical tools, while the study as a w ­ hole moves chronologically (with one epicyclic exception) through the period 1660–1730. Thus the first chapter applies the tools of close reading to Andrew Yarrenton’s treatise ­England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677) to show how projectors used rhetorical and literary tropes in presenting their visions. The second chapter uses descriptive bibliography and history of the book to follow the paper trail of Aaron Hill’s beech oil proj­ect of 1713–1716. The third chapter steps back in time to the first half of the seventeenth ­century in order to examine, through the lens of “per­for­mance studies,” the ­actual logistics of making the proj­ect of draining E ­ ngland’s eastern fens into real­ity. The fourth and fifth chapters combine close reading with genre criticism to place the proj­ect in dialogue with the georgic (Alff’s well-­chosen examples are Cyder, Windsor-­Forest, and The Seasons) and to trace the development of “antiproject discourse” that reaches its culmination in the already-­mentioned “solar gourds” of Swift. The structure of The Wreckage of Intentions thus coordinates the internal logic of the proj­ect and

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the chronology of the period while giving turns to a succession of critical paradigms—an intricate, balletic feat. And yet: though three centuries or more separate us from Yarrenton, Defoe, Hill, and Swift, we describe the books we write as “proj­ects.” Alff acknowledges this homonymy in order to insist on the differences between early modern projectors and con­temporary scholars. But this study’s first three chapters fail at times to live up to the promise of its introduction in ways that would be all too familiar to shareholders disappointed by the returns on their investments in civet perfume or radish oil. The first chapter, on Yarrenton’s ­England’s Improvement, combines moments of insight (such as the observation that the passive voice enables projectors to figure forth their schemes’ fruition without explaining who exactly w ­ ill do what) with readings that are pedestrian to the point of obviousness, such as an appreciative explication of how Yarrenton uses a paragraph break to transition between two distinct ideas, “rendering [them] adjacent but apart from one another.” Yes, that is one t­ hing paragraph breaks did in the seventeenth c­ entury and continue to do ­today. Similarly, the second chapter’s “print culture” approach to Aaron Hill contains the fascinating fact that Hill actually gave away specimen beech fragments in “parcels” attached to his pamphlets, inviting prospective investors to expel droplets of oil between their own fin­gers. But it also makes far too much of the fact that said pamphlets, printed in octavo, have page counts that are divisible by eight (i.e., comprise complete sheets or half-­sheets). This utterly unexceptional feature “bolster[s]” the trivial observation that “the length of Hill’s pamphlets was the product of negotiations between the author and printer” (67). In the third chapter, on fen drainage, it is unclear how “per­for­mance studies” is needed to arrive at the jargony pseudo-­insight, in fact a truism as old as what Alff carelessly calls the “Tower of Babble” and as new as your latest purchase at Ikea, that “proj­ect implementations ­were never seamless translations of words into work, but rather took the form of collisions between the rhetorical contemplation of ­f uture possibility and an intransigent real­ity” (95, 180). The final sections of The Wreckage of Intentions are more sure-­footed. The fourth chapter, punningly entitled “Inheriting the F ­ uture: Georgic’s Projecting Strain,” persuasively shows that agricultural projectors of the Commonwealth and Restoration periods influenced the georgics of Philips, Pope, and Thomson. For Philips, taking up the theme of cider is itself a proj­ect, a novel poetic undertaking. Despite his avowed hostility to projectors in satiric works, Pope in Windsor-­Forest celebrates their handi­work and takes up their rhetorical techniques in praising the landscape and celebrating the commercial and imperial potential of ­England ­under Anne. The circular, seasonal logic of Thomson’s four-­part poem, meanwhile, at once adopts and resists the progressive ambitions of proj­ect discourse. The fifth chapter finds a similar ambivalence in the works of Swift. Swift was a sharp satirist of projectors, but his schemes for reforming the En­glish language and promoting Irish manufacturing meant that he was also one of the fraternity (if t­ here ­were female projectors, they have escaped this book’s notice). Alff helpfully locates Gulliver’s Travels and other texts by Swift in the larger seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century tradition

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of anti-­project satire, and shows how the distinctive temporality of the proj­ect—­a not-­yet-­realized vision for the ­future—­finds expression in Gulliver’s visit to the Acad­emy of Projectors, whose members are at once unable to succeed and unable to stop trying. A beautiful coda on Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Isle of ­Great Britain (1724) examines the temporality of the proj­ect in one more light, as Alff reads a moment when Defoe describes a proj­ect of his own—­a proposal of 1709 to s­ ettle German protestant refugees in the New Forest—­that never got off the ground. The narrator of the Tour “adapts the original proposal’s persuasive language, inviting readers to imagine a f­ uture world through its expired scheme” (172). In other words, Alff’s “hermeneutics of salvage” have a pre­ce­dent in the writings of the arch-­ projector Defoe himself. Perhaps this study’s moments of critical weakness and of belaboring the obvious show up more conspicuously against the under­lying strength and insight of its guiding argument. At time of writing, Alff’s faculty website reports that he is well underway writing a book about “Rights of Way”—­who is entitled to go where. It is good to know that a promising new proj­ect is already in the works. Jacob Sider Jost Dickinson College

