As time goes by, it generally softens asperities in the character of men and women from the past. We have quite a cuddly image of Ben Franklin, but to those who met him he could seem truculent and abrasive. Something rather different has happened in the case of Samuel Johnson. He used to be presented as a formidable figure—an overbearing literary potentate, if not a clubroom bore whose table you would avoid in the dining room. People thought him domineering and arrogant, qualities reflected in his nickname “the Great Cham.” Oldstyle British actors gave him a plummy upper-class bark, even though the evidence showed that he spoke with a strong Midlands accent, not too far from the nasal intonation you can hear on the streets of Birmingham today.
It has all changed dramatically in the last half-century. In fact, the shift has its roots even further back, in an essay by an outstanding scholar from Berkeley, first published in 1944. Bertrand Bronson’s study “Johnson Agonistes” set the agenda for much of what has come out in recent decades, together with work by other writers emphasizing the “perilous balance” that Samuel maintained in his psychic health. It is not surprising, then, that a sense of internal conflict pervades these new versions of Johnson’s life—the first two, but not the last, of a crop of biographies marking the tercentenary of his birth in this year.
Jeffrey Meyers’s book carries “the struggle” as its subtitle, while Peter Martin has barely gotten into the preface when he asserts of Johnson, “his life was a journey of agony and courage, a struggle to survive.” It’s easy to see how the key term has morphed from the subject in Bronson’sagonistes—Johnson’s own Dictionary defines the term as “a prize-fighter; one that contends at any public solemnity for a prize”—to the feelings of agony he experienced. Another convergence emerges at the end of the two biographies. As the deathbed scene approaches, both reach out to Dylan Thomas for an epigrammatic closure. “He did not go quietly, but raged against the dying of the light,” says Meyers, while according to Martin, “he was not about to go gentle into that good night.”
Of course there’s an undeniable truth in this view of a profoundly troubled yet heroic existence. Both biographers rightly point to a lack of civilized polish in Johnson’s self-presentation—Thomas De Quincey called his behavior that of “a sturdy beggar.” This sense of the man has been intensified rather than mitigated by efforts at a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, to account for some inappropriate actions. We now tend to emphasize a streak of excess and insobriety in his character, so that he has almost become “the sublime savage,” the term James Boswell applied to Johnson’s opponent in a bitter controversy over the epic of the Scottish Highlands allegedly concocted by James Macpherson. Each of the new lives follows current orthodoxy in stressing what Martin calls his “imbedded hostility towards authority” and deeming him a “rebel-moralist.” Each reads Johnson’s works as “a large canvas on which to protest aggressively against the Establishment and power-elites.”
But we can easily go too far in this direction. Let’s leave aside the question whether there really was a monolithic “establishment” in those days, ruling over politics and culture alike. If there was, then Johnson assuredly belonged to it in some sense. He was a member of one or two of the most august bodies in the state, like the famous Club, which earls, ministers, and ambassadors clamored to join, and which had at its center his close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy. A fairly serious effort was made to get Johnson into parliament. Though he dropped out from university, Dublin and Oxford gave him doctorates, thanks to the solicitation of well-placed backers. The great and the good flocked to his funeral in Westminster Abbey, and subscribed almost £1,000 to set up an impressive monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He led a comparatively poor and disheveled life; narrow domestic circumstances forced him to compose his Dictionary in a garret suited to the Grub Street hack that Hogarth portrayed in “The Distressed Poet.” But from his middle years, at least, he was never fully an outsider.
Of course it’s possible to criticize the power elite from within as well as from without, and there can be no doubt Johnson often stood against the prevailing wisdom of the bien-pensants who dominated public discourse. For example, like most Tories, he had no time for unnecessary foreign entanglements—he opposed the Seven Years’ War campaigns led by the Whig William Pitt, but supported the government of Lord North when it refused to launch into a war with Spain over the Falklands Islands in 1771, despite the “thirst of blood” displayed by an aggressive opposition pamphleteer known as Junius. He held slavery in abhorrence and, in the run-up to the American Revolution, dismissed the case of the colonists as “yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.”
