Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was the prototype of the literary celebrity – and of the modern professional author, independent of patronage, making his own way in the burgeoning print culture of the 18th century. It was his Dictionary, of course, that made his name – quite literally, since after its publication in 1755 he was universally known as “Dictionary” Johnson. But he was also celebrated as a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, translator and editor.
He did all those things with gusto and panache – but he did them really for money. As he told James Boswell, his friend, disciple and biographer, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” One literary form, though, did engage his sentiment: “The biographical part of literature,” he declared, “is what I love most.”
He wrote biographies of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope and dozens more. They were not always precise: “Accuracy,” he remarked, “cannot reasonably be exacted from a man oppressed with want, which he has no hope of relieving but by a speedy publication.” And not all of them meet his requirement that “Lives can only be written from personal knowledge.”
But his Life of Savage (1744) is the first great English biography. An intimate friend, Richard Savage shared Johnson’s life as a Grub Street hack. In its psychological approach, and the way it reveals as much of its author as it does of its subject, The Life of Savage feels strikingly modern – a benign version of Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998).
Johnson often promised to write his autobiography, but never did so. This was partly out of laziness, and partly because he was practically able to dictate it to the biographers surrounding him: the “unclubbable” Sir John Hawkins; Hester Piozzi – “Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale”, as it says on her memorial stone; and above all Boswell, whom he in effect appointed his official biographer.
He was in every sense a huge figure, universally acknowledged not only as the leading writer of his age, but as its chief spirit, the embodiment of the Enlightenment. He was magnificently eccentric and torrentially voluble, a human encyclopaedia of combative and sometimes contradictory opinion. As a biographical subject he was irresistible, and literary London queued up to write his life.
Between his death in 1784 and the publication of Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791, eight biographies of him were published; most of them less memorable than those by Hawkins and Piozzi.
Johnson’s own works are now rarely read outside university English departments. Thackeray summed up the attitude of the general reader in Vanity Fair when he had Becky Sharp throw her two-and-ninepence copy of the Dictionary out of her carriage and into Chiswick Mall. But thanks to the biographers, the general reader has a fairly clear idea of who Dr Johnson was, and had no difficulty in recognising him when he appeared on television in Blackadder the Third. (“D’you think he’s a genius?” asked Prince George. “No, Sir, I do not,” replied Blackadder. “Unless, of course, the definition of genius in his ridiculous Dictionary is ‘a fat dullard or wobble-bottom; a pompous ass with sweaty dewflaps.’ ”)
Since the 18th century, the biographies have kept on coming, and two new ones have recently been published in time for this year’s tercentenary of Johnson’s birth. Peter Martin, an academic and writer, previously wrote an excellent biography of Boswell; and Jeffrey Meyers is a journalist and the author of popular biographies from DH Lawrence to Humphrey Bogart.
Both books are entertaining, perceptive and well-written. And they have much in common. Both seek, predictably enough, to claim their hero for modernity – to make him relevant to our times, and even politically correct. They do not ignore Johnson’s rampant Toryism – or his virulent anti-Americanism (“I am willing to love all mankind, except an American”), or his other illiberal opinions. But they do emphasise his more progressive ones.
They cite his opposition to colonialism (except in America) and slavery, and his extraordinary kindness to Francis Barber, the “Negro Boy” given him by a friend, whom he sent to grammar school. Both note his humane attitude to animals – he objected to vivisection and foxhunting; he fed oysters to Hodge, his cat. They record that in many respects he treated women as equals, and encouraged the literary ambitions of the young Fanny Burney. And they observe that he was a great champion of the poor, the homeless and the wretched. In his seventies, he found a poverty-stricken woman lying in the street, carried her to his house on his back, and nursed her back to health.
All this makes a welcome and refreshing contrast to the conventional image of Johnson as a rather brutal, even violent character. “There is no arguing with Johnson,” said his friend Oliver Goldsmith, “for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” At the age of 75, in the last year of his life, he started a riot, protesting against the cancellation of a firework display.