Aileen Douglas. Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 229. From 1 June through 16 September 2018, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York held an exhibition entitled “The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Corrêa do Lago Collection.” Most of the items on display w ­ ere letters but some ­were photo­graphs, musical compositions, drawings, calculations, or documents of some other kind, but all of them had handwriting—at least a signature—­and the focus in all of them was on the handwriting and its author. Th ­ ere was, moreover, a tacit assumption that in looking at t­ hese examples of handwriting, we w ­ ere looking into the characters or even the souls of their authors. As p ­ eople walked around the gallery you could hear them calling out the names of the p ­ eople who had done the writing. The names w ­ ere so clearly foregrounded in the exhibit that viewing it was like walking through a celebrity row, like the walk of stars in Hollywood: Einstein, Freud, Lenin, Van Gogh, Proust, Wilde, Newton, Frida Kahlo, Marie Antoinette, the Beatles. . . . ​The names echoed. It was a hall of fame for cultural heroes. The effect of the exhibit depended on an association between handwriting and humanity that we take for granted. But as Aileen Douglas shows in Work in Hand, this association was not obvious ­until relatively recently. Douglas’s excellent book shows that the association ­rose gradually into prominence only in the Age of Johnson, and was not fully established ­until well into the nineteenth ­century. Douglas picks up the story of handwriting at the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century when print seemed clearly to have solidified its supremacy in the world of writing, including literary writing. Although t­ here is obviously a lot to say about writing and print from 1450 to 1700, Douglas’s terminus a quo is 1726, when, in An Essay upon Lit­er­a­ture, Daniel Defoe remarked, “the Printing Art has outrun the Pen and may pass for the greatest Improvement of its Kind in the World” (1). Out of context, this remark could suggest that Defoe foresaw the demise of handwriting—­ something we are legitimately concerned about at this time in the Unites States when forty-­one states no longer require public schools to teach cursive. On the contrary, Douglas points out, Defoe believed that manual writing was “one of the 209

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most essential Parts of Education.” Moreover, the spread of handwriting as a part of general education was not coming to an end in 1726; it was just beginning. Throughout the c­ entury, Douglas shows, script and print coexisted and influenced each other in complex ways; their interaction was essential to the conception of writing in the period, and it helped define “that highly specialized writer, ‘the author’ ” (2–3). Ironically, authenticity and “authoriality” in the age of print came to depend on hand inscription, but the change was gradual ­because only gradually did handwriting become “less a ­matter of technique and more a distinctive, singular manifestation of the person” (42), such as was assumed by visitors to the Morgan Library exhibit. At what stage ­were ­these developments in the Age of Johnson? Douglas addresses this question most pertinently in her ambiguously named chapter 4, “Johnson’s Character.” She correctly draws a distinction between Johnson’s own attitudes to handwriting and the attitudes of his publishers and biographers, especially ­t hose who w ­ ere ­eager ­after his death to capitalize on public appreciation of him as a celebrated literary figure. Douglas is mainly correct in saying that Johnson did not value handwriting; he is not as dismissive of it as he is of oral “lit­er­a­ture,” but he thought of lit­er­a­ture and authorship in terms of print. For an editor of Johnson’s works this is evident (sometimes painfully evident) in his carelessness about manuscripts, especially his own. The evidence, though largely negative, suggests that he preferred, where pos­si­ble, to dictate works rather than to write them. He may have dictated some of the sermons he wrote for o ­ thers, and ­t hose he wrote out he destroyed a­ fter the friend or purchaser copied them, thus obliterating any pos­si­ble claim to their authorship on his part. He apparently dictated parts of his translation of ­Father Lobo’s Itinerario, A Voyage to Abyssinia, as he lay in bed in Birmingham, disabled by depression. He dictated a ­couple of Adventurer essays for his friend Richard Bathurst. (A forthcoming article in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities by David Mannion and Peter Dixon confirms Johnson’s authorship of t­ hese sometimes disputed essays.) Robert Chambers was the beneficiary of Johnson’s greatest act of ghost writing. Johnson traveled to Oxford to help Chambers write the second Vinerian Law Lectures, and since ­t here are no manuscripts, it seems likely that dictation was his method of conferring his gift of writing on Chambers. One may even think of Johnson’s way of composing The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes in his head, writing down only half lines as a way of self-­dictation (how he would have loved an iPhone or even a tape recorder). We do not know how he composed his other poems, but it seems likely that he “wrote” some of them in his head in the same way. He had amanuenses to help him with the im­mense amount of handwriting required for compiling his Dictionary. He marked out passages to be used for the illustrative quotations, but the amanuenses did the copying—­t he ­actual writing. He used the same technique for some of his many book reviews, most of which consist largely of excerpts. This was prob­ably also his method in the “History of the En­glish Language” that he prefixed to the Dictionary. Not only did he not copy out the passages, but he also may not even have read them b ­ ecause they contain errors,