Yet at the same time he fiercely upheld traditional views of church and state, deplored the rise of the dissenting interest, and set up firm rankings of both words and authors in deciding what to include in the Dictionary. Modern scholarship has shown that he seldom acted as a prescriptive lexicographer, but it has not been able to airbrush out other facts—that he included derisive comments on vulgar, slangy, and novel locutions, or that he resolved to include illustrative quotes only from writers whose standing gave them special linguistic authority. Meyers and Martin are good on the fractious and ornery Johnson, but they seem less happy with Johnson the Anglican apologist, the loyal servant of monarchy, the willing pensioner of George III, or the man who spoke contemptuously of Voltaire, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In most respects, both the new books present a well-rounded, coherent, and persuasive view of their subject. They come from writers with contrasting literary backgrounds. Meyers has published over twenty well-received biographies, as well as a notable study of disease and the novel. He has specialized in twentieth-century figures, ranging from the Lawrences (T. E. and D. H., a rare coupling in the critical world) and Katherine Mansfield to Edmund Wilson, Bogart, and Modigliani. Martin is an eighteenth-century specialist who has turned to biography in mid-career, with excellent volumes devoted to a pair of Johnsonian sidekicks in the Club, Boswell and the Shakespearian scholar Edmond Malone. The results are pretty much what you would expect. Meyers has produced a more selective account with a more sweeping narrative, and he writes with a sharper edge. As for Martin, he is stronger on day-to-day detail, more inclusive in his trawl of the minor writings, and fuller in documenting most of his sources.
Both books will give readers a good sense of this extraordinary individual. For those who already know a fair bit about the subject, Martin will fill out the picture more amply—despite their best efforts, neither author has come up with any important new factual material. Anyone who has never read much on Johnson should still turn first to Boswell, or, if they are lucky, revisit their old college notes from a time when The Life of Johnsonheld its key position in the canon. After that, Meyers would be as good a place to start as anywhere: he is livelier than most of his rivals, and more skilful in applying what Christopher Ricks once called “biographer’s relish” to the materials in hand.
Effective and consistently interesting as these books are, they suffer from limitations which mean that they don’t quite stand up as definitive treatments. The twentieth-century perspective Meyers brings has its benefits. He slips into the endnotes a few short anecdotal passages, some familiar and some less so, concerning modern figures including Hemingway, Churchill, Joyce, Kafka, Waugh, and Frost. (He also has an appendix on Johnson’s later influence, to which I’ll be coming back.) He tells us that he wrote his first dissertation on Johnson, and that he has retained a lifelong interest. Fair enough: but there are many signs that he had been long absent from the area, until he parachuted back into the age of the Enlightenment.
Among the mistakes we all make, some lapses betray a distance from the materials which somebody more closely involved would be unlikely to commit. Speaking of the Stuart rebellion in 1715, he asserts that “the Jacobites were decisively defeated at Preston, Northumberland.” Actually, the surrender of the rebels at Preston took place before the Pretender even arrived in Scotland, and the battle at Sheriffmuir on the very same day proved more significant in the ultimate collapse of the rising. By moving Preston from Lancashire to Northumberland, Meyers shows he has lost the plot of the rebels’ intended assault down the west coast of England. He gets names like Lyttelton wrong and awards knighthoods to “Sir” Robert Harley and Pope’s friend Dr. John Arbuthnot (Harley did become a knight of the garter, but only after his earldom). He believes exploded tales like the canard that the royal librarian Frederick Barnard was a natural child of the Prince of Wales. He holds the bewildering view that Robert Walpole was the “principal target” of Gulliver’s Travels. He alludes to “the murdered Thomas Wentworth,” a strange way of describing the parliamentary impeachment and execution of the Earl of Strafford, just or unjust as the process was.
Most of these are on the level of irritants. One deeply misleading statement, however, indicates a larger failure to come to grips with Johnson’s world. Meyers wants to show that the electorate was narrowly exclusive, and writes “Until 1832 voting was limited to freeholders worth forty shillings a year; women, common laborers, and the poor had no political power.” The main contention is true, but the supporting “evidence” is false. The forty shillings qualification applied to the franchise only in the forty English counties, whose voters made up a minority of the electorate. A larger slice in the parliamentary cake belonged to the borough constituencies, of which there were more than two hundred. Most had a smaller number of voters than the average county, especially the notorious rotten boroughs where it was enough for a grandee to own a few ramshackle buildings to gain control. But there were many places where the electorate was far bigger than this, owing to a bewildering mixture of qualifications, and here the electorate extended much lower down the social scale.
