14

CONTAGION OF DESIRE 1763-1764

I

Johnson had experienced several major turning points in his life: leaving Oxford, getting married, completing the Dictionary and receiving his government pension. The events that took place in the twenty months between May 1763 and January 1765—befriending James Boswell and founding the Literary Club, as well as meeting the Thrales—would also transform his life in fundamental ways. Johnson’s literary reputation and financial security were now firmly established, but he was still struggling with severe depression and would soon suffer a second mental breakdown.

The fateful encounter between the twenty-two-year old Boswell and the literary lion he’d been stalking took place on May 16, 1763, in the back room of Tom Davies’ bookshop at 8 Great Russell Street, near what is now the British Museum. Boswell became not only an intimate friend and surrogate son, but also the devoted recorder of Johnson’s life. With his usual dramatic flair, Boswell described one of the great hostile-turned-friendly meetings in literature. He already had a clear idea of Johnson’s appearance from engravings of Reynolds’ first portrait of him, pen in hand and deep in meditation, and first saw him through a glass door, portentously approaching like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Boswell’s tracking shot of a ghost seen through glass then became a sharp close-up of Johnson’s rocky face and mountainous belly.

Boswell knew that Johnson was notoriously hostile to the Scots. He particularly disliked the Presbyterian Church, the Jacobite threat of a civil war and the restoration of a Catholic Stuart king. He disapproved of the inordinate Scottish influence in England, symbolized by Lord Bute, George III’s close friend and prime minister, who (ironically enough) had given him his comfortable pension. In The False Alarm Johnson maintained that “every one knows the malice, the subtilty, the industry, the vigilance, and the greediness of the Scots.” Boswell, ecstatic with anticipation, begged Davies not to mention that he was a Scot, though his accent would immediately betray him. Davies provocatively announced that Boswell came from Scotland, and Boswell defensively pleaded, “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” Johnson, seizing the opening and twisting it to mean that Boswell had been forced to leave his impoverished home, crushed him with “that, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” He thus implied that the English had not been able to staunch the invasion of immigrants from the north.

Johnson told Davies that Garrick had refused to give him a free theater ticket for Anna Williams (he rarely asked favors for himself, but often solicited them for friends). Eager to edge into the conversation, Boswell committed a second humiliating gaffe. “‘O, Sir,’ Boswell said, ‘I cannot think Mr. Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you.’ ‘Sir, (said he, with a stern look), I have known David Garrick longer than you have done: and I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject.’” Boswell’s comment made Johnson, always possessive about Garrick, even angrier by emphasizing the rudeness of his refusal.

Much mortified but not entirely defeated by his rough reception, the irrepressible Boswell struggled to maintain his precarious foothold and was rewarded with more talk. Johnson mentioned John Wilkes, the radical MP whose political views he loathed, but who’d helped secure Frank Barber’s release from the navy. He spoke of Wilkes’ criticism of the royal family and insisted that he had behaved outrageously. Though Wilkes was protected by parliamentary privilege, he deserved to be chastised: “I think he is safe from the law, but he is an abusive scoundrel; and instead of applying to my Lord Chief Justice to punish him, I would send a half a dozen footmen and have him well ducked.” After Johnson left, Boswell, though battered by his blows, felt that he was an essentially good-natured man. Davies consoled him by saying, “don’t be uneasy. I can see he likes you very well.”¹

Boswell’s relationship with his father had taught him to endure harsh treatment. Born in Edinburgh in 1740, he was five feet, six inches tall, robust and plump, with dark skin, wavy hair and the hint of a double chin. Cursed with a feckless character and a morbid Calvinistic streak, he was constantly criticized by his severe and disapproving father, the High Court judge Lord Auchinleck, whom he compared to a cold surgical instrument. Boswell’s father (who was two years older than Johnson) first forced him to study English and Scottish law, and then told him that he was not qualified to practice because “it would cost him more trouble to hide his ignorance in these professions than to show his knowledge.” In Johnson, Boswell found a stern but forgiving father figure, with the warmth, encouragement, humor and affection that his own father lacked.