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especially in the Anglo-­Saxon parts, that he presumably would have noticed if he had read them (if he could read Old En­glish). The first Reynolds painting of Johnson (1756) shows him with a pen in his hand and his recently published Dictionary in the background, but the fact is that Johnson’s pen did not do most of the physical writing of the Dictionary. The awkwardness of Johnson’s hands in this picture and, more famously, in the next painting by Reynolds (1769), may reveal a sort of disability that discouraged Johnson’s penmanship, but they also emblematize his rejection of handwriting as the medium of lit­er­a­ture. He clearly saw the printed product as the best representative of lit­er­a­ture. On the other hand, Johnson’s pen was hardly idle in his life of writing. We have over a thousand letters; he wrote out most of his works, although manuscripts of only a few of them survive. The surviving manuscripts, however, show convincingly that Johnson’s pen was active both in composition and often in correction: the “Scheme of the En­glish Dictionary,” for example, the “Life of Pope,” Irene, some election addresses for Henry Thrale, some dedications (all written for o ­ thers), thirty-­nine “Considerations” on the plagiarism case brought against Edward Cave by Joseph Trapp, and numerous other bits and pieces. Johnson denigrated the activity of taking notes while reading, as Douglas reminds us, but ­t here is a credible report of six folio volumes of “Adversaria,” which went missing a­ fter his death. He left notes for a life of the Shakespearian scholar Styan Thirlby; for a ­legal case involving his cousins, the Colliers; for proj­ects (“Designs”) he hoped some time to complete; as well as the odd definition or note of another kind for his Dictionary. ­There are other examples, including the translation of Suetonius’s “Catilinian Wars,” which he jotted down late and life and which he only partially destroyed. Naturally, an amanuensis was not always pre­sent, and Johnson usually had no choice but to write himself. When he had a choice, he apparently chose not to write. He dictated the outlines of l­ egal briefs for Boswell, and he performed his “Meditation on a Pudding” for both Boswell and Hawkins (see Yale Works, 20:527). The fact that Johnson wrote, as well as dictated, a good deal does not fatally damage Douglas’s point that Johnson did not value the act of handwriting, as we do (or used to do), as a way of thinking and as an expression of character. Perhaps the closest Johnson comes to valuing handwriting in itself is in his notes for a life of Thirlby, where he reflects on the scholar’s habit of numbering lines or making lists of proper names: “His mind seems to have [been] tumultuous and desultory, and he was glad to catch any employment that might produce attention without anxiety. Such employment, as Dr. Batty has observed is necessary for madmen” (Yale Works, 19:484). Johnson might be talking about himself, as he often is in his biographical writings, and he is clearly not elevating handwriting to a very high station by talking about its palliative value for bouts of madness. A few of Johnson’s own jottings seem to be employment of the therapeutic kind. He tallied numbers of verses, for example, but more often he noted daily activities or wrote prayers and confessions designed for self-­improvement. Th ­ ese diurnal jottings are the most in­ter­est­ing examples of Johnson’s handwriting for Douglas. Johnson wrote annals, prayers, and meditations throughout his life, and many of the surviving examples

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­ ere published shortly ­after his death with engravings in an evident attempt to w preserve him for public admiration. In the printed volume of t­ hese scraps of writing (with the facsimiles) and their poor reception Douglas sees the complexity of the age’s attitude ­toward writing playing itself out: The published facsimile of Johnson’s handwriting was a relic, a novel commodity gratifying public appetite for continuation in some form of Johnson’s presence. Readers turned eagerly to Prayers and Meditations, expecting to find in this posthumous manifestation of Johnson’s hand confirmation of his character; instead they found a rec­ord of painful and in­effec­tive ­labour. Lost, emended, transcribed, and unfulfilled resolutions comprise a significant part of Prayers and Meditations, their material fragility compounding the defining characteristic of the resolution as form: absence. (121)

The reasons for the disappointment are partly the low value that Johnson himself placed on his hand (or anyone’s) as an expression of character and, relatedly, the largely hackneyed nature of his per­for­mances in the genres of prayer and meditation. That is to say, Johnson had very dif­fer­ent ideas about the value of handwriting than his posthumous audience. It is worth pointing out, however, that R. W. Chapman and a number of other Johnson scholars had misgivings about the publication of Johnson’s prayers and meditations when they ­were docketed for appearance in a scholarly edition in the 1950s and a­ fter they appeared in that edition, volume 1 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, edited by E. L. McAdam, Jr., with Donald and Mary Hyde (1958). Chapman, a g­ reat friend of the Hydes, argued against including this material in the Yale Works, especially at the start. He thought the material both too trivial and too personal for inclusion. He ­didn’t think of it as writing worthy of Johnson’s inclusions with Johnson’s printed works. Reviewers, such as the anonymous author of “Solitudes of the ­Great Bear” in the TLS for 6 March 1959, concurred and, moreover, found many m ­ istakes in the notes. Fredson T. Bowers disapproved both of the editorial method and its inaccuracy (JEGP 57 [1959]: 132–137). (I briefly discuss the reception of volume 1 of the Yale edition in “Publishing Johnson’s Works: The First Two Hundred Years,” in Tercentenary Essays on Samuel Johnson, ed. Howard Weinbrot [San Marion, CA: Huntington Library, 2014], 343–366.) Interestingly, however, in 1984 Pembroke College published facsimiles of the all the notebooks in their possession—­the bulk of all the prayers and meditations—­and the reception among scholars was much more positive. I’m not entirely sure what the l­ater history of the publication of Johnson’s jottings shows in terms of Douglas’s points, except that she is right in considering the relations between script and print complex. With re­spect to this par­tic­u­lar body of handwriting, print seems to be obnoxious to their value. ­W hether or not this would remain true, however, if the editing ­were more perfect, is hard to say. Prayers and Meditations (1785) failed as a “ ’monument of Johnson’s fame’ ” (to quote Douglas’s use of William Strahan’s phrase [121]), but the failure “was overcome by a slew of biographies” that came out from 1785 to 1791. Notably, neither