Martin and Meyers both attribute Johnson’s sensitive and sympathetic side to his own extensive experience of personal suffering. “His life,” writes Martin, “was a journey of agony and courage, a struggle to survive.” For most of his life, Johnson was in dire poverty. In 1756, a year after his Dictionary brought him some measure of security, he was arrested for a debt of £5/18s and held in a “sponging house”, until Samuel Richardson came to his rescue.
As an infant he was afflicted with scrofula, a condition that left him half-blind and hideously scarred, and for which he was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne, to no visible effect. He was also half-deaf, and as an adult suffered numerous disorders – palsy, dropsy and gout, flatulence, gallstone and rheumatism of the loins.
In his early twenties, forced by poverty to leave Oxford University after little more than a year there, he first made the acquaintance of the “black dog”. He felt himself, as Boswell put it, “overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery”, from which he “never afterwards was perfectly relieved”.
It was his principal affliction, and both his new biographers agree with Boswell – and every biographer since – that it was to escape the “black dog” that Johnson drove himself to his immense achievements.
Martin and Meyers strive for topicality – and achieve it – in remarkably similar ways, and both acknowledge a massive debt to Boswell’s Life, implicitly encouraging their readers to return to it. This too has been republished in advance of Johnson’s tercentenary in an exemplary new edition by David Womersley, an Oxford English professor, who has furnished the book with exhaustive notes, appendices and indices, and an admirably scholarly introduction.
Johnson met Boswell in 1763, when they were 53 and 22 respectively. Though this period before their friendship takes up a mere fifth of Boswell’s account, it occupies about two-thirds of both Martin’s and Meyers’s – but Boswell’s portion is still longer than theirs. “The Life of Samuel Johnson is, self-evidently, a very large book,” writes Womersley. “It is however also, and much less self-evidently, a work of furious compression.”
Boswell was most self-evidently not a modest writer. He called his Life “the richest piece of Biography that has ever appeared”, and boasted that his subject is present “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived”. One cannot disagree. As Womersley donnishly puts it, its “complex amplitude” makes it “the richest example of life writing in English”.
The only area in which later biographers can compete with Boswell is the perennially fascinating one of sex. Johnson and Boswell established a new frankness in English biography, which was subsequently buried beneath the piety and decorum of the Victorian age. It has since been excavated with a vengeance. Boswell was hardly a prude, but he had his limits.
When Johnson’s play Irene was staged at London’s Drury Lane Theatre, which was then owned by his old friend and pupil the actor David Garrick, he used to visit the performers backstage. Then one day, Johnson apparently announced, “I’ll come no more behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses do make my genitals to quiver.”
In the Life, Boswell bowdlerised that last phrase to “excite my amorous propensities”. “The effect,” writes Meyers, “is to mock the sexual urges of a respectable man, rather than allow us to see the misery of his sexual frustration.” This is mildly interesting as textual criticism, but otherwise unconvincing, and smacks of a peculiarly modern reverse prudishness, as priggish in its way as the conventional kind.
The great revelation on the sexual front, discussed extensively by both Martin and Meyers, is what the latter calls Johnson’s “darkest secret” – which was actually revealed in 1942 when Mrs Thrales’ diary was published. Thraliana records that “the Fetters & Padlocks will tell Posterity the Truth”. And Johnson wrote her a letter, in stilted French, that includes the passage, “I wish, my protector, that your authority will always be clear to me, and that you will keep me in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful.” Katherine Balderston, who edited the diary, thought this showed “erotic maladjustment”, and that it was “inescapably evident” that whipping and bondage occurred.
Martin is more cautious: “The likelihood is that he asked her to chain him ... fearing perhaps sleepwalking and the insanity that he thought ... could do him physical harm.” Martin’s scholarship is impressive, but some readers may think that fetters and padlocks were unlikely to have been a precaution against sleepwalking.
Meyers takes a more worldly view, however. “It’s not surprising,” he writes, “that a man tormented by lifelong sin and guilt would seek penance and want to be gently whipped ... by the woman he adored.” I doubt if it is possible to be gently whipped, but you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Bernard Malamud maintained that all biography is fiction, which may well be true. It is certainly true that no two biographers agree completely, and every biography is stamped with the character of its author. Boswell’s Life is an incomparable masterpiece, but Martin and Meyers have much to recommend them – and are far easier to read in bed.