When Boswell called on him a few days after the bookshop encounter, Johnson was characteristically shabby and disheveled. But Boswell found that Davies had been right. They immediately hit it off, and launched into an engrossing conversation. They discussed the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian poems, the madness of the poet Christopher Smart, the motives for truly moral behavior and the evidences of the Christian religion. Though Boswell twice offered to leave, Johnson pressed him to stay and keep the talk on the boil. As they parted after Boswell’s second visit, Johnson urged him to come as often as he could and said he’d always be glad to see his new friend. During their third meeting, at Johnson’s favorite tavern, the High-Church-sounding Mitre, they conversed about the poetry of Colley Cibber and Thomas Gray, and the new plays at Drury Lane. Johnson encouraged Boswell to pursue his studies, to travel in little-known Spain and to write a book about it. Johnson told him, “give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.” By the time he’d been introduced to Goldsmith and Anna Williams, Boswell said his mind had become “strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether.”²

Though pushy and self-promoting, an anxious and ambitious outsider, Boswell nevertheless managed to charm. Childishly egoistic, he had a zest for life and curiosity about other people, an acute perception and lively imagination. Insecure yet cocky, melancholy yet high-spirited, he won people over with his great good humor. Boswell and Johnson had a spontaneous and intuitive affinity. By August 1763, when Boswell left England to study Roman law (closely connected to Scottish law) at Utrecht, they’d become good friends. Protestant Holland, the home of Erasmus and Spinoza, was famous for its religious toleration and freedom of speech, and the Dutch King William III had replaced James II and ruled England from 1689 to 1702. In the 1660s, when Germany was still a weak collection of princely states, Holland had a great empire. Britons went there to study in the eighteenth century just as they would go to Germany in the nineteenth.

Johnson loved a leisurely ramble in a coach with plenty of time to talk. As a mark of his affectionate regard, he offered to accompany Boswell on the two-day stagecoach journey to Harwich, on the North Sea coast, and see him out of England. At dinner the first night he repaid Boswell’s adoration by teasing him in front of strangers. He said “that gentleman there (pointing at me), has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever.” Johnson may well have reflected that he too had been idle at Oxford and had not, like Boswell, earned a university degree. His theme and variations on Boswell’s idleness—past, present and future—were based on Boswell’s confessions about his studies in Scotland, Johnson’s own observations about Boswell’s wasteful life in London and his shrewd prediction about what was bound to happen in Holland. Boswell protested about this public ridicule, but Johnson, ignoring his complaint, said the people didn’t know him and would think no more about it.

When it was time for him to leave, Boswell, idealizing Johnson as “majestick,” recorded their farewell:

My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, “I hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.” Johnson. “Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.” As the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestick frame in his usual manner: and at last I perceived him walk back into the town.

He then faded out of Boswell’s view as slowly as he’d first appeared in Davies’ bookshop.

Johnson’s parting from Boswell, en route to study in Holland, inevitably reminded him of his equally emotional farewell to Savage, en route to exile in Wales, in July 1739. Savage left London, Johnson recalled, “having taken leave with great tenderness of his friends, and parted from the author of this narrative with tears in his eyes.” Savage had drifted out of his life, and Johnson may well have wondered if he’d ever see Boswell again. But they corresponded as promised, and resumed their warm friendship when Boswell returned to England—after two and a half years in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France—in February 1766.

Buoyed by his meetings with Johnson, Boswell sailed to Holland, where his studies came a distant second to wenching and drinking. He then set off on a Grand Tour of the continent and successfully courted two more literary celebrities, the notorious Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose lives and thought were antithetical to Johnson’s. He took an adventurous trip to the wilds of bandit-ridden Corsica, then ruled by the Republic of Genoa, where he met the revolutionary hero Pasquale Paoli. He passionately admired Paoli and supported his effort to free his country. Boswell’s Account of Corsica (1768), dedicated to Paoli, established the patriot’s reputation in Europe, made him welcome in England when he was forced into exile, and influenced British and French policy toward the island. On his way home, Boswell, a fox in charge of a hen, escorted Rousseau’s mistress, Thérèse Le Vasseur, from Paris to England, and seduced her on the way. Both commented tartly on the experience. She allowed he was a “hardy and vigorous lover, but [had] no art.” He ungallantly described her performance as “agitated, like a bad rider galloping downhill.”³