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Boswell’s Life nor the o ­ thers contained any facsimiles of Johnson’s hand. Many of ­t hese ­were added in ­later editions and many readers of Boswell grangerized or extra-­illustrated their copies of the Life, swelling their volumes as much as tenfold, partly with images of Johnson’s and his friends’ handwriting. The fact is, as Douglas carefully points out, the interest in handwriting as evidence of character took hold gradually and spottily. One of her nicest illustrations of this fact is the report of Charles Lamb on seeing the manuscript of Lycidas and Milton’s other minor poems in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1820: “I wish they had thrown them in the Cam. . . . ​How it staggered me to see the fine ­t hings in their ore! Interlined, corrected! As if their words w ­ ere mortal, alterable, displaceable at plea­sure . . . ​ as if inspiration w ­ ere made up of parts, and t­ hose fluctuating, successive, indifferent!” (123). Lamb clearly preferred print as an expression of Milton’s “unpremeditated verse.” This is very dif­fer­ent from the view of con­temporary scholars who, for example, come to Vassar College to look at the hundred versions of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose.” Douglas does not carry her study up to the pre­sent, but she is excellent at tracing the history of the interactions of print and script through Blake and on to Maria Edgeworth and the early history of debates about teaching handwriting in schools. Work in Hand is an admirable work of scholarship. Douglas’s point is always clear but never forced to stand out more starkly than the research ­will support. Her book achieves a high standard both as history and as literary criticism. By discussing shifts in media and the shifting reception of vari­ous forms of writing, Douglas improves our knowledge of the Age of Johnson and tells us how our assumptions about handwriting got from that age to our own. She does so elegantly, accurately, and with complete scholarly responsibility. Robert DeMaria Jr. Vassar College

Julie Flavell. When London Was Capital of Amer­i­ca. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 305. Near the beginning of this engaging but l­imited study, Flavell maintains that the ways in which “Amer­i­ca’s colonial forebears responded to their capital must be told through their many stories, stories that vividly re­create an all but forgotten world” (5). More a conscious choice than a necessity, Flavell’s case-­study approach does provide for depth, immediacy, and narrative drive. Yet by focusing on the experiences of a ­limited number of colonial Americans in London between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the start of the American Revolution, she sacrifices the kind of breadth and analytical rigor that would allow a fuller exploration of the implications b ­ ehind her expansive title. And while the book offers ample and persuasive detail about how and why her subjects w ­ ere drawn to London, it would benefit from more attention to their lives, ­careers, and attitudes ­after their return to an Amer­i­ca for which London was no longer the capital. The first four chapters of the book focus on the ­family and ­house­hold of Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolina planter who came to London in 1771 and joined a community of American—­including West Indian—­elites who had admired and copied En­glish fashions in architecture, gardening, and so on, and for whom a personal experience of London was impor­tant. As Flavell details, however, this experience could lead to unexpected, ironic consequences. Laurens came to the capital primarily in order to see his sons educated ­t here, but wound up moving two of them to Geneva to avoid the temptations that the city offered. Residence in London also altered the dynamic between Laurens and the slave who accompanied him. Scipio, who changed his name to Robert upon his arrival in ­England, found himself with more f­ ree time and money—­t hrough tips and traveling funds—­t han he ever had on the plantation. The chapter on Robert offers glimpses into the extensive Black community in London at the time, and addresses the Somerset case, the resulting “­legal limbo” regarding slavery, and the anxiety this produced among the planter class in London. As Flavell astutely notes, Robert’s assertions to Henry that he did not want freedom may have been a canny attempt to reassure his mas214

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ter. Henry’s control proved tenuous ­after Robert’s 1774 arrest for burglary while living with another ­family when Henry was abroad. The planter’s desire to transport his “property” back to Amer­i­ca was thwarted when the fortunate Robert was sentenced neither to hanging nor to transportation but instead to branding of his hand and a year in prison, which paradoxically secured his freedom. Residence in London exacerbated the similarly fraught relationship between Henry and his eldest son, John. The ­father disapproved of the boy’s early interest in medicine and natu­ral history and wanted him to pursue a more “genteel” profession, which led John to return to London from Geneva in 1774 to study law (which he hated) and to cavort with a de­cadent “Carolina set” at the Inns of Court. He became a friend of the radical Thomas Day, whose popu­lar ­children’s book Sandford and Merton portrays a Jamaican planter’s son in an unfavorable light. U ­ nder Day’s influence, he began to argue against slavery, and during the war, he proposed a plan to enlist slaves from South Carolina and Georgia to fight against the British in exchange for their freedom—­unlike his ­father, who freed only one slave upon his death. ­After Henry’s return to Amer­i­ca in 1774, John, who was left in loco parentis, repeatedly asked permission to follow him back as the conflict with Britain grew more pronounced. Following the accidental death of his youn­gest ­brother, an affair that resulted in pregnancy, and a secret marriage, John returned alone early in 1777, never saw his wife again, and never met his d ­ aughter. But he became a trusted aide to George Washington. Flavell concludes that his time in London contributed to his self-­fashioning into “the beau idéal of a soldier-­hero” (112). However one judges John’s decidedly mixed conduct, his agency contrasts strikingly with that of his cousin, Mary (Molsy) Bremar, who also came to London in 1771. She returned to Charleston ­after only three months, presumably in order to conceal her pregnancy by her brother-­in-­law, Egerton Leigh. While she was unsuccessful in attempts to terminate the pregnancy, her son died six days ­after his birth on board a ship returning to London. Molsy subsequently rejected a marriage proposal, was taken by Henry to an Ursuline convent in France, became a “virtual recluse” (81) in London, went to Plymouth in an unsuccessful attempt to apprentice herself to a mantua, and ultimately committed suicide in 1777. Flavell concludes that she fit the Georgian Londoner’s ste­reo­t ype of the “wild and extravagant” American (83), but so largely did John Laurens, and Flavell could have made more of the implications of gender and class—­t he male scion of a wealthy ­family versus a dependent female orphan—on their respective fates. Molsy Bremar is the only ­women whose life is examined at any length in the study, a choice resulting more from Flavell’s archive than from Molsy’s importance e­ ither as an individual or as a representative figure. The second half of the book turns away from plantation elites and focuses first on a “Yankee” whose story reads like a picaresque novel. Stephen Sayre, the son of a Long Island farmer, was sent to London in 1762 by the governor of Pennsylvania to testify in a trade dispute, and over the next fifteen years strove to enrich himself through what­ever means ­were at hand. He quickly gained the support of a wealthy Dissenting merchant, Dennis De Berdt, who unlike elite Londoners

