All the News Unfit to Print

THE FIRST COLLECTION OF JOURNALISTIC LIES TO SURVIVE the ages was published in the 1740s. It was written by perhaps the second most esteemed figure in the history of the English language, and it did nothing to hurt his reputation. In fact, it seems to have helped. An odd man, as charming in some ways as he was off-putting in others, he was the result of a difficult birth. Then he was handed over to a wet nurse whose milk was tubercular, ensuring that the rest of his life would be no less difficult.

Of the most esteemed figure in the history of the English language, William Shakespeare, there are but two authentic images. One is a portrait on the cover of the First Folio edition of his plays, the other a statue in the church in which he is buried. But likenesses of number two, Samuel Johnson, abound, and they reveal a man who appears quite less than dashing, his face fleshy and his nose overgrown. The truth, however, is worse. In Alexander Pope’s words, even as a young man, Johnson was “a sad Spectacle.” In fact, he first gained public notice by his appearance, plagued as he was with some kind of neurological disorder, “an Infirmity of the convulsive kind,” as Pope put it, “that attacks him sometimes.” According to a modern biographer of Johnson, “These obsessional traits took such a variety of forms as to have included almost every major category of tics or compulsive gestures.” While walking down the street, Johnson sometimes looked like a marionette whose strings were being pulled by a madman.

they usually tend to have one common denominator: an instinctive effort to control—to control aggressions by turning them in against himself. (As [the painter] Joshua Reynolds shrewdly said, “those actions always appeared to me as if they were meant to reprobate some part of his past conduct.”) Or they were employed to control anxiety and reduce things to apparent manageability by “compartmentalization,” by breaking things down into units through measure (counting steps, touching posts, and the like), just as he turned to arithmetic . . . when he felt his mind disordered.

It may be for this reason that Johnson, renowned though he was in his time and venerated as he remains in learned circles, turned out so little creative work in his life. Shakespeare filled the stage, writing eleven tragedies, fourteen comedies, and a dozen histories. His oeuvre also includes five poems and another 154 sonnets. When he was not writing, he was often listening to his words being read during rehearsals or supervising publication of his verse.

Not only was Johnson less prolific, but his works have been less regarded through the ages. He was an eloquent man, a wit, although not quite the stylist Shakespeare was, and certainly not in the same category as an author of drama or poetry. But Shakespeare was not in Johnson’s category as a guest at salons. In large part because of his aphorisms, the shortest of literary forms, which Johnson was often able to improvise, his sparkling conversation distracted from his infirmaties and delighted his fellow partygoers. Behind only Shakespeare, Johnson was the most widely quoted man in his native tongue, not only in his time but up to the present as well.

Yet he is far better known for a book written about him than anything he wrote himself. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by the Scottish diarist and journalist James Boswell, remains the most famous account of a life ever produced in English; it was as a result of this that Johnson seems to be “one of the most fascinating individuals in history.”

The most notable work to which Johnson can lay claim himself was not his alone, but rather a committee’s doing, compiled as much as written, and although Johnson headed the committee, he did a minority of the compiling. A Dictionary of the English Language, which took Johnson and his clerks a decade to complete, and required them to peruse thousands of books, was the standard volume of its kind for more than a century, until the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1884. It was without question a work of scholarship. It was also a work of whimsy, sometimes provided by Johnson’s gift for the aphorism, sometimes by his use of quotes from other sources to illustrate the meaning of a word.

Johnson might have done a minority of the compiling, but he provided virtually all of the definitions and quotes. Some of them are as follows:

bear. (1) A rough savage animal.

to bloat. To swell, or make turgid with wind.

The strutting petticoat smooths all distinctions, levels the mother with the daughter. I cannot but be troubled to see so many well-shaped innocent virgins bloated up, and waddling up and down like the high-bellied women. Addison, Spectator.

a dab. (3) Something moist or slimy thrown upon one. (In low language.) An artist, a man expert at something. This is not used in writing.

retromigency. The quality of staling [making water] backwards.

The last foundation was retromigency, or pissing backwards; for men observing both sexes to urine backwards, or aversely between their legs, they might conceive there were feminine parts in both. Browne’s Vulgar Errours.

tonguepad. A great talker.

She who was a celebrated wit at London is, in that dull part of the world, called a tonguepad. Tatler.