In later years Boswell, escaping from his dour father and tedious law practice—he lost several clients to the gallows and morbidly witnessed their executions—was always delighted to be with Johnson in London. They usually saw each other in the spring, when both were at their best. Having survived the illnesses and gloom of an English winter, Johnson was cheered by Boswell’s high spirits and gossipy talk. Boswell felt that being with Johnson was the high point of his life. Finding himself in the exalted company of Johnson and Goldsmith, he alluded to Swift’s poem (“They hug themselves, and reason thus: / ‘It is not yet so bad with us’”) and ecstatically recorded, “I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

Boswell also had a dark side. His mental instability, though not as extreme as Johnson’s, was evident in his periods of intense boredom and depression, reckless gambling and alcoholism, sexual debauchery and venereal disease. Though he solemnly insisted “there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman,” his relations with women were often more commercial than congenial.⁴ He was consistently unfaithful to his attractive and tolerant wife. Over a ten-year period in the 1760s, the charming but not particularly attractive Boswell slept with three married women, had liaisons with four actresses, kept three lower-class mistresses and paid for quick, sometimes stand-up sex in dark alleys with more than sixty whores. He fathered and neglected two bastards.

Johnson remained chaste after his wife’s death, while Boswell, acting out the passions that Johnson forced himself to suppress, fornicated insatiably. Johnson disapproved of Boswell’s immorality and (after his marriage to a cousin in 1769) of his adultery, which Boswell unsuccessfully tried to conceal from his moral guide. Yet he also envied his sexual freedom, and observed the vices of rakish friends with surprising tolerance. He too had been guilty of heavy drinking and sexual adventures when consorting with Savage, and still longed for drink and sex after he’d become rigorously abstinent and celibate. His athletic feats and occasional violence were a physical release from oppressive desires, and he got vicarious pleasure from Boswell’s exploits.

A drunkard and sometimes a buffoon, Boswell played Falstaff to Johnson’s Prince Hal. Johnson’s “Notes” on Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2 suggest they were written with Boswell in mind and that Johnson saw the parallels: “Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy.”

Johnson and Boswell complemented each other’s personalities and shared significant traits. Johnson had hoped to be a lawyer; Boswell, the son he never had, became one. Johnson found it difficult to start writing; Boswell was a compulsive writer for whom nothing was real till he’d recorded it. Johnson was the first literary celebrity; Boswell the first modern biographer. Obsessed with literary fame, Boswell was perhaps the first writer to review his own work. He even dedicated an anonymous ode to himself, thanking “James Boswell, Esq... for your particular kindness to me, and chiefly for the profound respect with which you have always treated me.”

Both men frequently made and broke vows, and felt corrosive guilt after the deaths of their wives. Both suffered from crippling indolence and profound dejection. Boswell’s melancholy frightened Johnson and threatened to undermine his own precarious sanity. He strongly warned Boswell not to discuss “the exaltations and depressions of your mind [of which] you delight to talk, and I hate to hear... Make it an invariable and obligatory law to yourself, never to mention your own mental diseases.”⁵

Boswell was drawn to Johnson’s mind and character by a contagion of desire, like a lover eager to know everything about the beloved. Except when too drunk to record the conversation, he never stopped inquiring and observing. In his Life Boswell devoted himself to delineating minute particulars of Johnson’s behavior, to painting a realistic Flemish picture, to making him as vivid as possible. Boswell was with Johnson for about 425 days during the last twenty-two years of Johnson’s life, a quarter of them during their tour of Scotland in 1773. But the amount of time they spent together was not as important as the depth of intimacy that developed between them. The emotional power of Boswell’s feeling for Johnson drove the dramatic narrative of the Life.

Fanny Burney, a more discreet diarist, satirically observed the observer observing. She noted that Boswell’s senses were fully alert and his body responsive to Johnson’s speech, that his mouth hung open like a fish cruising for bait: “the moment that voice burst forth, the attention which it excited in Mr. Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered: nay, he seemed not only to dread losing a word, but to be anxious not to miss a breathing; as if hoping from it, latently, mystically, some information.”