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regarded the Yankee character as “a throwback to an original and purer En­glish way of life” (131). His secret and eventually aborted engagement to De Berdt’s ­daughter initiated a series of relationships motivated by a desire for financial gain, including t­ hose in which he could be characterized as a kept man or even as a pimp. He also allied himself with John Wilkes, which led to his election as Sheriff of London in 1773, and with the American Arthur Lee, who attempted to join Wilkes’s support of parliamentary reform and “liberty” with the appeal for colonial rights. In 1775, he was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason ­because of a supposed plot to kidnap George III, but was quickly released and enjoyed some brief celebrity. The bank he had established in 1773 soon failed, and his arrest for debt in 1777 led to his departure from London, ­after which he joined the fledgling American diplomatic corps with Lee and Benjamin Franklin, and fi­nally returned to New York in 1783. Through his story, Flavell introduces the financial institutions and practices and the po­liti­cal allegiances available to an American on the make, and stresses the enduring appeal of London gentility for a man like Sayre, who twice unsuccessfully attempted to return and famously said, “I c­ an’t bear the thoughts of living in Amer­i­ca or starving in ­England” (143). As dif­fer­ent as they ­were in terms of achievement and historical significance, Benjamin Franklin shared Sayre’s attraction to London, where he arrived in 1757 and, with the exception of a two-­year interval back in Pennsylvania, remained u ­ ntil 1775. Flavell ably details the failure of Franklin’s original mission as agent for the Pennsylvania assembly—to compel the Penn f­amily to pay taxes in support of Pennsylvania’s defense—­his subsequent unsuccessful attempts to replace the proprietorship of the Penns with royal government, and the compensatory satisfaction of his warm embrace by the universities, the Scottish intellectuals, the Royal Society, and the Club of Honest Whigs, among ­others. Franklin was accompanied by his illegitimate son, William, who studied law, fathered a bastard himself, and married a West Indian heiress. William was appointed governor of New Jersey in 1762, which Flavell attributes in part to his ­father’s effort, a view at odds with Walter Isaac­son’s 2003 biography. Franklin’s second period in London, from 1764 to 1775, coincided with and implicated him in the rising tensions between Britain and the colonies. His initial tepid response to the Stamp Act—­grounded, in Flavell’s view, by his greater concern for a “joint Atlantic empire of English-­speaking ­peoples” (213) than for colonial rights—­raised questions in Pennsylvania about his loyalties, which he attempted to address by testifying against the act in the Commons. He subsequently became agent for Georgia, New Jersey, and Mas­sa­chu­setts, and Flavell regards t­ hese positions as a source of his reluctance to criticize the slave trade, in which all ­t hese colonies ­were variously engaged. His repre­sen­ta­t ion of Mas­sa­chu­setts led to what Flavell calls “the worst disaster of his life” (226): ­after helping to leak the private correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, the governor for whose removal the colony petitioned, he was summoned before the Privy Council, publicly roasted, and dismissed from his post as deputy postmaster general. He nevertheless remained in London for over a year, left only a­ fter the failure of Pitt the Elder’s proposals for conciliation with the colonies, and apparently planned