In such boroughs, polling was serious business, with hotly contested elections and no certainty of success for any candidate. (Those who have seen the 2008 movie The Duchess will recall Keira Knightley as the heroine running the gauntlet of a volatile mob beneath the hustings. Not all in the crowd had a vote, but many did.) Johnson himself wrote electoral publicity for his friend Henry Thrale when he ran for the House of Commons in Southwark, yet Thrale lost his seat in 1780. He was turned out not by nabobs or upper-class twits, but by a wide cross-section of middle-class voters who covered a broad spectrum of the adult male population.
A sprinkling of errors by Martin is less forgivable, coming from a specialist in the period, and these must represent carelessness rather than any outright ignorance. He confuses Jacob Tonson, the publisher of Milton, Dryden, and Pope, with his great-nephew and successor in the business. He writes of Johnson on his trip to the Hebrides visiting “Flora Macdonald’s beautiful home, Dunvegan Castle.” In fact, Johnson had just left the modest house on Skye of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s deliverer and had reached an ancient seat owned by the Macleod family. Another cockeyed assertion claims that Johnson’s friend Robert Chambers left to be a judge in “Bengal (now Bangladesh),” whereas the British presence and courts lay in Calcutta (now Kolkata), still located in West Bengal (that is, India). Sometimes slapdash on dates, Martin has Johnson’s first publisher Edward Cave dying in 1734, instead of 1754, and the poet William Collins in 1750, instead of 1759, while he miscalculates Alexander Pope’s age in 1717 as twenty-five, when he was twenty-nine. Most surprisingly, he suggests that Cave asked Johnson to write a short biography of “the famed William Boerhaave, the celebrated Dutch physician.” Not famed enough apparently for the doctor’s real name, Hermann, to have stuck in the head of author or copyeditor.
Both biographers have a taste for dogmatic assertion on controverted points. One issue which has provoked a great deal of discussion is Johnson’s possible taste for masochistic sex. This derives from a padlock left with Hester Thrale and some suspicious references to chains and punishment (some in a letter coded in French that he wrote to Hester). Martin states baldly that the suggestion, originally made by the scholar Katherine Balderston, “has been discredited.” The rashness of this claim emerges when we turn to Meyers, who supports the prosecution case with a quote from Krafft-Ebing. Personally, I am with Meyers on this, but the facts are not conclusive, and, though biographers have to make up their mind on such points, it is only fair to the reader if they admit the scale of disagreement. Similarly Meyers buys easily into the theory that a mysterious letter Mwhich crops up in Samuel’s journal reveals “a painful and unceasing struggle with masturbation.” As Martin shows, there are other and maybe more plausible explanations, notably a record of bowel movements.
Both writers agree that the strange scraps of orange peel Johnson carried round with him served a medicinal purpose, which is not a certainty. And both allege that “Johnson has been mistakenly called a Jacobite,” driving a coach and horses through the most contentious issue in recent scholarship. It was not only Boswell and the waspish Lichfield poet Anna Seward who saw him in this light. Plenty of other people said the same thing in his lifetime. They may well have been mistaken, but since many of them knew him personally and we don’t, we ought to take their claims seriously. To do otherwise is to adopt the very ex cathedra pose that used to be associated with Johnson himself.
Where then does the advantage lie? Both writers supply searching comments on key works in the canon: for instance, each uses the Rambler to very good effect—its essays provide the best summary of Johnson’s moral and social thought. Both sketch out evocatively some more colorful aspects of the age, such as the bustle and squalor of the city. On paratextuals, Martin wins: he has more than thirty beautifully reproduced color illustrations, as against the sixteen smaller black-and-white pictures in the other book, and he also has a better index. Within the text itself, he describes Johnson’s boyhood home in Lichfield more fully. By this means, he plants the young man’s roots more solidly in the soil of Staffordshire, a county that was still largely agricultural but would shortly get squeezed on either side by Josiah Wedgwood’s potteries to the north and the engineering works of Matthew Boulton and James Watt to the south.