Anyone who’s tried to write the lives of living authors knows how keen they are to elude the biographer’s net. Johnson also felt pursued by Boswell and was sometimes greatly vexed by his unremitting inquiries. Undeterred by occasional outbursts and setbacks, Boswell asked provocative questions, assiduously (sometimes tactlessly) collected material, took indiscreet notes immediately after conversations and deliberately incited Johnson’s wrath in order to create memorable scenes.

Edmund Burke, for one, disapproved of Boswell’s pernicious pursuit of his quarry, which interfered with the free and open talk between close friends. As Edmond Malone explained to Boswell, “The true cause I perceive, of Burke’s coldness, is that he thinks your habit of recording throws a restraint on convivial ease and negligence.” Johnson complained to Hester Thrale, “one would think the Man had been hired to be a spy upon me,” and was more directly confrontational with Boswell himself. Irritated by Boswell’s obsessive interrogations, he exploded with “I will not be put to the question. Don’t you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what, and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow’s tail long? why is a fox’s tail bushy? . . . You have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.”⁶

Yet Johnson could not help joining in Boswell’s biographical game. Their relationship had begun with Boswell paying court to Johnson and Johnson slapping him down, and this pattern continued until the end. Johnson retaliated by ridiculing and teasing. He loved to arouse Boswell’s curiosity, even about the most trivial details, and then withhold the precious information. Boswell noticed that Johnson saved the peel of squeezed oranges, scraped them neatly and let them dry. When Johnson adamantly refused to explain what he did with this treasure, Boswell said, with mock solemnity: “‘then the world must be left in the dark. It must be said . . . he never could be prevailed upon to tell.’ Johnson. ‘Nay, Sir, you should say it more emphatically:—he could not be prevailed upon, even by his dearest friends, to tell.’” In fact, Johnson used the dried peel as tinder to start fires and, when ground into a powder and taken with liquid, as a laxative and remedy for indigestion.

Johnson’s criticism of Boswell’s Scottish origins was a recurring tease. Boswell quoted, among Johnson’s other pronouncements, “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!” Johnson always mocked Boswell’s idleness and dissipation. In front of the rakish John Wilkes he declared, with some truth, that Boswell lived “among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in England.”⁷ Boswell hardened his carapace, but sometimes, when Johnson was genuinely angry, his painful barbs struck home. After Boswell claimed to be vexed by public affairs, Johnson insisted that neither Boswell’s food nor sleep were ever disturbed by events in Parliament. He then ordered Boswell to “clear your mind of cant,” which he defined as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” When Boswell wished he’d lived in the Augustan Age, Johnson told him that if he’d been alive in Pope’s time he would have been immortalized by being put into the Dunciad.

A sharp exchange that reversed their roles (and was too strong to be included in the Life) took place when Boswell told the deaf Johnson, whose hearing improved in a closed coach, that the rattling of the chaise made it impossible to hear him. Annoyed that Boswell couldn’t bear to miss a minute of his conversation, Johnson shocked him by retorting: “then you may go hang yourself.” Johnson, who had a realistic idea of hanging and often mentioned it, replied in a similar fashion to a particularly foolish but well-intentioned question. When Johnson was seriously ill, Boswell asked if he’d gone outside that day. Aware of the gravity of his own condition, Johnson shot back, “Don’t talk so childishly. You may as well ask if I hanged myself to-day.”⁸ But Boswell, fortunately for posterity, was impervious to insult. Like a large rubber doll, he always bounced back when Johnson knocked him down.

II

The eighteenth century was the great age of men’s clubs. In Spectator 9 (March 10, 1711) Joseph Addison wrote, “man is a sociable animal and we take all occasions and pretences of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies which are commonly known as clubs.” In the spring of 1714 Swift, Pope, Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Thomas Parnell and the Tory prime minister Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, formed the illustrious Scriblerus Club. In Johnson’s time there were Tall Clubs, Ugly Clubs, Surly Clubs, Farters’ Clubs and even Mollies’ Clubs, which catered to those with a taste for cross-dressing.

Johnson, with no wife or children and a misery-making household, oppressed by melancholy and fearful of solitude, enlivened his life with conversation and cheered himself up in company. He craved intellectual entertainment and constantly searched for “some kindred mind with which he could unite in confidence and friendship.” In the winter of 1748-49, while working on the Dictionary, he founded the Ivy Lane Club, which gathered at the King’s Head beefsteak house and tavern, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, for good food and lively conversation. The club—including Dr. Richard Bathurst, John Hawkins and John Hawkesworth—had arranged the all-night celebration for Charlotte Lenox in 1751, and lasted until about 1756.

