Four years after Johnson’s death in 1784, the essayist Vicesimus Knox remarked on the severity with which he had been treated by critics and biographers:
Few men could stand so fiery a trial as he has done. His gold has been put into the furnace, and really, considering the violence of the fire, and the frequent repetition of the process, the quantity of dross and alloy is inconsiderable….
I think it was in Egypt in which a tribunal was established to sit in judgment on the departed. Johnson has been tried with as accurate an investigation of circumstances as if he had been judicially arraigned on the banks of the Nile.
It does not appear that the witnesses were partial. The sentence of the public, according to their testimony, has rather reduced him; but time will replace him where he was, and where he ought to be, notwithstanding all his errors, and infirmities, high in the ranks of Fame…. The number of writers who have discussed the life, character, and writings of Johnson, is alone sufficient to evince that the public feels him to be a great man.1
Here in summary form is the outline of Johnson’s critical reception both during his lifetime and afterwards. Few writers have been subjected to an equally sustained, rigorous, and wide-ranging scrutiny for upwards of a century. Few have emerged from ‘so fiery a trial’ with such a secure reputation for greatness. The general nineteenth-century view of that greatness does not coincide with our own; but eminence of some kind was rarely denied him. He was constantly before the public: whether to acclaim or admonish, a succession of reviews, pamphlets, and books kept him there. It may have been merely an anonymous letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1774 in which he was cited as evidence that the ancients did not excel the moderns ‘in elegance of stile, or superiority of knowledge’.2 Or the swingeing attacks made on him by men like Charles Churchill, John Wilkes, Archibald Campbell and James Callender. Or such a book as Robert Alves’s Sketches of a History of Literature (1794) which, because of its censorious attitude towards Johnson, forced the Monthly Review into a reappraisal of its critical view of him.3 Or, on the other hand, it may have been no more than the casual sneer that occurs in Cobbett’s Tour of Scotland (1832):
Dr. Dread-Devil (who wrote in the same room that I write in when I am at Bolt-court) said, that there were no trees in Scotland, or at least something pretty nearly amounting to that. I wonder how they managed to take him about without letting him see trees. I suppose that lick-spittle Boswell, or Mrs Piozzi, tied a bandage over his eyes, when he went over the country which I have been over. I shall sweep away all this bundle of lies.4
Whatever the nature of the reference or the authority of the commentator, the reading public were continually reminded that the character, writings, and reputation of Johnson were subjects for debate. Indifference to them was impossible.
Johnson was not indifferent to his reception: praise or censure, so long as it was published, was welcome to the professional author:
It is advantageous to an authour, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.5
Johnson never lacked admirers, but a review of his critical reception leaves the impression that the most persistent and clamorous were his traducers. Indeed one wants to believe, with Boswell, that Johnson’s paragraph in the Life of Blackmore reflected his own character:
The incessant attacks of his enemies, whether serious or merry, are never discovered to have disturbed his quiet, or to have lessened his confidence in himself; they neither awed him to silence nor to caution; they neither provoked him to petulance nor depressed him to complaint. While the distributors of literary fame were endeavouring to depreciate and degrade him he either despised or defied them, wrote on as he had written before, and never turned aside to quiet them by civility or repress them by confutation.6
By 1779 (when this was written) Johnson knew from harsh experience how essential was this equanimity.
Substantial critical attention to Johnson’s works was delayed until the publication of the Rambler, 1750–2. His two major poems attracted little notice. The Gentleman’s Magazine printed brief extracts from London in May 1738 with the comment that the poem had ‘become remarkable for having got to the Second Edition in the Space of a Week’ (the third edition appeared on 15 July). Perhaps more significant was Pope’s remark on the anonymous author that ‘he will soon be déterré’.7 The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1749—the first work to bear Johnson’s name —attracted even less attention. The Gentleman’s Magazine printed extracts with no critical comment. On the other hand Irene (1749), his sole and unsuccessful attempt to write for the stage, was greeted by two pamphlets (Nos. 4, 5). Barely more than a fortnight after the first performance an anonymous sixpenny pamphlet was on sale, followed two weeks later by another, possibly written by the actor John Hippisley.
With the Rambler (1750–2) Johnson first caught the critics’ attention on any important scale. The sales were not large—though recent research shows that the potential readership was greater than had been thought before—but critical interest in the essays began at once. Two early tributes were reprinted by the Gentleman’s Magazine from the Remembrancer and the Student (No. 6); a third was reprinted from the Daily Advertiser. Charlotte Lennox, in the penultimate chapter of her novel The Female Quixote (1752), declared ‘the Author of the Rambler’ to be ‘the greatest Genius in the present Age’. Joseph Warton included Rambler No. 37 in his Works of Virgil in Latin and English (1753); in the same year essay 53 on ‘Essay Writers after Addison’, in the Gray’s-Inn Journal, referred to ‘the admirable Performances of the Author of the Rambler’ in his ‘nervous, clear, and harmonious Stile’; and Goldsmith paid Johnson a handsome compliment in the Bee, 3 November 1759. A discordant note had been sounded, however, in the Connoisseur, essay 27, on 1 August 1754. Although the author does not refer directly to Johnson, in view of subsequent criticism of his style one suspects that the Rambler was the target of remarks on the ‘new-fangled manner of delivering our sentiments’:
As to Essays, and all other pieces that come under the denomination of familiar writings, one would imagine, that they must necessarily be written in the easy language of nature and common-sense. No writer can flatter himself, that his productions will be an agreeable part of the equipage of the tea-table, who writes almost too abstrusively for the study, and involves his thoughts in hard words and affected latinisms. Yet this has been reckoned by many the standard stile for these loose detached pieces.
A few days earlier a similar comment in the privacy of a letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Bute certainly shows that the Rambler had roused the interest of the cognoscenti; it is also an early example of the distaste for the ‘Laborious Author’ (whose identity Lady Mary did not know) who plods after the Spectator ‘with the same Pace a Pack horse would do a Hunter in the style that is proper to lengthen a paper’.8
The Rambler had crept anonymously into the world; the Dictionary’s arrival was carefully stage-managed and professionally ‘puffed’. The Plan of a Dictionary had appeared in 1747; Dodsley, the publisher, had persuaded Lord Chesterfield (to whom the Plan was dedicated) to write two essays for the World (November-December 1754) to herald the forthcoming work; these essays were reprinted in three other journals,9 and an extensive advertising campaign coincided with the publication of the Dictionary itself on 15 April 1755. The book was widely reviewed. The Monthly Review allotted so much space to its favourable notice (by Sir Tanfield Leman) that it omitted its usual monthly ‘Catalogue of Books’, ‘notwithstanding the additional expence of four pages extraordinary’.10 The Gentleman’s Magazine reviewed it enthusiastically, and —like the Public Advertiser and London Magazine—printed Garrick’s poem ‘Upon Johnson’s Dictionary’ celebrating his friend’s superiority over the forty academicians of France:
And Johnson, well arm’d, like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.11
The practice of reprinting important notices—obvious in the case of Garrick’s verses—was also employed in the case of Adam Smith’s largely favourable article in the Edinburgh Review (No. 19). Abroad Johnson’s Dictionary was presented in 1755 to both the French Academy and the Accademia della Crusca; at home suitable publicity was given to these events.12
The chorus of approbation was not sustained. As the more professional lexicographers entered the debate censure of Johnson mounted. John Maxwell led the way. In The Character of Mr. Johnson’s English Dictionary (1755) he attacked the omission of certain classes of words, inadequate etymologies, and the unsatisfactory arrangement of Johnson’s definitions. Later the notorious John Horne Tooke contemptuously dismissed Johnson’s work as unworthy of serious consideration (No. 20); Herbert Croft in his Unfinished Letter to Pitt (1788) found the Dictionary ‘defective beyond all belief’;13 George Mason in his Supplement to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1803) described his predecessor’s book as abounding in ‘inaccuracies as much as any English book whatsoever —written by a scholar’;14 and the American lexicographer, Noah Webster, following up his Letter to Dr. David Ramsay (No. 22), remarked in the introduction to his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) on Johnson’s ‘great defect of research by means of which he often fell into mistakes; and no errors are so dangerous as those of great men.’ Only the German scholar, Johann Christoph Adelung, in one of his Three Philological Essays (translated by Willich in 1798), was able to retain enough critical objectivity to give a balanced appraisal of Johnson’s achievement (No. 21).
Rasselas was published anonymously in April 1759 but no reviewer seems to have been in doubt about its authorship. Its initial reception was varied: the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine were favourable; the Critical Review and Owen Ruffhead in the Monthly (No. 23) were censorious; and the Annual Register (No. 24) was mixed.
Until and including the publication of Rasselas Johnson’s reception by reviewers had been largely favourable, certainly tolerant, even on occasions good humoured. But in the 1760s a degree of virulence and personal malice hitherto completely absent made its appearance. Charles Churchill opened fire with the portrait of ‘Pomposo’ in The Ghost, Book II, March 1762; before Book III appeared in October he had formed his friendship with the radical John Wilkes and Johnson had accepted a royal pension; consequently the second passage on ‘Pomposo’ in the later book is edged with a bitterness so far unknown in Johnsonian criticism (No. 70). Simultaneously—in August 1762—Wilkes joined in the attack on Johnson’s alleged political apostacy and hypocrisy, in the North Briton, Nos. 11 and 12 (No. 71). In 1765 William Kenrick added his severity, first in a thirty-page review of Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare in the Monthly Review, and then in a book-length excoriation of the same work (Nos. 30, 31). Though the Gentleman’s Magazine expressed itself unable to explain the ‘malignity’ of Kenrick’s second attack,15 it must be owned that, for the most part, the Shakespeare was greeted with disappointment. (The reputation of the edition improved only towards the end of the following century.) But more virulence was still to come in the 1760s. In 1767 Archibald Campbell’s Lexiphanes purported to ‘restore the English tongue to its ancient purity’ by exposing Johnson’s ‘affected style’ to harsh ridicule and by applying ‘that rod which draws blood at every stroke’.16 This he followed with the Sale of Authors (1767) which intensified the assault on Johnson among others. Concentrated in this decade, therefore, was a series of vicious attacks which coincided with a notable rise in Johnson’s popularity and authority; from now on personal, political, scholarly, and stylistic matters seemed equally legitimate for critical use.