Johnson also wrote essays, few of them memorable, and a philosophical novel called Rasselas, which he produced in one week, supposedly to pay for his mother’s funeral expenses, and in which the title character, the prince of Abyssinia, and three companions travel through Egypt looking for happiness. They don’t find it. Neither does the reader. At least Rasselas has the virtue of brevity; it is so short that in some modern paperback editions the text occupies fewer than 180 pages. Yet, the dictionary notwithstanding, it was Johnson’s lengthiest work of prose, and so unmemorable that a person in search of that paperback today will not easily locate it. For so venerated a craftsman of the English language, it seems a remarkably unremarkable output, certainly not comparable in any conventional way to that of Dickens or Hardy, or even Maugham or Forster. Nonetheless, Johnson’s name is engraved in the pantheon, and in larger letters than those who were more productive.

The son of a poor bookseller, Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford University after little more than a year, because his parents could not pay his tuition. He became a schoolteacher, a husband, and the master of an academy that he founded himself near the small town of Lichfield. He did not have problems with overcrowding. His student body, at its peak, numbered three.

In 1777, penniless and pessimistic, Johnson and one of his students, the eventually famous actor David Garrick, set out for London, where Garrick made the rounds of the theaters, quickly winning roles and making a name for himself. As for Johnson, he found employment writing, or rather transcribing, parliamentary debates for a publication called the Gentleman’s Magazine. These were not debates as we understand the term today. Or perhaps they were, for, more than a genuine interchange of ideas, what they more closely resembled were the quadrennial follies staged by our candidates for the presidency in front of television cameras—the members of Parliament taking turns reciting lines in a manner that did little to enlighten those who came to listen. For that, people would have better advised to watch the debating societies of Oxford and Cambridge in one of their competitions.

Johnson needed the money that the Gentleman’s Magazine provided. But the thought of actually showing up at the House of Commons, listening to the members of Parliament prattle on day after day, expressing themselves in language so clunky that it made his tics start ticking all the more, was something Johnson could not abide. He would not do it. For more than two years, Johnson was the Gentleman’s Magazine’s only man on the parliamentary beat. Yet during that time he attended the House of Lords a grand total of once.

Still, from his own sofa or lounging chair or even bed, often wearing only an oversized dressing robe and tattered slippers, he provided daily coverage of parliamentary activity, the only such coverage available to the men and women of London. For instance, in the winter of 1740, Johnson quoted one of the MPs as saying the following about the British war at sea with Spain:

To encourage our Seamen to do their Duty, and to unite private Men, at their own Expence, to attack and distress the Enemy, must necessarily contribute greatly to a vigorous Prosecution of the War, which, if vigorously prosecuted, cannot be long. . . . [O]ur very Being depends upon bringing this War to a speedy Conclusion. There is a Spirit of late raised among every Nation throughout this part of the World, for improving their Trade, Navigation, and Manufactures. . . . What then shall become of us, if by a languid Prosecution of the War, we allow our Trade to be interrupted by Privateers under Iberian [Spanish] colours; whilst our Rivals are carrying on theirs without any Disturbance?

Said another MP one day in 1741, as Johnson tells it, about a proposed bill to protect the citizenry against unethical behavior in Parliament:

My Lords, a Bill of like Tendency has often been laid before us, I have several times given my Vote against it, and my Reasons for so doing. My Sentiments are still the same, because my Reasons have never been answer’d, nor the least care taken in forming this Bill to obviate any of the Objections to the former.

The Danger of Corruption, my Lords, may be painted forth in frightening Colours, and were it real, I should explode Corruption with as much Zeal and Sincerity I am sure, tho’ not with so much Rhetoric, as any Lord in the House; but Corruption, my Lords, ought not, I think, be the Subject of our Debate.

And spoke a third MP in 1742, as the Johnson version has it, in favor of a bill to provide aid for India:

Let us not add to the Miseries of Famine the Mortification of Insult and Neglect, let our Countrymen, at least divide our Care with our Allies, and while we form schemes for succouring the Queen of Hungruland [India], let us endeavour to alleviate nearer distresses, and prevent or pacify domestic Discontents.

If there be any Man whom the sight of Misery cannot move to Compassion, who can hear the Complaints of Want without Sympathy, and see the general Calamity of his Country with employing one Hour on Schemes for its Relief: Let not that Man dare to boast of Integrity, Fidelity or Honour.

Johnson made it up. Every word of it, every punctuation mark, every paragraph break. Every single day that he published his account of the House of Commons, it was just that, his account. But he did not make up the positions of the various MPs. He was well enough acquainted with their thoughts on the various issues to know what they would say, and well enough acquainted with their lack of originality to know they were more likely to repeat themselves than reexamine the matters at hand and put forth new ideas.

Despite this, he sometimes employed a young man to eavesdrop on the MPs and then run back to Johnson’s rooms with the substance of their comments. But like a movie that is “based on” a book rather than literally following its plot, Johnson’s reports were based on the speeches rather than literally rendering them. He did not, to repeat, except for one day, hear a single word from the gallery of the House of Commons.