Five months after Boswell’s departure for Holland, Johnson helped to found the famous Literary Club, which met for the first time in January 1764. The Club’s aim was to elect the leading man in every profession. In contrast to the contentious losers in his dysfunctional household, the brilliant members, from the artistic and intellectual elite of England, liked and admired one another. The nine founding members included many of Johnson’s closest friends: Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith, Hawkins, Langton and Beauclerk, as well as Dr. Richard Nugent, Burke’s father-in-law, and Anthony Chamier, secretary of the war office. The Club gradually elected other illuminati: Percy, Garrick, Boswell, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles Burney and the naturalist Joseph Banks, and became the most brilliant concentration of genius in English literary history. By the time of Johnson’s death in 1784, it had thirty-five members, including four lords and an earl.

The Club met informally and under Johnson’s benign gaze, once a week at 7 PM at the convivial Turk’s Head Tavern on Garrard Street in Soho, and continued to eat and drink till late at night. Boswell was predictably bumptious, Gibbon was silent and Burke was unconstrained and fooled around. Johnson, more formal and guarded, was always ready for aggressive argument. The unclubbable Hawkins was frozen out after his intolerable rudeness to Burke. Beauclerk defected to more fashionable clubs, but later regained admission.

Many distinguished men keenly sought to join. There was a good deal of discussion about who should be let in and kept out, and members tended to defer to Johnson’s wishes. Garrick brazenly declared he would join; Johnson said they might not want a mere player; and Garrick had to cool his heels offstage till 1773. The Irish MP and friend of Burke, Agmondesham Vesey (who should have been admitted on the strength of his first name alone), was so anxious about his fate that he hired couriers to race with the news of his vote. No women were allowed; and friends like Hawkesworth, Henry Thrale and Baretti were either not proposed or blackballed.

The leading Club members not only had extensive knowledge and experience, but also came from diverse social origins and geographical backgrounds. Beauclerk had royal blood; Percy was the son of a grocer. Most of them were born outside of London. Burke, Goldsmith and Nugent came from Ireland; Boswell and Adam Smith from Scotland. Others were from the English provinces: Johnson and Garrick from the Midlands; Reynolds from Devon; Percy and Burney from Shropshire in the west; Langton from Lincolnshire in the east. Burke, Gibbon and Sheridan (like the brewer Henry Thrale and bookseller William Strahan) were Members of Parliament. Joseph Banks had traveled around the world on the Endeavour with Captain James Cook.

On their tour of Scotland in 1773, Johnson and Boswell fantasized about creating their own university in St. Andrews, a kind of Institute for Advanced Study staffed by the luminaries of the Club. Boswell wrote:

I was to teach Civil and Scotch Law; Burke, Politics and Eloquence; Garrick, the Art of Public Speaking; Langton was to be our Grecian, [George] Colman our Humanist; Nugent to teach Physic... Goldsmith, Poetry and Ancient History; Chamier, Commercial Politics; Reynolds, Painting and the arts which have beauty for their object; [Robert] Chambers, the Law of England. Mr. Johnson at first said, “I’ll trust Theology to nobody but myself.” But upon due consideration that Percy is a clergyman, it was agreed that Percy should teach Practical Divinity and British Antiquities, and Mr. Johnson himself, Logic, Metaphysics, and Scholastic Divinity.

It was a fascinating idea. Boswell might have enrolled Hawkins and Burney to teach music. Garrick could have also taught acting. Goldsmith would have disappointed students by his hapless ignorance, lack of preparation and lost lecture notes. Reynolds could have tried out his Discourses on art. Chambers, as in real life, would have had his law lectures ghostwritten by Johnson. The polymath Johnson graciously ceded theology to a divine, but kept three subjects—more than anyone else had—for himself. (It’s not clear if he meant to use a whip on his pupils.) He could have said, as a wag said of the nineteenth-century Oxford don Benjamin Jowett: “I am the Master of this college: / What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.”