Johnson played into the hands of abusive critics in the following decade by publishing four political tracts between 1770 and 1775. The first, The False Alarm (1770), was roundly condemned in the Middlesex Journal and Political Register as well as in the North Briton and three pamphlets, one by Wilkes, the man at the centre of the furore (No. 40).17 Thoughts on…Falkland’s Islands (1771) and The Patriot (1774) were received with similar hostility; but most bitterness was reserved for Johnson’s contribution to the debate on the American colonies, in Taxation no Tyranny (1775). The Public Advertiser, St. James’s Chronicle and Whitehall carried rebuffs from pseudonymous contributors;18 at least ten pamphleteers denounced him; and though he was not without defenders, they were swamped by the voices of the opposition. So successful were his detractors that—backed by more than a century of misunderstanding of eighteenth-century politics—Johnson’s political views have continued to be grossly misrepresented. To the detriment of his fundamental rationalism, scepticism, and humanitarianism, he was declared a high Tory out of sympathy with democratic principles. Equally false was the description of Johnson as a Jacobite. He was also vilified for his alleged support of arbitrary rule based on the divine right of kingship; he was in fact a monarchist but on pragmatic grounds and with a profound distrust of all political metaphysics. And on the American question, though he was denounced (by Joseph Towers among others) for defending tyranny, Johnson’s intention in Taxation no Tyranny was quite otherwise. In that pamphlet he expounded rationally and logically the constitutional principle of the inalienable sovereignty of the British Parliament over the American colonies. He can be accused of being insensitive to the demands of practical politics in 1775, but his wholehearted approval of a policy of armed repression is certainly open to doubt. First, since he introduced textual changes into his pamphlet as a result of ministerial pressure, his original views cannot be exactly known; second, the use of armed force was inconsistent with his declared horror of war; and third, Johnson never believed that governmental tyranny was a practical possibility. ‘Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head.’19
In the mid-1770s attacks were directed from a new quarter—Scotland—on the Journey to the Western Islands (January 1775). Most London-based reviewers were favourably disposed towards ‘the learned author’ in whom ‘every talent was united which could gratify the most inquisitive curiosity’,20 but not so the Scots. A poem by Robert Fergusson (No. 43) which appeared in the Edinburgh Weekly Magazine a month before the Doctor’s tour was completed gave a foretaste of what was to greet the published work. The Weekly Magazine carried six hostile reactions by March 177521 and an anonymous pamphlet appeared before the end of the year. Other angry rejoinders followed, the most abusive being one of 370 pages by Donald McNicol (possibly with assistance from the indignant James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson).
Johnson’s last major work (1779–81), the Lives of the English Poets (as they came to be known), inevitably attracted multitudinous commentators ranging from one anonymous contributor to the London Packet offering his views on the Life of Milton to another in the Westminster Magazine on the Life of Smith,22 as well as more substantial critics. With such a variety of issues raised—chief among them being Johnson’s alleged hostility to Milton and the lyric poetry of Gray—there was abundance of matter for critical scrutiny. The plethora of censorious pamphlets and articles continuing well into the nineteenth century must not, however, be allowed to obscure a generally favourable reception: ‘It is a work which has contributed to immortalize his name.’23 While, for example, abusive criticism of Johnson on Paradise Lost could readily be cited, account must also be taken of the Monthly reviewer: ‘it is executed with all the skill and penetration of Aristotle, and animated and embellished with all the fire of Longinus’ (No. 50). Similarly, though William Fitzthomas devoted an entire pamphlet to refuting Johnson’s ‘Strictures on the Lyric Performances of Gray’ (No. 55), the Critical Review supported Johnson: ‘Gray’s Odes, as well as his other little performances, have been much over-rated’ (No. 51).
The critical response of Johnson’s contemporaries was, then, voluminous, searching, and frequently personal in view of the increasing dominance of the man who provoked it. Inevitably, too, because he was essentially a miscellaneous writer Johnson had to endure criticism of very diverse quality. His critics were innumerable. They were encouraged by newspapers whose volume and frankness impressed foreign visitors to London;24 by the well-established system of journalistic reviewing; and by the avid interest in pamphleteering which Arthur Young said existed even among ‘grocers, chandlers, drapers, and shoemakers of all the towns in England’.25 Johnson’s contemporaries could not remain unaware of his character, views, prejudices, and publications; cartoonists like Gillray reminded them of his appearance and of widely shared (even if not fully justified) attitudes towards him;26 indeed their number cannot be estimated who, on his death, would ask Richard Cumberland’s rhetorical question: ‘When will this nation see his like again?’27
Cumberland’s was undoubtedly the implicit question asked by the majority of the interminable necrologists, biographers, recorders of Johnsonian anecdotes, and the like, after Johnson’s death in 1784. Of many it could be said, as Thomas Tyers remarked of his own Biographical Sketch: ‘His little bit of gold he has worked into as much gold-leaf as he could.’28 Yet in virtually all the substantial biographies— as well as the avowedly literary-critical studies—some attempt was made to evaluate Johnson’s writings. But Johnson the man could not be dislodged; his conversational prowess, religious devotion, benevolence, learning, and his exemplary struggle from obscurity to incomparable fame all kept him in the centre. Inevitably then, his biographers exerted a major influence on his literary reputation. Ironically the consequences were unhappy. Boswell fulfilled his role as biographer with such brilliance in 1791 that only forty years later Macaulay and Carlyle could express their own and their generation’s fascination with Johnson the man, yet for his works, contempt.
Boswell did not bring about this revolution unaided. The changing critical climate hastened the process. There continued to be critics like Robert Burrowes and William Mudford who were, though severe, fundamentally sympathetic; creative writers there were, such as George Crabbe and Jane Austen, who responded to the influence of ‘dear Dr. Johnson’;29 but there is no denying a growing distaste for him and all he represented. It could manifest itself in Jeremy Bentham’s dismissive remark— ‘that pompous preacher of melancholy moralities’30 —or, on the large scale, in the Romantics’ realization that Johnson epitomized supremely the assumptions about ‘man, nature, and human life’ which had to be rejected if their own convictions were to prevail. Their determination to confront and dispose of the eighteenth century by attacking Johnson is particularly evident in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and later De Quincey in England, and Schlegel in Germany. It is vividly demonstrated in Hazlitt’s decision to meet Johnson’s challenge in the prefatory remarks to his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817) before advancing his own views; it is summed up in his comment that ‘if Dr. Johnson’s opinion was right, the following observations on Shakespear’s Plays must be greatly exaggerated, if not ridiculous’ (No. 36). Johnson provided a sacrificial victim essential to the success of the literary and moral revolution.
Against contemporary attacks, with one exception, Johnson offered no defence. ‘The only instance, I believe,’ says Boswell, ‘in the whole course of his life, when he condescended to oppose any thing that was written against him,’31 was a reply in 1756 to Jonas Hanway’s angry-retort to Johnson’s review of his Essay on Tea. Even there Johnson was unconvinced of the propriety of making any response:
It is observed in the sage Gil Blas, that an exasperated author is not easily pacified. I have, therefore, very little hope of making my peace with the writer…indeed so little, that I have long deliberated whether I should not rather sit silently down under his displeasure, than aggravate my misfortune by a defence of which my heart forbodes the ill success.32
Johnson never repeated his folly. Rather he adopted Vida’s advice to his pupil, quoted in Rambler No. 176, ‘wholly to abandon his defence, and even when he can irrefragably refute all objections, to suffer tamely the exultations of his antagonist.’ Moreover, Boswell believed that Johnson ‘enjoyed the perpetual shower of little hostile arrows’,33 presumably on the grounds that he outlined in conversation on 1 October 1773.
He remarked, that attacks on authors did them much service. ‘A man who tells me my play is very bad, is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence. A man, whose business it is to be talked of, is much helped by being attacked. …Every attack produces a defence; and so attention is engaged. There is no sport in mere praise, when people are all of a mind.34
Two years later he commented on the reception of Taxation no Tyranny: ‘I think I have not been attacked enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.’35 Both sets of remarks involve several considerations. As a professional Johnson was well aware that all publicity is good publicity; thus a writer becomes ‘known’ (as he triumphantly informed Chesterfield (No. 17)); and he becomes economically more attractive to the publishers. Again, as a writer who was perpetually a teacher— ‘a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom’, Boswell called him36 —Johnson sought the assurance that his writings drew some positive response even if it were hostile. And, thirdly, he had a high regard for the public’s right to pass judgment on an author’s performance: ‘the public to whom he appeals must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.’37 If he sought their approval he must also be prepared to suffer their condemnation.
Although there is no firm evidence that Johnson—like his friend Burke in the Enquiry into…the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) —revised any of his writings to take specific account of criticism of them, this does not denote lack of interest. He could show mere amusement at the ineptitude of his opponents, as with McNicol’s angry Remarks on… Journey to the Hebrides (1779): ‘This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me with pamphlets.’38 On the other hand, at least on two occasions, Johnson showed himself sensitive to criticism which sprang from the worthy motives of responsible men. According to Boswell39 he was disturbed by the censure contained in a private letter from the Revd. William Temple and, probably more so since it was public, by Joseph Towers’s Letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson Occasioned by his late Political Publications (No. 41). Towers’s pamphlet was not virulent despite his profound disagreement with Johnson; perhaps its firm moderation, its respect for Johnson, and its basically moral disgust with his political views caused disquiet.
Evidence on these matters is necessarily incomplete. What is available seems to show a steady growth in Johnson’s popularity in the early years, with a noticeable quickening of it in the late 1750s and 1760s. Indeed, while not disregarding the intrinsic achievement of the Dictionary and Shakespeare, it is likely that his delight in public criticism was soundly based economically; that the notoriety he acquired during the 1760s itself provoked an increased demand for his books.