W. Jackson Bate, Johnson’s superb late-twentieth-century biographer, was impressed:

The Parliamentary Debates remain one of the most remarkable feats in the entire history of journalism. . . . When we consider [the debates’] total length, their historical importance (the fact that for so long they were considered authentic speeches by some of England’s greatest statesmen), the extraordinary resourcefulness and range of argumentative ability they show, his age (thirty-one to thirty-four) and inexperience, the disadvantages under which he worked [by which Bate presumably means Johnson’s failure to attend the events to which he was assigned, certainly a disadvantage to any reporter], and finally the incredible speed with which he wrote them, it is hard to find anything remotely comparable.

But just how accurate was Johnson? Surely there was the occasional member of Parliament who said something the scribe did not anticipate. Surely the occasional topic was raised for which Johnson had not prepared. Surely the young man he hired to listen in on the debates missed something that history would have found worth recording. Surely the estimable Mr. Bate goes too far in his praise, and nowhere at all in offering a cautionary note.

The reason that Johnson’s versions of the debates were considered authentic for so long—at least twenty years, and by some even longer—was that Johnson was a much better writer than any of the MPs. They were not about to admit that in the process of being falsified, they were simultaneously being made to appear much more eloquent than they really were.

At first Johnson took pride in the approbation his speeches earned. But after a while pride turned to grumpiness—all that praise directed at so many people, everyone except the person who really deserved it. His anonymity had begun to wear on him, an abrasive to his ego, which became all the more rebellious in response. One night at a banquet, long after Johnson had ceased to write for the Gentleman’s Magazine, the scholar Philip Francis was addressing the diners and said he had recently come across a speech that William Pitt had given to the House of Lords some years earlier, referring to it as “the best he had ever read.” Even Demosthenes, the most famous of early Greek orators, about whom Francis was the reigning British expert, had never written so magnificently.

At this, Johnson’s tether snapped. Pitt was in attendance at the dinner, and when the ovation for him died down, Pitt standing at his chair and acknowledging the encomiums with a wave of the hand and the most self-satisfied of grins, a moment of silence filled the dining hall. Johnson ended it by muttering loudly enough so that most could hear, “That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter.”

And, more than likely, Johnson’s doubts began in earnest. The older he got the more he fretted at what he had done, and eventually his reservations were exacerbated by ever-declining health: bouts with bronchitis, pneumonia, catarrh, not to mention blindness in one eye. It was no longer a matter of ego; it was a matter of conscience. He was not a happy person generally, and was specifically annoyed that his replicas of the parliamentary debates were coming to be viewed as the historical record. When he gave up the practice after only a few years, he told a friend that he “would not be accessory to the propagation of falsehood.”

Six days before Johnson died, still troubled by his creativity as a much younger man, he said to a friend that back when he was crafting the MPs’ orations, “he did not think he was imposing on the world.” Now, however, he feared otherwise. He had rewritten the truth, and if it is fair to say that he converted it not into lies so much as literature, it is also fair to say that what Johnson wrote was not precisely what the members of Parliament said, in which case The Parliamentary Debates, in their hundreds of pages, probably constitute the longest single series of falsehoods ever assembled under the banner of fact in the history of reporting.

Yet that does not seem to be a prevalent view. As previously stated, Johnson’s modern biographer toasted him for his ingenuity. His most famous biographer, Boswell, was unconcerned with the Debates. This, however, does not tell us as much about Bate and Boswell as it does about the kind of world in which Johnson lived, a world in which, as previously stated, most people had little time for journalism. But when those among the British who did have time—which is to say, for the most part, the upper classes—turned their attention to current events, they preferred to read the works of those who were not paid for their efforts. They trusted men who dipped their pens without remuneration, believing them to be “persons of enlarged views and unbiased vision.” And, of course, substantial outside income.

As for journalists, like Johnson, who were forced to grasp for every farthing, their publications were often treated with disdain. “Writing for money,” states scholar John Brewer, “not only reduced authorship to a mechanical trade but subverted the value of the work. Literature for profit could not be unsullied and unbiased; tainted with lucre, it became a hideous grotesque—distorted, partial and blind.”

Brewer goes too far. But his general point, stripped of hyperbole, is accurate. When Englishmen learned of Johnson’s duplicity, they became even less trusting of newspapers than before, delaying the eventual acceptance of journalism as a reliable source of information, and contributing to their own ignorance of the world at a time when world affairs were becoming more and more important, and would in fact soon lead the British to a war with their own kin across the Atlantic.