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to return, but Lexington and Concord put an end to ­those hopes. Flavell concludes with a brief evocation of Franklin’s “cult status” in Paris during his ser­v ice as congressional commissioner, largely due to his self-­fashioning as a “backwoods phi­ los­o­pher” (233), regarding it as both a prize that eluded him in London and a triumph over the Londoners who rejected him in spite of his abiding attachment to Britain and its capital. In the epilogue, Flavell devotes attention to the Americans who remained in London and the Loyalists who emigrated ­t here ­after the start of the war, but she says very ­little about the significant ­careers of her principal subjects ­a fter their return to Amer­i­ca. Henry Laurens became president of South Carolina’s Provincial Congress and, in 1777–1778, of the Continental Congress. In 1780 he was imprisoned in the Tower a­ fter he was captured on his way to Holland, and was freed a year ­later in exchange for Cornwallis. He joined Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay as a commissioner in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Paris. As an aide-­ de-­camp to Washington, John Laurens was designated to arrange the terms of surrender at Yorktown, and he also served as an envoy to Louis XVI. He was killed in an ambush in 1782 before peace was concluded. Franklin’s tenure in Paris was bookended by his contributions to the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence and the US Constitution. Perhaps Flavell regards t­ hese details as outside the confines of her subject, but minimizing or ignoring them also creates a misleading impression of the nature and limits of her subjects’ attachment to London and to their identity as Britons. Flavell’s methodology and emphases constrain her analy­sis in a few other ways. At times, the case-­study approach descends into banal storytelling. For instance, the chapter on Robert Laurens ends with the phrase “we wish him well as he dis­ appears from our view” (61), and the discussion of John Laurens and his interest in natu­ral history begins, “The warm after­noon sun sifted through the win­dow upon the boy’s fair hair and the olive-­green shell of the turtle. The boy was concentrating all his skill on the paper before him as he carefully sketched the lines and curves of the animal” (63). While the case studies allow for consideration of broader social, cultural, and economic phenomena—­including slavery, coffee­house culture, the London financial system, and the American crisis—­t hese subjects are regularly subordinated to the individual stories and are consequently less fully developed than they could have been. The chapter on “London’s American Landscape,” which examines Londoners’ attitudes ­toward vari­ous racial and regional groups of Americans and their embrace of American imports, is a notable exception, but sits awkwardly with the narrative-­driven chapters that surround it. Fi­nally, Flavell tends to position Henry Laurens and the planter class generally as normative: she contrasts Sayre’s embrace of Wilkes to Laurens’s distaste for him, and Franklin’s “status anxiety” (195) upon his arrival in London with Laurens’s more comfortable fit. As valid as ­t hese observations may be, they reflect an implicit bias in ­favor of the figure to whom she has devoted the most research and attention. In spite of ­t hese limitations, Flavell offers a lively, informative account of individual Americans in London and firmly establishes the enduring attractions of the

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capital for colonials of varied stripes, both before and a­ fter American in­de­pen­ dence. Her study also offers a salutary reminder—­particularly for the nonspecialist audience at whom it is aimed—of the Britishness of eighteenth-­century Americans, which did not dis­appear ­after a revolution that was hardly inevitable and occurred “when many colonists ­were drawing closer to their ­mother country culturally and socially” (245). Joseph F. Bartolomeo University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Amherst

John Phibbs. Place-­Making: The Art of Capability Brown. Swindon: Historic E­ ngland, 2017. Pp. vii + 374. This is an impor­tant book that covers the ­whole of Brown’s work, giving it a unique breadth of treatment in that a multiplicity of less-­known and comparatively obscure gardens is carefully taken into account. The book falls into four parts. The first offers a survey of the materials of landscape (grass, silviculture, ­water, buildings, ground) that ­were used in the eigh­teenth ­century. The second part deals with Brown’s application of ­t hese, and the third part—­t he most in­ter­est­i ng from the point of view of cultural history—­goes into the question of the meaning to be attached to Brown’s designs. The fourth part describes the campaigns waged against the Brownian concept. A ­ fter closing the book, the pre­sent reviewer was left with the impression of having read an all-­embracing investigation of the subject, although the author modestly denies early on that his book is “encyclopaedic” (4). The lavish illustrations, which are part and parcel of this monograph and surpass ­t hose produced in Valentin Hammerschmidt’s and Joachim Wilke’s fine Die Entdeckung der Landschaft: Englische Gärten des 18. Jahrhunderts (1990), receive their full heuristic value through the considerable visual sophistication displayed by the author. Although the penetration brought to bear on the illustrations can be fully appreciated only by looking at the gardens themselves, many convincing insights testify to the author’s sensibility without the need of detailed inspection. Thus, to give but three persuasive examples, Phibbs draws our attention to a rather delicate accessory to a farm building at Berrington (68), which he associates with politeness; with regard to this country seat he also demonstrates the reduced role of buildings that fade in visibility and therefore importance ­behind the supremacy of the landscape (74). And on the yards of the farms at Burton Pynsent, he makes the subtle observation that the Tuscan order prevents any discordance with the simplicity of the vernacular architecture. He also rightly states: “­These yards are a perfect fusion of use and beauty” (112). Incidentally, the author obviously has ­great expertise in botany. 219