Johnson’s poem London could be described as a publishing success: a second edition within a week, a third within two months, and a fourth in the following year. Dodsley, the publisher, paid ten guineas for the copyright; Boswell thought the amount inadequate; but compared with the £7 Pope received from Lintot for the first version of The Rape of the Lock or the £15 for the second,40 Johnson was fairly rewarded. By the same token fifteen guineas for the Life of Savage (1744) and the same sum for The Vanity of Human Wishes (which was not separately republished in Johnson’s lifetime)41 was not inappropriate. Irene was not a theatrical success; yet Johnson sold the ‘copy’ to Dodsley for £100 and received nearly £200 as his share of the profits. Nevertheless it was with the Rambler that his popularity increased significantly. The London sales of the twopenny issue each Tuesday and Thursday over the two years from March 1750 probably never exceeded 500. But, as R.M.Wiles has proved, through the practice of reprinting whole essays or extracts in provincial newspapers, ‘more people in all parts of England had the opportunity of reading Rambler essays than saw the successive issues as they came from the press in London.’42 From Bath and Bristol to Nottingham and Newcastle readers were able to enjoy at least 142 of the 208 issues of what the Newcastle General Magazine described as ‘the best Paper of the present time’. Therefore, by 1752, when the collected edition of the essays was published, Johnson—with the aid of perceptive newspaper editors—had a potentially large and responsive audience. The fourth edition (of 1,500 copies) came out in 1756; three further London editions were produced in the 1760s; and the tenth was on sale in the year of Johnson’s death. In addition Dublin had its unauthorized edition in 1752; Elphinstone published his (with permission) in Edinburgh, in 1750–2; and there were two further editions, probably from Edinburgh, in 1772 and 1776. For the essays Johnson received two guineas each, which compares favourably with the fee of two guineas for sixteen pages paid to contributors to the Critical Review.43
By placing his bust of Johnson on a solid volume marked ‘RAMBLER’, Joseph Nollekens, in 1777, accurately indicated the basis of his fame.44 The consequent reputation—along with the publicity campaign conducted by the publishers—doubtless contributed to the success of the Dictionary in 1755. ‘The Dictionary sells well,’ wrote Johnson on 10 June 1755. It did. The reception of the first folio edition of 2,000 copies (price 90s. per copy) prompted a second in 1756, and concurrently the issue of the work in weekly parts at sixpence each for three and four sheets alternately, or at a shilling for seven sheets. Also in 1756 an octavo abridgement appeared; it went through ten editions (eight from London and two from Dublin) and approximately 40,000 copies in thirty years. Inevitably with this multiple choice of editions the expensive folio was not a best seller; yet by 1784 when Johnson died five editions had been required, totalling about 7,000 copies. The folio version was also reprinted in three quarto editions between 1775 and 1785, in London and Dublin.45 When it is recognized that the public was, in 1755, offered as an alternative J.N.Scott’s revision of the well-established Universal Dictionary by Nathan Bailey, Johnson’s success becomes even greater. In Boswell’s estimation ‘his clear profit was very inconsiderable’;46 he had been paid £1,575 (or perhaps £100 more47) but from this sum had to hire amanuenses, buy paper, and discharge other expenses; and he was paid £300 for ‘improvements’ to the fourth folio edition (1773). For his part Johnson insisted that publishers were ‘generous liberal-minded men’.48
The cumulative importance of the Rambler to Johnson’s esteem is further indicated by the announcement on the title-page of the third collected edition of the Idler (1767): ‘By the Author of the Rambler’. His income from this edition is not known. From the first, in 1761, he had earned £84 2s. 4d., which represented two-thirds of the profit on the 1,500 two-volume sets printed. Equally important in the long term was the wide distribution of the essays through reprinting in London and provincial journals. The Newcastle General Magazine, for example, which had shown a marked enthusiasm for the Rambler, reprinted 28 numbers.49
The historian William Robertson remarked that ‘an author should sell his first work for what the booksellers will give, till it shall appear whether he is an author of merit; or, which is the same thing as to purchase-money, an author who pleases the publick.’50 This Johnson had done. By the late 1750s he was clearly an author who ‘pleased’. Thus when he urgently needed money in 1759 Dodsley paid him £100 for Rasselas (which sold for 5s.); he added £25 more when a second edition was printed in the same year. For his part, Dodsley made a profitable purchase: the sixth edition was on sale in 1783. The work was also translated into Dutch (1760), French (1760), German (1762), Italian (1764), Russian (1795), and Spanish (1798).
The eight-volume Shakespeare of 1765 comprised 1,000 copies. In October, the month of publication, the Gentleman’s Magazine announced that ‘the rapid sale of the impression has already made a second necessary’; it appeared in November (750 copies). A pirated Dublin edition is dated 1766; authorized London editions followed in 1768, 1773, and 1778. It was only for the first three editions that Johnson had sole responsibility; other editors were also involved from 1773 onwards, though he continued to contribute notes and slight changes until Malone’s Supplement in 1780. His total income from the venture has been estimated at £1,312 10s.51
All Johnson’s political pamphlets met harsh criticism; all were anonymous; but the demand for them was obviously brisk. The publisher, Thomas Cadell, brought out four editions of The False Alarm in 1770; two of the Falkland’s Islands in 1771; two of The Patriot in 1774 and one in the following year; and four of Taxation no Tyranny in 1775.52 Then, with the King’s printer, William Strahan, Cadell reprinted the four pamphlets in a volume of Political Tracts (at 4s.) in 1776. The more clamorous the abuse, the greater the sales.
The same two publishers were responsible for the Journey to the Western Islands in 1775. They were doubtless encouraged by a reputed sale of 4,000 copies (at 5s.) in the first week; even if this exaggerates the speed of sale, Boswell corroborates the number sold.53 Two editions in 1775 and three unauthorized Dublin editions (one issued in London with a bogus imprint) were produced. Then the demand ceased. Boswell was surprised; so was Johnson: ‘in that book I have told the world a great deal that they did not know before.’54 The register of borrowings from the Bristol City Library over the last eleven years of Johnson’s life—the only one of its kind extant—confirms this impression of some initial enthusiasm followed by a steady decline.55 A new edition of the Journey was not necessary until 1785 when Boswell published his own account of the tour and, one assumes, stimulated a demand for Johnson’s. Six editions appeared in the next fifteen years.
Johnson’s Advertisement to the Lives of the Poets (No. 49) clearly suggests that he underestimated either the magnitude of the task to which he committed himself in 1777 or his own enthusiasm as he proceeded with his commentary on a collection of poets who (except for four) were not of his own choosing. Some such explanation is needed to account for his naming 200 guineas when asked by the publishers to propose his fee. The publishers spontaneously added another 100 guineas; a further 100 were later paid to the author for corrections.56 The sum was trivial in comparison with what Johnson at the height of his fame could have demanded—Malone thought 1,000 or even 1,500 guineas.57 (It might be noted, for example, that Hugh Blair was paid £1,100 for his first three volumes of Sermons, 1777–90.58) Malone adds that the publishers probably made a profit of 5,000 guineas in twenty-five years. The succession of editions—seven before 1800 (and two from Dublin) —would seem to justify the assertion. And the Bristol Library registers corroborate the enthusiasm implied in the figures: in 1781–4 more borrowings were made of the Lives than of any other work in the ‘Belles Lettres’ section of the library. (It might be added that these borrowings exceeded those of Blair’s Sermons, in the same period, by a ratio of eighteen to one.59)
A compilation which, possibly as much as any, consolidated Johnson’s reputation as a sage and moral teacher, as well as satisfying an audience unaccustomed to sustained and serious literary pursuits, was The Beauties of Johnson. It was published by Thomas Kearsley; the probable compiler was William Cooke, a member of the Johnson circle and author of the anonymous Life of Johnson published by Kearsley in 1785. The title-page sufficiently describes the contents of the work:
The Beauties of Johnson: Consisting of Maxims and Observations, moral, critical and miscellaneous, by Dr. Samuel Johnson. (Accurately extracted from his works, and arranged in Alphabetical Order, after the manner of the Duke de la Roche-Foucault’s Maxims.)
The first volume appeared in 1781, at 3s.; a second volume was added and reprinted twice in 1782; and in 1787, at the ‘seventh’ edition, the two volumes were combined into one.60 The reason for this, given in the Advertisement, is interesting:
The former Editions of this selection have been introduced into several of the most reputable schools, for both sexes, in the Kingdom; however, the Price of the two volumes (viz. Five Shillings) has been, by some, thought too much, the whole is therefore now brought into one Volume, under one Alphabet, and the Price reduced to Three Shillings and Sixpence.
Thus was Johnson made accessible to generations of young readers in a way that would certainly fix his image as a moralist from whose ‘lips impressive wisdom fell’.61 The book would have been highly appropriate at academies such as that conducted by Miss Pinkerton on Chiswick Mall.
The posthumous interest in Johnson was unprecedented. Dr Burney, reviewing Anderson’s Life of Johnson in 1796, commented on the volume of it:
In the course of our reading or recollection, we do not remember a similar instance, either in antient or in modern times, of any man, however he may have distinguished himself by ‘compass, pencil, sword, or pen,’ having, within ten or eleven years from the time of his decease, been the object of so much literary notice.
The reviewer went on to prophesy that, however Johnson might have irritated some among his contemporaries, ‘posterity will admire the depth, force, eloquence, moral purity, and originality of his writings, as long as the language of which he has made use shall remain intelligible.’62 Publishers at first seemed to regard the potential readership for Johnson’s writings as unlimited. An eleven-volume collected Works, with a ‘Life’ by Sir John Hawkins, was published in 1787; five years later another edition appeared in twelve volumes, prefaced by Arthur Murphy’s ‘Essay on the Life and Genius’ of Johnson, and this was reprinted fifteen times by 1824.63 A ten-volume edition was produced in Alnwick in 1816, and reissued in London in 1818. In 1825 there were five different editions: three from London, one from Glasgow, and another from Philadelphia. Then at last—and in view of the opinion expressed by Macaulay of Johnson’s writings six years later it is not surprising—the demand in England apparently declined. The next edition—by Henry Bohn—was in two volumes in 1850 (republished in 1854). In America, however, the high rate of publication suggests at least that an interest was assumed to be continuing in Johnson’s writings. A New York two-volume edition of 1832 was republished annually from 1834 to 1838, twice in the 1840s, four times in the 1850s, and again in 1873.
In view of the indifferent quality of many eighteenth-century reviews —they ranged from something little better than publishers’ lists to journals attracting contributors like Goldsmith, Dr Burney, and Johnson himself—Johnson’s respect for them is perhaps surprising. But his view was probably a characteristic blend of generosity and realism: that theirs was a difficult function combining advertisement and critical evaluation, both of which were essential to the new class of professional writers. Without reviews books would not be known or bought, bad writers would not be chastised nor good ones acknowledged. He believed that reviewers wrote well ‘in order to be paid well’64 —which is sensible; but his claim that they were also impartial seems in flat contradiction of his own comments on the Monthly and Critical:
The Monthly Reviewers (said he) are not Deists; but they are Christians with as little christianity as may be; and are for pulling down all establishments. The Critical Reviewers are for supporting the constitution both in church and state.65
(One of his own definitions of ‘impartial’ is ‘free from regard or party’.) He preferred the Critical reviewers on grounds other than their Toryism: even if they ‘often review without reading the books through’, they ‘lay hold of a topick and write chiefly from their own minds. The Monthly Reviewers are duller men, and are glad to read the books through.’ However, despite the alleged originality of the Critical, though review-criticism varied widely in quality it rarely approached the normal level of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the next century. The revolution of 1802—the founding of the Edinburgh—was still to come.