The members of the exclusive, close-knit Club shared an unusual mixture of rivalry, competition and magnanimity. Aware of their mutual foibles and faults, they indulged in high-minded discourse and repeated juicy gossip, jockeyed for position and tried to shine in the bright swordplay of wit. At the meeting on April 3, 1778, the shifting conversation ranged from intellectual topics like ancient art, the Irish language and travel writing, to political questions like emigration, speeches in parliament and suppliants for office, to practical matters like replenishing their nearly exhausted hogshead of claret. In the outside world they pulled strings and granted favors for friends, and were pleased by individual achievements and collective success. Like a kindly schoolmaster, Johnson addressed his friends by their nicknames (though “Goldy” objected) and kept the unruly class in order.

Pasquale Paoli—the Garibaldi of his time—was not elected to the Club, probably because he was a foreigner, had an imperfect command of English and always planned, when circumstances permitted, to return to rule Corsica. A contemporary wrote, “Paoli is of a fair and florid complexion with dark and piercing eyes, and about five feet nine inches tall (as I guess); strongly made, but not in the least clumsy. He uses many gestures in his conversation as other Italians do... He looks and speaks like one who had been accustomed to command, yet there is nothing rough or assuming about him, but on the contrary the utmost politeness.”⁹ The kindly and dignified old soldier, well read in the classics, had been made wealthy by his British government pension of £1,200 a year, granted for his patriotic struggles against Genoa and then France. He charmed Fanny Burney, who described him as “a very pleasing man, tall and genteel in his person, remarkably well bred and very mild and soft in his manners.”

Boswell introduced his two heroes in London in October 1769, when Paoli first arrived in England, and interpreted as they spoke in French. Johnson, impressed by Paoli, said “he had very much the air of a man who had been at the head of a nation.”¹⁰ Both men had huge appetites and liked to dine and drink together. They discussed languages, marriage and melancholy; visited Rochester together, and met in Wales. Paoli, later accorded the rare honor of a bust in Westminster Abbey, was among the distinguished mourners at Johnson’s funeral.

III

Johnson almost never went to the theater after the production of Irene in 1749, had no appreciation of music or opera, couldn’t dance, rarely drank, and was bored by cards and games. Without these diversions, he concentrated on the stimulus of learned conversation. He craved, above all, the “animated reciprocation of Ideas,” which enabled him to display before an appreciative audience his intellect and his wit.

Like Dryden in The Lives of the Poets, Johnson “did not offer his conversation, because he expected it to be solicited.” He was, as Fielding said of a character in Tom Jones, “like a ghost, [who] only wanted to be spoke to” and then “readily answered.”¹¹ Once jump-started, however, he shot out amusing and sometimes devastating salvoes. He said of a bothersome acquaintance, “I never did the man an injury; yet he would read his tragedy to me.” Asked to join friends on a visit to Westminster Abbey and thinking it might be his final resting place, he replied, “No . . . not while I can keep out.” Sometimes Johnson’s own verbal faux pas enraged him. Defending a certain woman, he insisted she “had a bottom of good sense.” Boswell said “the word bottom thus introduced, was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing.” Furious that he’d provoked ridicule and determined to exercise despotic power, Johnson dug himself into a deeper hole by suggesting the word “anus.” “Where’s the merriment?” he asked, then slowly pronounced, “I say the woman was fundamentally sensible.”¹²

Johnson could talk brilliantly on any subject that came up and could argue, with the perverse virtuosity of a lawyer, on either side of an issue. He often began a statement contrary-wise, with “No, Sir,” and his opponent’s rejoinder, no matter how reasonable, sounded rather feeble after his thunderous argument. Boswell recorded that Johnson even defended the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, maintaining that “false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion.” As he wrote of Dryden in The Lives of the Poets, “when once he had engaged himself in disputation, thoughts flowed in on either side: he was no longer at a loss; he had always objections and solutions at command.”