Additionally, Martin analyzes the contents of the Dictionary in much greater detail, and picks out choice passages of Boswell with greater readiness. Amazingly, both forbear from quoting the wonderful exchange between Johnson and his old college companion Oliver Edwards, whom he met by chance in 1778 after a separation of fifty years. For many readers, this is among the most revelatory moments in the entire Life, with its pathos, comedy, and human interest: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Boswell never surpassed the rendition of this speech, with its astutely placed “I don’t know how” and the unidiomatic but telling continuous past tense “was always breaking in.”
Cheerfulness breaks in a tad more with Meyers. He, too, has some gloomy chapter titles, like “Society of the Afflicted” and “Lacerated Friendship,” to go with those in Martin like “Once More into the Breach,” “Suffering Chimeras,” and “Losing Ground.” But Meyers writes with more breadth of reference, and also with greater ease and informality. It is in this respect principally that he scores, with some brilliant pithy summations. A prime example comes when he discusses one of the portraits Reynolds made of his great friend, in which Johnson is shown clawing at the air with both fists. “His powerful hands,” says Meyers, “held in front of his massive chest, have nervously bent, twisted, convulsive fingers. They seem to be playing a difficult piece on the violin.” That is exactly right. The left hand seems to be fingering the strings, and the right hand could be clutching a bow. It will be hard to look at the picture from now on without seeing Johnson as a virtuoso air-fiddler. By contrast, Martin has his clumsy moments with some odd repetitions (“Jervis vowed never to see his mother again, as a result of which neither son ever saw his mother again.”) By missing out a necessary particle, he suggests that the forger-clergyman William Dodd was both chaplain to the King and also bishop of St. David’s. Three times he starts a paragraph with “he,” meaning Johnson, when the preceding sentences have been devoted to other male persons—a result, no doubt, of our present fondness for cut and paste maneuvers.
Finally, Meyers comes to the fore with his postlude on the influence of Johnson. This covers a wide range of authors: Jane Austen, Hawthorne, A. E. Housman (unsurprising), Woolf, Beckett, and Nabokov. No one doubts that Johnson left a large shadow over the work of Austen, and Meyers ably documents some of the connections. The most arresting bits concern the two near-contemporaries on the list. Most Johnsonians will be aware that, in the late 1930s, Beckett started to write a play called Human Wishes, curtailing the title of his predecessor’s greatest poem. By now, this must be about the best-known literary fragment since “Kubla Khan.” The dramatist only got as far as page ten of his draft, and never managed to land Johnson himself on stage. Meyers thinks that he came to hate the aborted project because it “reflected his own sexual impotence.” Well, perhaps. A longer discussion concerns Pale Fire, beginning with the explicit references, such as Nabokov’s epigraph on a favorite cat Hodge, taken from Boswell’s Life. It moves to hidden clues, such as the suggestion that a confusing reference made by a lady to “The Hally Vally” involves not, as Charles Kinbote assumes, a confusion of Valhalla with the Kalevala, but a recollection of the Happy Valley in Rasselas. Meyers scores a number of hits, but I think he misses a trick in following previous commentators who relate the “distant northern land” of the novel to a line Kinbote cites from Pope’s Essay on Man. The concealed source of the Zemblan motif occurs more likely in another poem by Pope,The Temple of Fame: “So Zembla’s rocks (the beauteous work of frost)/ Rise white in air, and glitter o’er the coast;/ Pale suns, unfelt, at distance roll away,/ And on th’impassive ice the lightnings play.”
One big thing comes out from this concluding chapter by Meyers in particular, and from both books in general. This is the fact that Johnson still matters in our literary culture after three hundred years. We can view him as the savage disturbing the polite drawing-rooms of eighteenth-century society, from his humble roots in provincial England, almost as the “primitive” Tahitian incomer Omai challenged conventional expectations of the day with a civility the salonistas had not looked for. Or, just as plausibly, we can read Johnson’s story as one of a truly civilized man joining and helping to mold that society, by the force of his learning, intelligence, wit, and will. Both narratives can be reconstructed from these two informative and accessible biographies, even if their authors tend to linger on the first version.
Notes
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- Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, by Jeffrey Meyers; Basic Books, 528 pages, $35. Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin; Harvard University Press, 608 pages, $35.