But in analysing the response to Johnson we must have regard for limitations other than those imposed by the lack of distinction in the majority of his critics. Attitudes existed or gradually developed, based primarily on prejudices of various kinds—social or religious, personal or political, as well as literary—which made it especially difficult for those critics to achieve the Arnoldian ideal of seeing the object as in itself it really was.
Johnson was from the beginning an outsider. He was poor and ambitious—and ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depress’d’; he was from the lower middle class in an age dominated by the aristocracy; he was coarse in a period jealous of its social refinement; and he had the proud aggressiveness (as well as the sympathy for the underprivileged) which is often associated with success founded solely on personal achievement. Like Burke he could have described himself as the ‘novus homo’.66 Both suffered for it. Burke scornfully repudiated the pretensions which accompanied aristocratic privilege, in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796); Johnson wrote his famous letter to Chesterfield. Both men provoked sharp antagonisms. Indeed Johnson could have echoed Burke’s Ciceronian retort made in the Commons in 1770: ‘Novorum Hominum Industriam odisti’ (which may be translated ‘you hate the industry of self-made men’).67 The new man was hated not only for his industry but—as Pope had discovered—for his unaided success.
Social or class prejudices were, then, certainly active in some criticism of Johnson. His lowly origin and his professionalism frequently offered opportunities for a sneer or for a condescending explanation of his eccentricities. The jibe took various forms. It provided James Callender with an explanation for Johnson’s emergence to fame: Johnson, ‘not worth a shilling’, was patronized by ‘a phalanx of booksellers’, ‘protected’ by Garrick, and indebted to Chesterfield; he thus gradually achieved ‘the dignity of Independence’.68 Archibald Campbell turned it the other way. He asserts that Johnson and his like— ‘authors by profession’ —‘reckon a gentleman who writes, or in the language of the shop, makes a book, an interloper who takes so much of their trade out of their hands.’ Therefore ‘they entertain a particular spite against noble authors.’69 Thus Johnson becomes by turns a dependant or an inverted snob, a social climber or a literary tradesman. Sometimes the sneer that he wrote ‘for gain or profit’ was used to explain why he was better qualified for certain literary tasks than for others. William J. Temple, in his Character of Dr. Johnson (1792), describes his subject as ‘the son of a petty bookseller of Lichfield, or some other provincial town’ (which recalls Swift’s contemptuous remark on Defoe— ‘the fellow that was pilloried, I have forgot his name’); he later explains why Johnson was best equipped for lexicography: ‘Poverty and Solitude bar the door against liberal and enlarged observation and refinement of sentiment, but are peculiarly favourable to the compiler’s labour.’70 Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges accounts on similar grounds for Johnson’s inability in the Rambler to match Addison’s ‘exquisitely nice touches of character’; his own creations, though ‘full of good sense are coarse’. The explanation follows: ‘Johnson had not in early life, like Addison, been familiar with the circles of polished society,’71 and no amount of experience could compensate for that deficiency. Likewise Mrs Thrale, smarting under Johnson’s rebuke for laughing at people who like to smell their food before eating it, generalized on the same theme:
These Notions…seem to me the faeculancies of his low Birth, which I believe has never failed to leave its Stigma indelible in every human Creature; however exalted by Rank or polished by Learning:—no Varnish though strong can totally cover primaeval meanness, nor can any Situation of Life remove it out of the Sight even of a cursory & casual Observer…no Flattery was so welcome to him, as that which told him he had the Mind or Manners of a Gentleman.72
Sir Walter Scott shrewdly detected a similar bias in Anne Seward:
Neither Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin nor Miss Seward were partial to the great moralist. There was, perhaps, some aristocratic prejudice in their dislike, for the despotic manners of Dr. Johnson were least likely to be tolerated where the lowness of his origin was in fresh recollection.73
Thomas Tyers, writing his Biographical Sketch in 1784, clearly recognized the class-prejudice operating against Johnson; he nobly repudiated it: ‘His father…was an old bookseller at Lichfield, and a whig in principle. The father of Socrates was not of higher extraction, nor of a more honourable profession.’74
Scott’s use of the word ‘despotic’ directs attention to another set of attitudes which militated against critical objectivity. Various elements were combined here. Envy of Johnson’s successful emergence from obscurity, of the deference increasingly paid him by both the publishers and the reading public, and of his domination of the literary scene; jealousy of his social renown linked with contempt for his coarseness; irritation at the stylistic revolution attributed to his influence; or censure of his alleged approval of authoritarianism in politics: any or all of these frequently prompted the use of the pejorative term ‘despotic’. The word must be seen in its eighteenth-century context if we are to recognize the complex associations it carried for an age which was peculiarly sensitive to any sign of absolute power.75 Johnson was well aware of this characteristic of his time:
In absolute governments there is sometimes a general reverence paid to all that has the sanction of power and the countenance of greatness. How little this is the state of our country needs not to be told. We live in an age in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced.76
The association between pedantry in literature and authoritarianism in politics had, of course, been established long before Johnson was charged with being both a pedant and a supporter of arbitrary government. It is present, for example, in Dryden’s lines on Flecknoe whose ‘absolute’ power in ‘all the Realms of Non-sense’ was unchallenged.77 It is more obviously a prominent feature of Pope’s satiric vision in The Dunciad. The note to The Dunciad, Book IV, line 175 makes the point sufficiently. There Pope explains ironically that to avoid the danger of men turning from the study of words to ‘useful Knowledge’, the Goddess of Dulness:
in her wishes for arbitrary Power…will encourage the propagation of words and sounds; and to make all sure, she wishes for another Pedant Monarch. The sooner to obtain so great a blessing, she is willing even for once to violate the fundamental principle of her politics, in having her sons taught at least one thing; but that sufficient, the Doctrine of Divine Right.
Nothing can be juster than the observation here insinuated, that no branch of Learning thrives well under Arbitrary government but Verbal…
Many of the terms and all the attitudes found here were at some time, singly or combined, applied to Johnson.
On occasions the concept of Johnson as a ruler was used favourably. Courtenay provides one example (No. 73):
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By nature’s gifts ordain’d mankind to rule, He, like a Titian, form’d his brilliant school… Nor was his energy confin’d alone To friends around his philosophick throne. |
It was more usually employed by Johnson’s antagonists, and first explicitly by Charles Churchill. As ‘Pomposo’ Johnson is portrayed as a tyrant ‘Whose ev’ry word is Sense and Law’; his Laws are absolute; he has seized ‘Learning’s throne’; and by accepting a royal pension from Lord Bute he is indelibly tainted with political as well as literary tyranny (No. 70). Elsewhere in The Ghost Churchill links Bute with those who are ‘Defenders of a Tyrant’s cause’; in contrast he strenuously insists on the importance to him of liberty of all kinds:
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Freedom—at that most hallow’d name My Spirits mount into a flame… I am Freedom’s Son. |
Further, where Churchill associates Johnson with neo-classicism, for his own part he proclaims in The Ghost (as in The Rosciad) the prime significance of natural emotion:
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The real feelings of the heart, And Nature taking place of Art.78 |
From a number of viewpoints, then, Churchill identifies Johnson with reaction and absolutism.
This attitude was not confined merely to the angry young men of the day—like Robert Lloyd, Bonnell Thornton, or Churchill himself. Robert Potter’s critical but by no means virulent remarks on Johnson’s Life of Gray conclude with the reminder that they ‘may be a lesson to literary tyrants to bear their faculties meekly’ (No. 57). (The allusion to Macbeth is presumably not accidental.) Similarly William Shaw finds much to praise, even venerate, in Johnson’s life and writings; but he was manifestly irritated by his arrogating ‘the distinction of Dictator in all companies’.79 It is not surprising to find these opprobrious terms used with great bitterness by Callender. He describes Johnson as ‘a stickler for the jus divinum’ and ‘the firm advocate of oppression’; and he closes his denunciation of the Dictionary thus:
Let us exert that courage of thought, and that contempt of quackery, which to feel, and to display, is the privilege and the pride of a Briton. In a country where no man fears his king, can any man fear the sound of a celebrated name, or crouch behind the banner of Dullness, because it is borne by SAMUEL JOHNSON, A.M. & LL.D?80
One expects this from Callender; but Richard Hurd, writing in his commonplace book, uses cognate terms: ‘Boswell: His Life of Samuel Johnson exhibits a striking likeness of a confident, over-weening, dictatorial pedant, though of parts and learning.’81 And Sir James Mackintosh, in his journal for 1811, opens his account of Johnson with these words (No. 68):
Dr. Johnson had a great influence on the taste and opinions of his age, not only by the popularity of his writings, but by that colloquial dictatorship which he exercised for thirty years in the literary circles of the capital.
In varying degrees, therefore, commentators on Johnson were guilty of prejudiced and—if not vindictive—certainly personalized criticism. He appeared to his contemporaries a man of extraordinary stature whose influence became immeasurable and whose dominance of ‘the literary circles of the capital’ was absolute. They found it virtually impossible to dissociate his writings from his reputation and personality. To the extent that they considered his influence beneficial, they welcomed his rule; to the extent that they disapproved of authoritarianism in general and ‘King Critic’ (to quote Cowper (No. 52)) in particular, they repudiated it. Few were objective.