Johnson liked to think of himself as good-humored and polite, but he had a talent for invective and with astonishing rapidity thought up humiliating rebukes and crushing put-downs. He could, if irritated (and it was all too easy to irritate him), be as cruel as Swift and as caustic as Voltaire. He had an instinctive need to provoke and to shock, and his personal insults were the verbal equivalent of his physical violence. He observed in the Ramblers that every man, like “every animal, revenges his pain on those who happen to be near,” and that passionate men (like himself) are “provoked on every slight occasion, to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches.”¹³

Arthur Murphy, appalled by his frightening outbursts, called Johnson “a stranger to the arts of polite conversation; uncouth, vehement, and vociferous.” Boswell, more forgiving and more perceptive, explained that Johnson was not only deeply disturbed by his own inner struggles, but also vented his rage at the intolerable foolishness and heartbreaking injustice in the world: “Johnson’s harsh attacks on his friends arise from uneasiness within. There is an insurrection aboard. His loud explosions are guns of distress.”

He was not above lowlife exchanges. When a Thames boatman attacked him with coarse raillery, Johnson retaliated by piling up insults. He shouted, “your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods”—and let the boatman determine whether it was worse to be a whore or a thief. But most of his cutting remarks were more subtle. Dr. Bernard maintained that no man could improve after the age of forty-five. Johnson riposted that “there was great room for improvement in him, and he wished that he would set about it.”¹⁴ A pompous gentleman coming out of a service in Lichfield Cathedral said, “‘Dr. Johnson, we have had a most excellent discourse to-day!’ ‘That may be,’ said Johnson, ‘but it is impossible you should know it.’” A cheeky young gentleman, slightly drunk, resolved to bait him (as people often did) by asking: “‘what would you give, old gentleman, to be as young and sprightly as I am?’ ‘Why, Sir,’ said he, ‘I think I would almost be content to be as foolish.’”

Women, as well as complacent and presumptuous men, could also be the victims of his sudden blasts. Pressed to read and comment on the work of a tedious female, who said she had no time to correct it herself because she had so many irons in the fire, he shot out: “then, Madam, I would advise you to put this where your Irons are.” Women who’d been trying to be kind were especially shocked and frightened by his outbursts. Frances Reynolds, though sympathetic to Johnson, recalled an occasion when he made free with the name of the Lord. When the lady in a country house “was pressing him to eat something, he rose up with his knife in hand, and loudly exclaim’d, ‘I vow to God I cannot eat a bit more,’ to the great terror of all the company.”¹⁵ After another woman said she’d been deeply affected by the tender sentiments in a novel by Laurence Sterne, Johnson, who thought Sterne an irreverent clergyman, crushed her with, “that is, because, dearest, you’re a dunce.” When she complained (as few people ever did) that he’d been rude, he disingenuously replied: “Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have said it.” No wonder, then, when a puzzled woman asked him why he was not courted by the great and invited to dine at their tables, he bluntly explained, without the slightest admission that his behavior was improper, “because, madam, great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped.”

One of Johnson’s most devastating rejoinders, which annihilated a balding, high-voiced, timorous young clergyman and supposedly ended his promising career, was described in Max Beerbohm’s amusing fantasia “A Clergyman” (1918). Beerbohm first quoted Boswell’s anecdote: “Boswell. ‘What sermons afford the best specimens of English pulpit eloquence?’ Johnson. ‘We have no sermons addressed to the passions that are good for any thing; if you mean that kind of eloquence.’ A Clergyman (whose name I do not recollect). ‘Were not [William] Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?’ Johnson. ‘They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.’” Beerbohm then added his own gloss: “The suddenness of it! Bang!—and the rabbit that had popped from its burrow was no more. I know not which is the more startling—the début of the unfortunate clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end.”¹⁶ Beerbohm’s vignette was doubly ironic. Johnson contradicted the mild query of a clergyman, a profession he usually respected; and though the clergyman could not know it, Johnson himself had written Dodd’s last prison sermon before he was executed for forgery.

Many victims who lacked Boswell’s resiliency limped away from Johnson’s attacks, licking their wounds and believing he’d been a bully and a boor. His cutting comments, however, were not made merely to vent his spleen, but to teach a moral lesson. They were usually incited, as he wrote in Rambler 40, not to gratify his pride “by the mortification of another,” but to improve mankind “by the hopes of reforming faults.” As we saw in his disputes with Beauclerk and Percy, Johnson usually felt sorry when he drew blood and made conciliatory gestures to the injured party. As Boswell learned from painful experience, “when he did say a severe thing, it was generally extorted by ignorance pretending to knowledge, or by extreme vanity or affectation.”¹⁷