Dr Johnson was one of the great moralists of 18th-century England: a staunch Tory, conservative in his religion and politics, and passionately opposed to slavery, one of his many reasons for disliking Americans. John Wilkes was one the leading radicals of the age, a Whig, and a notorious libertine to boot. The ever-inquisitive James Boswell was friends with them both: as he said: ‘Two men more different could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind’. They had even attacked one another with real dislike in print, and he decided to orchestrate a meeting between the two by arranging that they should sit beside each other at a dinner party at a friend’s house.
Boswell sly prepared – ‘negotiated’ as he put it – Johnson for the encounter by telling him that their host might have radical friends present: ‘I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.’ Johnson said ‘And if Jack Wilkes SHOULD be there, what is that to ME, Sir? My dear friend, let us have no more of this. I am sorry to be angry with you; but really it is treating me strangely to talk to me as if I could not meet any company whatever, occasionally.’
At the friend’s house, Johnson was disconcerted to find himself surrounded by radicals and ‘patriots’ (‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, as he once noted), but when they were called into dinner, Boswell says Wilkes ‘placed himself next to Dr. Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness, that he gained upon him insensibly. No man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate. Mr. Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. ‘Pray give me leave, Sir:—It is better here—A little of the brown—Some fat, Sir—A little of the stuffing—Some gravy—Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter—Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange;—or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.’—’Sir, Sir, I am obliged to you, Sir,’ cried Johnson, bowing, and turning his head to him with a look for some time of ‘surly virtue,’ but, in a short while, of complacency’.
The two even discovered a mutual antipathy to Scots, England then – as at some other times – being run by unpopular Scots. Boswell records: JOHNSON (to Mr. Wilkes) ‘You must know, Sir, I lately took my friend Boswell and shewed him genuine civilised life in an English provincial town. I turned him loose at Lichfield, my native city, that he might see for once real civility: for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in London.’WILKES. ‘Except when he is with grave, sober, decent people like you and me.’ JOHNSON. (smiling,) ‘And we ashamed of him.’
What Happened Next
The roguish radical and his new Tory friend were to bump into each other again years later, again under Boswell’s eye, and again they got on. Boswell’s experiment in matching opposites had worked, as long as the experiment was not extended too long. Wilkes. for example, does not seem to have shared Johnson’s visceral disgust at slavery – Johnson once drank a toast to the next slave rebellion – and in an odd twist of fate the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, a passionate defender of slavery, was named after him. See also 1764: Boswell gets Voltaire out of bed; 1773: Dr Johnson and Boswell stay with Flora MacDonald.