Turning to the criticism of specific works, one can say outright that throughout the period to 1832 the assessment of Johnson’s poems was generally inadequate. In his lifetime little was said of them worth remark. Occasionally certain poems were commended. For example, in the early months of 1748 (before the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes) Thomas Gray wrote to Walpole:
…(I am sorry to differ from you, but) London is to me one of those few imitations, that have all the ease and all the spirit of an original. The same man’s verses at the opening of Garrick’s theatre are far from bad.82
Or again, Goldsmith wrote a headnote for London in his collection called The Beauties of English Poesy (1767):
This poem of Mr. Johnson’s is the best imitation of the original that has appeared in our language, being possessed of all the force and satyrical resentment of Juvenal. Imitation gives us a much truer idea of the ancients than even translation could do.83
Among his biographers most, like Boswell, rate Johnson highly as an ‘ethick’ poet; few analyse the poems in detail. William Shaw is an exception but his analysis is finicking; he looks for a Popeian kind of verbal economy and, failing to find it, censures what he takes to be tautologies. His conclusion is broadly representative of eighteenth-century opinion:
Johnson fortunately for his reputation was soon satisfied his forte did not lie in making verses. His poetry, though not anywhere loaded with epithets, is destitute of animation. The strong sense, the biting sarcasm, the deep solemnity, which mark his genius, no where assume that union, symmetry, or collected energy, which is necessary to produce a general effect. We are now and then struck with a fine thought, a fine line, or a fine passage, but little interested by the whole.84
Mudford in his Critical Enquiry is at least prepared to devote earnest attention to the poems; he succeeds in underlining some of Johnson’s distinctive qualities but he too uses Pope as his reference point, to Johnson’s disadvantage. Also, like Joseph Warton writing on Pope himself, Mudford finds Johnson unable ‘to attain those heights of sublimity which astonish and delight’ (No. 2). The assumptions (originally Burkean) behind this remark had secured wide acceptance by 1802. ‘The mind that is not turned either to the sublime or the pathetic, cannot certainly rank in the first class of writers of imagination.’85 Satire no longer commanded immediate respect; when written in couplets it was likely to attract the disapproval marked by Mudford’s word, ‘mechanical’. (Only a few years later Keats would speak of ‘musty laws lined out with wretched rule’.86) If Johnson’s poems were to find approval it was more probably on the basis of their morality. On these grounds John Aikin could place The Vanity of Human Wishes higher than Juvenal on account of its superior theology (No. 3). The only critic who showed notable sensitivity to Johnson’s achievement in poetry was Anna Seward, not invariably one of his admirers. In her view it was only ‘the gay and commiserating sensations’ that he failed to touch in his verse; that he was unable to excite the ‘passions’ of any kind she totally rejects. Indeed she claims for Johnson ‘nervous and harmonious versification…a quick and vigorous imagination, elevated sentiments, striking imagery and splendid language’. She continues:
Of the author who possessed those great essentials, it is surely not too much to say that he might, had he chosen it, have been perpetually a poet—a stern and gloomy one certainly; but yet a poet, a sublime poet, however the want of tender sensibilities might have closed all the pathetic avenues against his muse.87
Anna Seward, with other critics of Irene, dismissed the possibility that Johnson could ever have become ‘a great dramatic writer’. There was unanimity among the critics whether they wrote—like the two quoted below (Nos. 4, 5) —in 1749, or in biographies published after his death, that whereas the play was morally unexceptionable, the verse was non-dramatic; the author reached the intellect but not the emotions of his audience. ‘The very soul of Tragedy, Pathos, is wanting; and without that, though we may admire, our hearts will sleep in our bosoms.’88 Had Garrick not been involved in the production or, for later writers, had Johnson not been the author, Irene would almost certainly have attracted less critical attention.
The Rambler ‘was the basis of that high reputation which went on increasing to the end of his days’ (No. 8). So wrote Arthur Murphy in 1792; the critical history of the work supports his claim. The second public tribute to the essays, in 1750—probably by Christopher Smart— contains in embryo most subsequent criticism: a comparison with Addison, a reference to ‘high-wrought’ diction, the appropriateness of style to sentiment, and the general vigour of the writing. Later critics were principally concerned to amplify or contest these points. One critical tradition contesting them begins in the Connoisseur (quoted on p. 3) —objecting to Johnson’s abstruseness, ‘hard words and affected latinisms’ —and makes its way through Campbell’s burlesque of his style in Lexiphanes to Hazlitt’s complaint about his wordiness and stylistic monotony (No. 12). But for the most part, from the critic in the Gray’s-Inn Journal, 1756, via Goldsmith and Anna Seward (in her letters of 1763–4) to Boswell, Murphy, George Gleig in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797), and Alexander Chalmers in British Essayists in 1802, there was a consensus of critical opinion. It was largely agreed that, though Addison was the safer model for imitation, Johnson had revolutionized and enriched the essay style. He achieved ‘more vigour, more spirit, more elegance. He not only began a revolution in our language, but lived till it was almost completed.’ As is true of so much criticism of Johnson, Chalmers is here praising him on grounds which he had himself already specified. In the final Rambler paper Johnson claims as his chief contributions to the essay tradition an increased refinement of language, greater stylistic elegance, and the inculcation of wisdom and piety. Again it is Anna Seward who proves herself particularly sensitive to his style. Few writers before the present century have commended Johnson’s lavish ‘use of imagery and metaphor’ with equal force; few recognized the advantage he derived from his classically-based diction: ‘Greek and Latin being so much higher voweled than English, a liberal intermixture of words springing from their roots, must surely render the style more graceful and sonorous’; and few better conducted the critical exercise of comparing Johnson with Addison:
The language of Addison appears to me as only possessing distinguished excellence from comparing it with that of his contemporary writers; and even then we should except some of them, Bolingbroke and Swift for instance, who wrote prose at least as well; that, compared with the style of our present essayists, it is neither remarkably perspicuous nor remarkably musical… Then he frequently finishes his sentence with insignificant words… [which] utterly precludes that roundness, that majestic sweep of sound, in which the Johnsonian periods so generally close: periods that my ear finds of such full and satisfying harmony, as not to need either rhyme or measure to add more sweetness. In truth, rhyme and measure are but the body of poetry, not its spirit, and its spirit breathes through all the pages of the Rambler.89
Great stress was also laid on one feature not mentioned by Smart: Johnson’s distinction as a moral teacher in the Rambler. Again critics were paying tribute to his having achieved his stated purpose: ‘to consider the moral discipline of the mind, and to promote the increase of virtue rather than of learning’.90 It was recognized that he taught known truths but that, as Addison had remarked of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, in 1711:
they are placed in so beautiful a light, and illustrated with such apt allusions, that they have in them all the graces of novelty, and make the reader, who was before acquainted with them, still more convinced of their truth and solidity.91
Hazlitt and his age no longer accepted the criteria assumed here; critics nearer to Johnson’s time did. There was only one discordant voice: that of William Mudford. While he generally approved of the Rambler— judiciously edited, it would be ‘the most estimable book which the English language can boast’ —he took very strong exception to the misanthropic cast of the author’s mind. The impression of mankind given in the essays is, he claims, of ‘fraud, perfidy, and deceit’; Johnson overstresses the evils of mortal existence and underestimates its joys. ‘This…greatly disqualifies the work for the hands of youth.’ But Mudford is second to none in his estimation of the importance and popularity of the Rambler: ‘where is the person who lays any claim to learning that has not read the Rambler of Johnson?’ (No. 10). Indeed when Boswell (who writes some of his most spirited pages on the essays) perpetually thought of Johnson as ‘the Rambler’, he was acknowledging what he and his contemporaries recognized as among the most distinctive of the Doctor’s achievements.
With the exception of the Lives of the Poets, no work raised a greater furore among the critics than the Dictionary. To indicate their range we can cite Callender on the one hand and George Colman and Joseph Towers on the other. In the Deformities Callender delivers a bitter and sustained attack on Johnson’s ‘amazing ignorance’, ‘circumscribed reading’, and ‘negligence’:
We look around us in vain for the well known hand of the Rambler, for the sensible and feeling historian of Savage, the caustic and elegant imitator of Juvenal, the man of learning, and taste and genius. The reader’s eye is repelled from the Doctor’s pages, by their hopeless sterility, and their horrid nakedness.92
One is surprised only by the modicum of praise which precedes the damnation. Colman, writing in the Gentleman of July 1775, expressed his conviction that the Dictionary would ever remain ‘a monument of the learning and genius of its author’.93 And Towers for his part selected this (with the Rambler) as Johnson’s most permanently valuable work. He acknowledges its faults—no man could ‘suppose it possible that it should be without’; but adds:
His Dictionary was a work of great labour, and great merit, and has not been praised more than it deserves…by the completion of it, with all its defects, he might justly be considered as having rendered a signal service to the republic of letters.94
Both professional and amateur criticism, with varying authority, fluctuated between these extremes. Once more Johnson had anticipated it: his Preface, a moving and honest appraisal of intentions and achievement, foreshadows much which both friends and detractors had to say.
The initial reception of the Dictionary was generally favourable; it did not involve professional lexicographers whose reactions took longer to formulate, but rather cultured amateurs who were moved (as is clear in Garrick’s verses) by patriotism or were prepared (as Johnson suggests in his Preface) to estimate the work by its practical usefulness. Adam Smith, for example, considered the word-list ample and accurate; he urged its use since there was ‘no standard of correct English in conversation’ (No. 19). On these grounds, like Towers later, he was ready to pardon its defects. Not so the professionals. In their hands criticism became more detailed and cumulatively severe. Horne Tooke sneered, reinforcing his ridicule with political prejudice; Herbert Croft, despite his great regard for Johnson— ‘this great Philological Cook’95 —lamented his extraordinary carelessness; and it fell to the German lexicographer Adelung to give a discriminating assessment. His account is the more convincing, not only because he fairly identifies Johnson’s failures and his successes—his etymologies on the one hand, and distinctions between vulgar and polite usage on the other; but also because he is quite detached from all controversies relating to Johnson the man or ‘literary despot’. Noah Webster was differently motivated. His onslaught on the Dictionary in the Letter to Ramsay was prompted by politico-sociological as much as by lexicographical reasons. In 1789—eighteen years before the Letter—he published his Dissertations on the English Language in which he spoke of Johnson ‘whose pedantry has corrupted the purity of our language’; he went on to insist on the intimate relationship that should exist between the ‘political harmony’ of an independent America and the ‘uniformity of its language’:
As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as in government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.96
It is an easy step from rejecting a political system to rejecting ‘the right often assumed by individuals who dictate to a nation the rules of speaking, with the same imperiousness as a tyrant gives laws to his vassals’. Here, manifestly, is a further example of the irritation with the despotic Johnson—Webster refers to ‘literary governors’ and lists Johnson among them—which was discussed earlier. Webster’s fury at his countrymen in Charleston, South Carolina, who objected to his presumption in trying to improve on Johnson’s Dictionary can be readily understood. It accounts in great measure, though not entirely, for the animus and rigour of his comments in the Letter to Ramsay.
Undoubtedly Johnson’s growing reputation in other fields strengthened the authority of his Dictionary; his posthumous fame and the immensity of his lexicographical achievement, despite its flaws, gave it the status of an oracle. Consequently later lexicographers were constantly placed in the position of improving on Johnson, rarely— ‘until the notion of the standard and standardizing dictionary was called in question’97 — of being able to produce original and independent work. Their frustration in having to repair the scholarship of the man who had pre-empted them, one they regarded as a careless if gifted amateur, at least partly explains their vindictive criticism.