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Throughout, Phibbs protests against the critics’ failure to notice the wide range of Brown’s designs: “We are blind to the constant changes in his style” (274). He corrects this by paying particularly close attention to late works such as Berrington, Milton Abbey, and Heve­ningham, the latter being undoubtedly one of Brown’s most pleasing creations. Altogether Phibbs’s central point (developed with reference to Thomas Whately’s theory of association)—­t hat at the beginning of his ­career Brown preferred to work with emblematic landscapes while by the end he had become a specialist in emphasizing the expressive effects of landscape—is not without plausibility, in spite of the fact that the Grecian Valley at Stowe, with its expressive character, seems to show already, at this early stage, the hand of Brown. The noteworthy nineteenth chapter, “Layers of Meaning,” which focuses on intellectual, social, and po­liti­cal history, is less convincing than Phibbs’s pictorial hermeneutics and not f­ ree from inconsistencies. It is centered on the meaning of “En­glishness,” to which crucial term he makes no substantial additions. Although on the ­whole Phibbs does not reject Horace Walpole’s patriotic interpretation of the genesis of the En­glish landscape garden (see on this Heinz-­Joachim Müllenbrock, “Horace Walpole’s Place in the Historiography of the En­g lish Landscape Garden,” 1650–1850 16 [2009]: 245–256), he does question the viability of Walpole’s national predispositions, which, by the way, fit in perfectly well with Edmund Burke’s endorsement of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent constitutional settlement, commented on at the beginning of this chapter (249) as a key to En­glish self-­assessment. Many uncensorious references to Walpole notwithstanding, Phibbs asserts: “It has to be said that ­t here are numerous difficulties with the idea that the En­glish ­were the sole originators of the En­glish style” (256). However, no compelling objections against this viewpoint are raised. His ensuing remark that “from our perspective t­ oday, any debate about the origins of En­g lish landscape looks narrowly jingoistic” (256) seems to betray a sort of hypersensitivity on the author’s part concerning this issue. And though, for instance, A.  J. Dézallier d’Argenville’s Théorie et la pratique du jardinage may, in spite of its clear geometrical pattern, contain some complementary pieces of advice compatible with l­ ater En­glish practice, Phibbs’s sweeping observation that “­England annexed, and took for its own, ideas purloined from France” (255) seems rather wide of the mark. In my opinion, the fact that especially the early En­glish landscape garden could assert itself only ­under the art-­historical terms of selective but assimilative borrowing (from Italian gardens as well) does not invalidate the claim for its national character. ­After all, nobody questions the originality and national aura of Versailles as the epitome of the French formal garden in spite of its hints of Italian models. The crux of the m ­ atter is that the En­glish garden may be said to be autochthonous in its radically new, ideologically underpinned attitude t­ oward nature, and this made pos­si­ble a revolutionary breakthrough in garden style. Occasional support from abroad merely emphasized the dynamics of overriding national ambitions. At the beginning of this chapter, an approving mention is given to Addison’s ideologically crucial essay in Tatler 161 (20 April 1710), which unequivocally established the connection between liberty in politics and liberty in landscape (250). This

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po­liti­cal impulse, which was pivotal for the concept of national identity as developed in the eigh­teenth ­century, and which was confirmed by foreign observers who praised the happiness of the island based on the princi­ple of freedom, is frequently attested by Phibbs. So it is not quite clear why he seeks to play down the claim to the vernacular character of the En­glish landscape garden. This patriotic stamp also comes to the fore in the spreading of the Gothic style, for which Phibbs gives many convincing examples. Surprisingly, in the context of the discussion of the national aura of the En­glish garden, Nikolaus Pevsner’s seminal article on “The Genesis of the Picturesque” (Architectural Review 96 [1944]: 139–146) is missing and not even listed in the bibliography. In the controversy, set off by Sir William ­Temple’s well-­k nown essay of 1692 about any supposed Chinese influence on the inception of the En­glish landscape garden, the author does not ­really intervene, though he seems to put China on the same footing as France as an obstacle to the claim of the En­glish to be the sole originators of the new type of garden. Since he quotes Horace Walpole’s condemnation of “ ‘all the fantastic sharawadgis of the Chinese’ ” (255), a disapproval particularly comprehensible with regard to Chinese architecture, I should like to draw attention to Ciaran Murray’s book Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications,1999), not mentioned by Phibbs, which, in offering a fascinating “Japa­nese thesis” as an alternative to Chinese influence, centers on the significance of that shadowy term (34–38). Phibbs rightly supposes that Brown turned away from the Chinese taste in building b ­ ecause “it was always ­going to be more emblematic rather than expressive” (255). The promising though somewhat unexpected remark t­ owards the end of the nineteenth chapter, “We may now begin to define En­glishness as it was understood in the 18th ­century” (258), is not followed up by conclusive evidence, and Phibbs makes too much of a so­cio­log­i­cal approach, over-­stressing the influence of the lower classes in an endeavor to put En­glishness on a broader footing. Sentences such as “The En­glishness of the 18th ­century admires the underdog and protects the minority, not b ­ ecause it identifies with losers but b ­ ecause in­de­pen­dence of mind is preferable to victory” (259) and “The love of birdsong made manifest the willingness of the aristocracy to encourage men like Kent and Brown, and to adopt lower-­class pleasures in the quest for national identity” (259) express a personal point of view, but are hardly suitable for detailed discussion. In connection with the growing rural ambience of the landscape garden, the author points out that “easiness” became a distinguishing attribute of En­glish culture, quoting a passage by Addison from Spectator 119 (17 July 1711): “The fash­ion­ able world is grown ­free and easy; our manners sit more loose upon us: nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence. In a word, good breeding shews itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least” (259). However, Phibbs’s reliance on Addison as a con­temporary witness of a nation-­wide phenomenon does not quite serve its purpose, since in the sentence immediately following the above quotation (and omitted by Phibbs) Addison makes the range of his observations subject to social stratification: “If ­after this we look on the ­People of Mode in the Country,