Though Johnson ‘had written nothing else’, Boswell believed Rasselas ‘would have rendered his name immortal in the world of literature’ (No. 75). Yet the book attracted little independent criticism after its appearance in 1759.98 Owen Ruffhead in the Monthly Review condemned it severely for the author’s limited narrative ability, his pompous style (for which Johnson later fell foul of Campbell), the lack of discrimination between characters and of originality of design. To the extent that this criticism depends on naturalistic principles, Ruffhead was answered by the Annual Register’s reviewer who observed that the story is merely a vehicle for the moral content; thus vivid action and nicely discriminated characters should not be expected. Ruffhead’s objections to Johnson’s moral vision found support in Mudford. Ruffhead complained that by insisting on disappointment as endemic in human life, Johnson would exacerbate it by discouraging determined effort. Mudford thought Johnson’s morbid melancholy not validated by general experience; therefore, despite admirable features of language and sentiment, he regarded Rasselas (as Johnson did Paradise Lost) as a work which the reader admires, puts down, and fails to pick up again. Mrs Barbauld, in 1810, added a further complaint. Proper to an age which was becoming acutely conscious of the social interdependence of all men, she asserts that to focus attention on a single individual, unencumbered by family or duty and seeking abstract good, falsifies the terms of a philosophical inquiry intended to have general relevance. Nevertheless she recognizes that Johnson’s stylistic richness is appropriate to an oriental tale; she rightly protests that he had been underestimated as an imaginative writer; and she claims that his morality is ‘perfectly pure’. Johnson had painted no ‘luxurious bower of bliss’: it is worth recalling that Mrs Grundy had made her appearance in 1798 and that Dr Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare followed in 1818.
The edition of Shakespeare suffered initially from the expectations which had been aroused during the nine-year period since the Proposals were issued. Remarks by George Colman (himself a dramatist) and the Critical reviewer testify to the keenness of these expectations. Colman was tolerant: ‘the appearance of any production of Mr. Johnson cannot fail of being grateful to the literary world’ (No. 29). Not so the reviewer who considered the edition permanently damaged by the long gestation.99 Other prejudices which Johnson encountered are clarified by reference to William Kenrick’s Review (which followed his article in the Monthly Review). In line with Churchill and Wilkes, who had prepared the way, Kenrick lashes Johnson for accepting a pension; dominating the ‘republic of letters’; enjoying the ‘homage’ of the King, universities, writers, and booksellers; and presuming to intrude into a field of scholarship in which he had no competence. Such personal abuse is now easy to shrug off, as it is with Pope who suffered greatly at the hands of Grub Street for his creative and social successes (but who expected ‘the life of a Wit’ to be ‘a warfare upon earth’); but we must recognize its intensity. Shakespeare editing was a literary minefield: four editions had appeared since Rowe’s in 1709, and Johnson had not only to justify the need for another but also to withstand scrutiny from a highly critical and, in many cases, well-informed public. They expected an ‘attempt to do justice to the [Englishman’s] favourite poet’ (No. 31): many were angry at Johnson’s seeming rigour in exposing Shakespeare’s weaknesses; they expected lavish textual emendations with notes to defend them: they found that, as Johnson ‘practised conjecture more, [he] learned to trust it less’;100 they expected large-scale textual collation: they found that Johnson failed them on this score too. Even his young Oxford champion, James Barclay, before beginning his rebuttal of Kenrick’s indictment, feels bound to admit that the editor had disappointed ‘the expectations of the generality’; because of his reputation for learning, Johnson had been relied upon to provide ‘a compleat commentary upon the works of their immortal bard’; his failure to satisfy this demand had provoked ‘public censure’ (No. 32). Joseph Ritson, irascible critic as he was, had some justification for remarking on Johnson’s claim that originally he collated all the folios but ‘afterwards used only the first’: ‘men who proudly expose and severely reprobate the crimes of their neighbours should effectually guard themselves against similar accusations.’101
The Preface to the edition was from the first treated with respect, often admiration: Edmond Malone considered it ‘one of the finest compositions in our language’.102 This did not, of course, protect it against critical scrutiny. When Schlegel, Coleridge, and Hazlitt sought to establish the Romantic view of Shakespeare, it was with the Preface that they took issue. We are then made aware of the antagonism between two centuries, traditions, and modes of criticism. Coleridge’s scathing description of Johnson as the ‘dogmatic Critic and soporific Irenist’ (No. 35) underlines the lumbering conventionality and juridical heaviness, the lack of imaginative perception and the insensitivity to poetry for which the Romantics condemned him. His style, as well as his critical criteria, was Procrustean.
Comparable hostility was lavished on his political pamphlets when they first appeared. Doubtless there were some who shared Adam Smith’s and the Tory Critical Review’s admiration for the moral sophistication shown in Falkland’s Islands;103 others no doubt had the high opinion expressed by a modern historian of Johnson’s defence of the government’s case in Taxation no Tyranny;104 but it was in a review of this pamphlet in the Monthly that Edward Bancroft stated the attitude generally held:
Human powers and human knowledge are circumscribed within such narrow limits, that no individual can excell in all undertakings. —The writer to whom we ascribe the work before us, has on other occasions by the right application of his talents merited a large share of public approbation; and if his present effort has less claim to applause, it is not because his abilities have been impaired, but because they have been misapplied. We have before had occasion to regret that any motive should have influenced him to engage in political controversy, and we believe his present performance will yield no considerable addition to his credit.105
Great abilities but misapplied: sharpened by abuse in the case of Wilkes or by bitter disappointment at Johnson’s treachery to the cause of ‘candour, of justice, and of truth’ in the case of Towers—that was the general response to the political pamphlets as a whole. Johnson’s critics exhibited an interesting contrast in rhetorical methods. On the one hand there is the attempt—bolstered by abuse of Johnson’s hireling pen—to translate into common speech what a newspaper correspondent called his ‘intolerable fustian’106 and thus to reduce his seeming authority. This is the method described by Wilkes as his ‘humble but laborious province, to endeavour to reduce [Johnson’s] lofty speculations to the level of vulgar apprehension’ (No. 40). Towers, on the other hand, dispenses with all scurrility; his manner evidences greater liberality and refinement than Wilkes’s; and his effect is achieved through a sternly abrasive statement of regret at Johnson’s betrayal of the morality so finely communicated in his non-political writings. The rhetorical range also includes the middle way of Tyranny Unmasked whose author does not hesitate to make scathing accusations but tempers them with a serious attempt to grapple with Johnson’s argument (No. 42).
The response to Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands divided by and large on national grounds. English reviewers approved highly of it; Scottish patriots challenged its accuracy and fairness. Ralph Griffiths in the Monthly Review found the author ‘able and entertaining’ (No. 44); the Critical reviewer, equally enthusiastic, observed that a travel-book must provide an investigation of ‘the remote resources of the genius and character’ of the people as well as topographical descriptions.
Such an enquiry can only be conducted by a person who is conversant in moral speculations, and is endowed with intellectual penetration capable of tracing the peculiarities of manners and action, through their various modifications, to the universal principles of human nature. In the learned author of this Journey every talent was united which could gratify the most inquisitive curiosity, or give elegance and dignity to narration.107
The Scots for their part felt both insulted and patronized. They were bitterly aware of the distrust of them entertained in England since medieval times and recently intensified by the three armed rebellions in the Highlands together with George III’s unpopular choice of Lord Bute as Prime Minister. One recalls Boswell’s timorous remark on first meeting Johnson: ‘I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’108 It is relevant to remember the mixture of pride with a sense of injury and inferiority in that remark when considering Scottish replies to the Journey. Moreover Johnson’s supposed anti-Scottish prejudice was well known, as Fergusson’s poem testifies. Unbiased responses could scarcely be expected north of the Border.
They were conveyed in undistinguished prose. The anonymous author of the Remarks on a Voyage to the Hebrides (1775) and McNicol are both on the defensive, both merely advancing objections and facts in opposition to Johnson’s magisterial assertions; in fact both sound petty and irritable. However justified their claims, they appear humourless and as intolerant as Johnson was reputed to be. It is a case of pugnacious authority challenged by petulant chauvinism. Fergusson’s poem is saved only by its wit, though this is somewhat smothered by his rhetorical device of inflating, for the purpose of burlesque, every simple term into a grandiose latinate monstrosity.
Beneath the fears and thus the severity of the detractors of Johnson’s Dictionary, his political pamphlets, the Journey and, finally, the Lives lay a frequently stated apprehension which was expressed by the author of Tyranny Unmasked in these words:
the most straggling thoughts, when they are supposed to come from able writers, are apt to have an influence on many, beyond their specific moment in the question.109
Partly because the Lives were received with wide acclaim and would therefore exert ‘an influence on many’, critics who wished to object to them in whole or part could not be content with cursory or mildly-phrased rejoinders. They had to contend with a journalistic reception typified by the two leading reviews: ‘In the walk of biography and criticism Dr. Johnson has long been without a rival. It is barely justice to acknowledge that he still maintains his superiority’ (No. 50). ‘It was a labour which…no man but Dr. Johnson would have performed so well’ (No. 51). One can appreciate the frustration and impotence felt by those who thought otherwise:
The splendour of Johnson’s literary fame, and of his ignis fatuus reasoning, cooperating with the natural envy of the ignorant, or rather half learned, will enlist a numerous army under his banners, overpowering by their numbers and by their clamour the generous few who have perceptions of excellence, and who dare think for themselves.110
Criticism was aimed at the Lives from two main directions: moral and political, and literary. Francis Blackburne in his Remarks on the Life of Milton (1780) exemplifies the first. He accuses Johnson of sympathy with authoritarian political views and therefore of working out a ‘virulent malignity’ against Milton’s republican convictions under cover of a biography.111 In the event he is more abusive than Johnson whose alleged abuse of Milton he roundly condemns; but he was not alone in his opinion. Cowper explains Johnson’s antipathy to Milton on the same grounds; so does Towers in his Essay; and the same reasoning underlies the angry comment by the distinguished orientalist, Sir William Jones: ‘I can’t praise [the Lives], nor do I want to have the good word of a man who abuses all the friends of Liberty because they are so.’112 But in the long term more important were the literary objections. Here too, as with the Shakespeare edition, we encounter a significant shift of critical perspective. Leaving aside the major Romantic writers, authors like Cowper, Fitzthomas, Potter, Anna Seward and, later, Mackintosh, accused Johnson of inadequacy when confronted with recent, especially lyric, poetry. Few disputed his good sense, varied insights, or boldness and independence of judgment; but many found him a ‘husky dry commentator’ with a mind ‘in some respects as narrow as a crane’s neck’ (No. 59). In particular they found him wanting when faced with, for example, the ‘romantic turn’ of Prior’s verse, the poetry glowing with ‘enthusiasm’ of Gray, or the ‘romantic’ ideas and the ‘wild grandeur’ of imagination in Collins (Nos. 52, 55, 57). The tone of rapturous pleasure in Potter’s remarks on Shenstone and Gray’s Bard (Nos. 57, 59) is indicative of a new critical temper; against the spread of this and the criteria which sustained it Johnson seemed to crouch like a dragon at the gate. Richard Graves commented: ‘A new era or school of poetry seems to have commenced with Mr. Gray, as different from the simplicity of Addison, Pope, and Parnel, as Pindar’s or Horace’s Odes from Homer or Virgil.’113 To many of his contemporaries Johnson appeared insensitive or hostile to this revolutionary change. Thus, though—as Potter remarked—probably the majority of readers in 1779–81 accepted Johnson as ‘infallible’, it was not difficult to discern the coming rejection of his authority represented by Keats’s dismissive statement in 1818: ‘that “Monument of his Mortality the lives of the Poets” and his deadness to the exalted and excellent in Poetry’.114 More than a century was to pass before T.S.Eliot viewed the Lives as ‘a masterpiece of the judicial bench’.115
As there are no modern writings higher in public estimation than Doctor Johnson’s, and as there are none which abound more in appropriate marks of stile, there are none which can with more advantage be made the subject of critical enquiry.
Burrowes’s declaration (No. 65) is symptomatic of the interest taken by sympathizers as well as detractors in Johnson’s prose style virtually as distinct from content. All commentators testify to its extraordinary influence—on miscellaneous writers, critics, orators, and historians; Courtenay, Nathan Drake, and Mackintosh speak of a Johnson ‘school’ of writers (the first two providing names of its members); and except those like Campbell, Walpole, and Webster who lament the passing of the style associated with the age of Anne, most welcome Johnson’s influence. The views of derogatory critics may be summarized in Webster’s remark: ‘simplicity of stile is neglected for ornament, and sense is sacrificed to sound.’116 Burrowes, on the other hand, attributes to Johnson the awareness that his mode of thought, careful moral discriminations, and desire to provide imaginative stimulus required of him a prose medium different from that of his predecessors. His prose is variously described by others, but none analyses it with greater thoroughness or precision than Burrowes. Mackintosh identified the ‘Rhetorical’ period of Johnson and his school as the successor to the ‘Latin or pedantic age’ of More and Clarendon, and the age of Dryden and Addison with its middle style ‘between vulgarity and pedantry’ (No. 68). Anna Seward, generous in her commendation of Johnson’s prose style, pronounced it ‘the most perfect example of eloquent writing’; she also made one of the earliest laudatory comments on his use of abstract terms ‘which at once elevate his language and compress his sense’.117 Only in our present century have the implications of this remark begun to be investigated.
In an age when imitation of great models was standard literary practice it was inevitable that Johnson’s prose style would be numbered among the select. Its ‘universally acknowledged beauties’ (No. 65) ensured that. Boswell prints quotations from some of the ‘serious imitators’, including William Robertson, Gibbon, and Fanny Burney;118 Walpole, Burrowes, and Drake warn their readers against the dangers of imitating such a personal, highly-wrought manner; and Drake (like Boswell) censures the essayist Vicesimus Knox, for example, for adopting Johnson’s style for ‘subjects too delicate to support its weight’ (No. 67). But the practice continued; according to Coleridge the ‘common miscellaneous public’ required trivial thoughts presented in an uncommon way (No. 69). It took a stylistic revolution at the direction of Carlyle to effect the break-up of Johnsonian English.
Other factors operated to complete Johnson’s eclipse as ‘the first great literary character’ of his own age and that which followed. Doubtless his detractors of whom, through his long writing career, there were scores, cumulatively brought about some erosion of his reputation as the ‘literary Colossus’119 of his day. Then, as Arthur Murphy declared in the Monthly Review, ‘many who would have trembled to have assaulted him when living, have mustered up resolution enough to treat him with a hearty kick after he was dead.’120 Thus we have W.J.Temple who pronounced Johnson narrow-minded, arrogant, insensitive, and pompous; Mason whose vindictive epitaph is printed below (No. 77); Hurd who despised the pedant with the ‘swaggering’ style;121 or Blake who associates him with slightly crude jokes and spurns any reverential attitude (No. 72). Chalmers also ruefully observes that the courage of Johnson’s adversaries rose ‘very considerably after his death’ (No. 11); they discovered new faults in his writings; and, as is the case of Potter’s second critical work, they became more aggressive when safe from rebuff. Yet his adversaries could not alone secure his eclipse. Paradoxically it was his biographers, pre-eminently Boswell, who helped to bring it about. ‘Friends and foes’ alike, Arthur Murphy commented:
have conspired in mangling his memory, in drawing his frailties from their dread abode, and in bringing him to an inquisition so rigid, that were the like practised in the courts of Minos and Rhadamanthus, no mortal could pass into the Elysian fields.122
A highly sympathetic memoir of the dead man at once produced its counter-balance; however well intentioned, the result was to expose Johnson’s defects with added rigour. Thomas Tyers and Joseph Towers provide an illustration. The opening sentence of Tyers’s Biographical Sketch sets the tone for the whole; it applies to Johnson Charles II’s remark on the death of Cowley: ‘that he had not left a better man behind him in England’. Two years later, in 1786, Towers in his Essay explicitly rejects this view: Johnson had many virtues but also too many ‘apparent faults to be considered as a proper object of indiscriminate imitation’ (No. 74). Towers must then justify his assertion. He therefore proceeds to present Johnson as a throwback to an earlier age of intolerance and bigotry, out of tune with the growing enlightenment of the later eighteenth century. Johnson remains ‘among the best and ablest writers that England has produced’ but, to Towers the moderate radical, an unsatisfactory model for imitation.
Hard on the heels of Towers’s Essay came the Life by Sir John Hawkins (first edition March, second June, 1787). Although Hawkins considered himself sympathetic towards Johnson, his detractors (including Boswell) attacked the biography as malevolent, and it can indeed be read in that light. However, as Bertram H.Davis has argued, ‘in the tradition of the magistrate, Hawkins considered it necessary to cast up the account of good and bad, of pro and con, and to base his judgement, not on some preconceived notion, but on the evidence as it was presented to him.’123 Whatever his motives, Hawkins appeared ruthlessly to expose Johnson’s weaknesses; his commentary on the writings provided little compensation.
Boswell was undoubtedly on the offensive against Hawkins, but he did not write a panegyric. ‘I profess to write…his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect.’124 He did not reveal ‘warts and all’ but he was guided by Johnson’s own demands of a biography in Rambler No. 60: ‘If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.’ Honesty can be claimed for both Boswell and Hawkins; but Boswell loved Johnson where Hawkins respected him. Like Johnson himself when writing the life of his friend Savage, Boswell, though he was truthful, was not coldly objective. ‘My affection and reverence for you are exalted and steady’; ‘how elevating it is to my mind, that I am found worthy to be a companion to Dr. Samuel Johnson’:125 such statements confirm Boswell’s personal involvement.
Yet with the foregoing evidence of critical controversy in mind, it is clear that he had to declare his position on every one of Johnson’s major writings. His opening sentence, that Johnson ‘excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others’, implies an attitude to censorious critics of the Lives; his sympathetic critique of the Rambler and defence of its perspicuity ranges him firmly against critics like Campbell; or his care to assemble testimonies from distinguished witnesses proves his anxiety to dissociate himself from fellow Scots who had denounced the Journey. But his position on the political tracts is not far removed from Towers’s; he frankly disowns Johnson’s views on America and criticizes Taxation no Tyranny. Equally was he committed to participation in the ‘inquisition’ on his friend’s personality. Public inquiry was too intensive to be ignored. His Life—though sui generis and in its own right a notable advance in the art of biography—was a contribution to a controversy. Consequently Boswell had to declare himself on, say, whether Johnson was prejudiced in politics and religion, whether he was vain, whether he lacked humour or was aggressive. His answers were given with affection as well as frankness; but help they did to draw Johnson’s ‘frailties from their dread abode’.
His skill in confronting (or seeming to confront) all the contentious issues raised over half a century became less significant as time blunted the sharp edges of the debate. Indifference also helped to blunt some of them. It is noticeable how relatively small is the attention paid to Johnson by the Romantics and—except for Byron, who thought he possessed the ‘noblest critical mind’126 —how completely adverse their judgement. What unmistakably remained from Boswell’s achievement was his vivid presentation of a character. The results are evident in Scott, Macaulay, and Carlyle. Scott could not read a word of Johnson without the man being recalled to his imagination by Boswell: ‘a personification as lively as that of Siddons in Lady Macbeth or Kemble in Cardinal Wolsey’ (No. 79). Macaulay confidently pronounced on the ‘indiscriminate contempt’ with which Johnson was regarded as a critic, the ‘fading’ reputation of his writings, and the irrelevance of analysing his stylistic faults— ‘the public has become sick of the subject’ (No. 80). With equal assurance he declared the permanent interest in the character created by Boswell. For Carlyle too Johnson’s works were ‘becoming obsolete’; he prophesied that their continuing importance would be as ‘Prolegomena’ to Boswell’s Life, a book he rated ‘beyond any other product of the eighteenth century’ (No. 81). Johnson for him was a man, not a writer; a Carlylean hero distinguished by his courage, honesty, compassion and sense of purpose to become one of ‘the guides of the dull host’; indeed, in Matthew Arnold’s words, from Rugby Chapel, one of those
|
souls temper’d with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends of mankind. |
Though Carlyle could claim with some justice in 1832 that outside England Johnson’s name was ‘hardly anywhere to be met with’, in this country it continued to be frequently invoked. But that Johnson was largely Boswell’s creation; as a writer he suffered almost total eclipse. There were, of course, exceptions to the rule. Arnold had obviously read him, but in blinkers; Leslie Stephen had read him, yet it was the talk recorded by Boswell to which he listened most avidly.127 In fact the predominant nineteenth-century attitude may be summed up in some words from the Temple Bar of June 1892:
Our knowledge of Johnson comes to us solely and exclusively through Boswell’s spectacles…. Not one man in a thousand…has ever dipped into any single thing that Johnson wrote.128
Like Becky Sharp and her contemptuous treatment of the Dictionary, her contemporaries had flung Johnson’s works out of the window as the carriage rolled away from the eighteenth century.