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we find in them the Manners of the last Age. . . . ​A Polite Country Squire s­ hall make you as many Bows in half an hour, as would serve a Courtier for a Week.” Easiness remained as much a sophisticated upper-­class phenomenon, cultivated self-­ consciously by the highest echelons of society, as the more formal manners of e­ arlier generations. In the final section of the book the author gives a clearly presented survey of the attacks directed against Brown’s concept of gardening as epitomized by his con­ temporary critics Richard Payne Knight in his poem The Landscape (1794) and Uvedale Price in An Essay on the Picturesque (1794). In this body of criticism accusations of unnaturalness (applied to both Brown’s clumps of trees and his designs of lakes), monotony, and overdone smoothness loom large. Phibbs makes short shrift of most of ­these attacks and comments pungently, “As for criticism of Brown’s work as formulaic, one might equally well criticise architects for always building ­houses with floors, win­dows and kitchens” (274–275). The author, who has done so much to make his readers aware of the variability of Brown’s designs, leads up by expressing his unreserved admiration. Right at the end of his text (to which a highly informative glossary of technical terms with many historical applications is appended) he declares, with a gentle hint of resentment against captious criticism, Brown’s wonderful per­for­mance of expressive nature to be “more profound than the piffling iconographies of Stowe” (276). This pithy statement accurately sums up Phibbs’s aesthetic and scholarly predilections. Heinz-­Joachim Müllenbrock Georg-­August-­Universität Göttingen

Notes on Contributors

Joseph F. Bartolomeo is professor of En­glish and associate provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Amherst. He is the author of A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-­Century Discourse on the Novel and Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction, and editor of the Broadview edition of Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel. Eric Bennett is the author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War and the novel A Big Enough Lie. He is professor of En­glish at Providence College. Peter M. Briggs, professor emeritus of En­glish at Bryn Mawr College, studies the interplay of popu­lar and literary cultures in eighteenth-­century Britain. Stephen Clarke is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an honorary research fellow of the University of Liverpool. He is chairman of Dr. Johnson’s House Trust and of the Beckford Society. His most recent book is The Selected Letters of Horace Walpole. Matthew M. Davis wrote his dissertation on Johnson’s literary criticism. He has taught En­glish at the College of William and Mary and on Semester at Sea. He is currently assistant professor, general faculty, at the University of V ­ irginia. Robert DeMaria Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of En­glish Lit­er­ a­ture at Vassar College and the general editor of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. He is also coeditor of the forthcoming Samuel Johnson: Selected Works, which is based on the Yale edition. Suzanna Geiser is a professor of l­egal research and writing at Norman A. Wiggins School of Law, Campbell University. She earned a PhD in En­glish and comparative lit­er­a­ture from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law. Her research interests include law and 223

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lit­er­a­ture, narrative l­egal theory, and the impact of l­egal and literary fictions on both the individual and collective consciousness. Geiser is also associate director of the Jane Austen Summer Program. Susan Kubica Howard is associate professor of En­glish at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She writes on the lit­er­a­ture and culture of the long eighteenth-­century in Britain and North Amer­i­ca and has edited works by Lennox, Scott, Edgeworth, and Burney. Jacob Sider Jost is associate professor of En­glish at Dickinson College. He is the author of Prose Immortality, 1711–1815 and Interest and Connection in the Eigh­teenth ­Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano. Anthony W. Lee’s research interests center on Samuel Johnson and his circle, mentoring, and intertextuality. He has published some fifty essays and chapters on Johnson and eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and culture (as well as on Spenser and Tennyson), and has three books recently published: New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, and “Modernity Johnson”: Samuel Johnson among the Modernists. He 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 visiting lecturer at Arkansas Tech University. Heinz-­Joachim Müllenbrock is emeritus professor of modern En­glish lit­er­a­ ture at the Georg-­August-­Universität Göttingen. He is author of Whig kontra Tories: Studien zum Einfluß der Politik auf die Englische Literatur des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts and The Culture of Contention: A Rhetorical Analy­sis of the Public Controversy about the Ending of the War of the Spanish Succession, 1710–1713. He has also edited volume 2 of Europäische Aufklärung for the Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. He is coeditor of the series Monographs on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, of which he is cofounder. U ­ ntil recently he was on the editorial board of ECCB: The Eighteenth-­Century Current Bibliography and foreign advisor to The Scriblerian. John Richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of En­glish (emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is A History of Eighteenth-­Century British Lit­er­a­ture. Paul Tankard is se­nior lecturer in En­glish at the University of Otago, Dunedin. His academic research centers on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and his pioneering edition of se­lections from Boswell’s journalism, Facts and Inventions, was in 2018 awarded the Mitchell Prize by the Bibliographical Society of Amer­i­ca. Forthcoming work includes a coedited essay collection on marginalia, major articles on Boswell’s use of anonymity, and a survey of Johnson’s journalism. He has edited seventeen annual volumes of the Papers of the Johnson Society of Australia.

Notes on Contr ibutors

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David Venturo, professor of En­glish at The College of New Jersey, author of Johnson the Poet: The Poetic C ­ areer of Samuel Johnson and editor of The School of the Eucharist . . . ​With a Preface Concerning the Testimony of Miracles, writes about and teaches British lit­er­a­ture, 1600–1850; poetry; baseball and American culture; and the Beatles and popu­lar culture. An editor of The Scriblerian, he is writing books on epic, mock epic, and growing skepticism about heroic ideals in seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and the Beatles and their world. Marcus Walsh is emeritus professor of En­glish lit­er­a­ture at the University of Liverpool. His monograph Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-­Century Literary Editing was published in 1997. He edited Swift’s Tale of a Tub, is a general editor of the new edition of Writings of Alexander Pope, and is editing (with Dr. Hazel Wilkinson) a volume including Pope’s Ethic Epistles. Recent work on Johnson includes “Fragments and Disquisitions: Johnson’s Shakespeare in Context.”