What remained and has persisted in the popular imagination is either a picture (Miss Pinkerton’s) of ‘The Great Lexicographer’, ‘the late revered Doctor Samuel Johnson’; or one of a rather coarse conventional Tory with the astonishing conversational loquacity recorded by Boswell; or a mixture of the two. As recently as 1946 C.E.Vulliamy rejuvenated the grotesque Johnson in his Ursa Major; in the same year Robert Lynd reaffirmed the dependence of Johnson on Boswell. Lynd presented the principal subject of his Dr. Johnson and Company as ‘the hero of the most permanently entertaining book in English literature’, and Johnson and Boswell were ‘as inseparable in our imaginations as Castor and Pollux. Each, lacking the other, would lack half himself.’129 But what Bernard H. Bronson called ‘the learned tradition’130 has increasingly asserted its authority. No longer is it possible for a student of Johnson to give credence, for example, to Lytton Strachey’s remark on the Lives of the Poets in 1906:
as serious criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far removed from the futile. Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one: they are never right.131
The scholarly reappraisal of Johnson has meant that Strachey himself now appears demonstrably wrong; his wit has ossified his folly.
The development of the ‘learned tradition’ of Johnsonian studies effectively began with the notable advance in textual scholarship associated with the name of George Birkbeck Hill. Significantly enough, he first edited Boswell’s Life and Tour to the Hebrides (1887); then followed editions of Johnson’s Letters (1892), the Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), the Lives of the Poets (1905). L.F.Powell completed the edition of Boswell’s Life with monumental thoroughness in 1934; D.Nichol Smith with E.L.McAdam Jr. published their edition of Johnson’s Poems in 1941; and R.W.Chapman his editions of the Journey to the Western Islands and the Letters in 1924 and 1952 respectively. And in 1958 the first edition of Johnson’s complete works since 1825 began to appear from Yale. Side by side with editing has gone bibliographical study. First in the field was W.P.Courtney whose work was revised and published by D.Nichol Smith in 1915; the numerous attributions of writings to Johnson since that time have been surveyed by Donald J.Greene in his essay ‘The Development of the Johnson Canon’.132
Following Sir Walter Raleigh’s pioneer work Six Essays on Johnson (1910) and Nichol Smith’s chapter in volume X of the Cambridge History of English Literature (1913), innumerable critical studies have directed attention to Johnson’s historical and permanent significance as a writer. Major biographical studies, delayed for so long by the supremacy of Boswell, have been undertaken by Joseph Wood Krutch (1944) and James Clifford (1955), but the most sustained effort has undoubtedly been devoted to literary-critical investigations. Johnson’s influence on the very-practice of literary criticism has been striking. When F.R.Leavis can regard him as discriminating ‘with something approaching infallibility between what is strong and what is weak in the eighteenth century’,133 this is not surprising. T.S.Eliot, Leavis himself, and others named below, with their insistence on the necessity for close attention to the detail of a literary text, their studious avoidance of generalizations except on the basis of such detailed scrutiny, and their sensitivity to the relationship between literature and morality, all pay tribute to Johnson’s critical procedures. The application of this critical mode to his own writings has produced results of great moment. Eliot, for example, in his introductory essay to London and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1930), declared the two poems as ‘amongst the greatest verse satires of the English or any other language’. This revolution in the estimation of Johnson as a poet has been continued in the work of other writers including Leavis (The Common Pursuit, 1952); Donald Davie (Purity of Diction in English Verse, 1952); Ian Jack (Augustan Satire, 1952); and Chester Chapin (Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, 1955). By similarly detailed and sensitive examination of Johnson’s prose, W.K.Wimsatt (The Prose Style of Johnson, 1941) and Donald J.Greene (Johnson, Boswell and their Circle, ed. M.Lascelles et al, 1965) have sharpened our understanding of his complex, subtle, and often imaginatively stimulating style. Close scrutiny of Johnson’s other writings has been employed with great advantage. From approximately 2,500 items in the bibliographical surveys conducted by James Clifford and Donald J.Greene134 selection presents acute difficulties, but even a brief list of significant criticism must include: James H.Sledd and Gwin J.Kolb, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1955); W.J. Bate, The Achievement of Johnson (1955); Arthur Sherbo, Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (1956); Donald J.Greene, The Politics of Johnson (1960); Robert Voitle, Johnson the Moralist (1961); and, on Johnson as literary critic, Allen Tate in Collected Essays (1949), Jean H.Hagstrum’s Johnson’s Literary Criticism (1952), and Warren Fleischauer’s Johnson, Lycidas, and the Norms of Criticism’ (in Johnsonian Studies, ed. Magdi Wahba, 1962). These and countless other writers have contributed to the rediscovery and, in some respects, the discovery for the first time of what—in Boswell’s memorable phrase—Johnson essentially provides: ‘bark and steel for the mind’.135
| 1 | Winter Evenings: or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters, 1788, i. 187, 190–1. |
| 2 | Gentleman’s Magazine, xliv (1774), 298. |
| 3 | Monthly Review, xviii (1795), 377–80 (by Dr Burney). |
| 4 | Rural Rides, ed. G.D.H. and M.Cole, 1930, iii. 820. |
| 5 | Journey, 431; see Boswell, Life, v. 400. |
| 6 | Lives, ii. 253. |
| 7 | Boswell, Life, i. 128–9. |
| 8 | Complete Letters, ed. R.Halsband, 1967, iii. 66–7. |
| 9 | See head note to No. 15. |
| 10 | Op. cit., xii (1755), 324. |
| 11 | Op. cit., xxv (1755), 190. |
| 12 | For these and other details of the reception of the Dictionary see works by J.H.Sledd and G.J.Kolb, and by Gertrude Noyes listed in the Bibliography. |
| 13 | Op. cit., 9. |
| 14 | Op. cit., i. |
| 15 | Op. cit., xxxv (1765), 529. |
| 16 | Op. cit., xiii. |
| 17 | Middlesex Journal, 3 Feb. 1770; Political Register, vi (June 1770), 315–18; North Briton, 13 Nov. 1770. |
| 18 | Public Advertiser, 13 March 1775; St. James’s Chronicle, 1 April 1775; Whitehall, 6 April 1775. |
| 19 | Boswell, Life, ii. 170. For a full analysis see Donald J.Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, Yale, 1960. |
| 20 | Critical Review, xxxix (1775), 44. |
| 21 | On 9, 16, and 23 February, and 2, 9, and 22 March. |
| 22 | London Packet, 28 June 1779; Westminster Magazine, vii (November 1779), 591–2. |
| 23 | Critical Review, iv (2nd ser. 1792), 259. |
| 24 | Cf. Friedrich Wendeborn, A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, 1791, i. 211–18. |
| 25 | Travels in France, ed. M.Betham-Edwards, 2nd edn, 1889, 237. |
| 26 | See M.D.George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire, 1967, plates 119–21. |
| 27 | Memoirs, 1807, i. 364. |
| 28 | See Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii. 380. |
| 29 | Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. R.W.Chapman, 2nd edn, 1952, 181. See also B.C.Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, 1964. |
| 30 | Works, ed. John Bowring, New York, 1962, ii. 386. |
| 31 | Boswell, Life, i. 314. |
| 32 | Literary Magazine, ii (1757), xiv. 253–6. |
| 33 | Boswell, Life, iv. 55. |
| 34 | Journey, 344; see Boswell, Life, v. 273. |
| 35 | Boswell, Life, ii. 335. |
| 36 | Ibid., i. 201. |
| 37 | Ibid., i. 200. |
| 38 | Ibid., ii. 308. |
| 39 | Ibid., ii. 316. |
| 40 | The Rape of the Lock, ed. G.Tillotson, 2nd edn, 1954, 104 and n.1. |
| 41 | It was, however, included in several poetical collections; see Poems, 91, for details. |
| 42 | ‘The Contemporary Distribution of Johnson’s Rambler’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, ii (December 1968), 159. |
| 43 | Boswell, Life, i. 208 n.3; iv. 214 n.2. |
| 44 | See R.M.Wiles, art. cit., 156. |
| 45 | For full details see R.C.Alston, Bibliography of the English Language, 1966, v. 30–7. |
| 46 | Boswell, Life, i. 304. |
| 47 | Ibid., i. 183 n.2. |
| 48 | Ibid., i. 304. |
| 49 | Idler and Adventurer, ed. W.J.Bate et al., Yale, 1963, xxii n. |
| 50 | Boswell, Life, iii. 334. |
| 51 | Athenaeum, ii (1909), 298. |
| 52 | Dublin editions of The False Alarm, Falkland’s Islands and The Patriot also appeared in 1770, 1771, and 1775 respectively; New York had its edition of Falkland’s Islands in 1771. |
| 53 | Boswell, Life, ii. 310 n.2. |
| 54 | Ibid., iii. 326. |
| 55 | Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library 1773–1784, Charlottesville, 1960, 41. |
| 56 | Boswell, Life, iv. 35 n.3. |
| 57 | Ibid., iii. 111 n.1. |
| 58 | Ibid., iii. 486. |
| 59 | Kaufman, op. cit., 15, 99. |
| 60 | For a full bibliographical account see Allen T.Hazen in Modern Philology, xxxv (1938), 289–95. |
| 61 | See below, No. 73. (The Beauties was republished in 1792 and 1797; a ‘new edition’ appeared in 1828.) |
| 62 | Monthly Review, xx (1796), 18–19. |
| 63 | Two of these editions were published in Dublin, one in Edinburgh, and another in Boston, Mass. Murphy’s ‘Essay’ was also published separately from the Works in 1792 and again in 1793. |
| 64 | Boswell, Life, iii. 44. |
| 65 | Ibid., iii. 32. |
| 66 | Burke, Correspondence, ed. Lucy S.Sutherland, 1960, ii. 128. |
| 67 | Ibid. |
| 68 | Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson, 2nd edn, 1782, v. |
| 69 | Lexiphanes, 2nd edn, 1767, xviii. |
| 70 | Op. cit., 1792, 7, 9. |
| 71 | The Ruminator, 1813, ii. 67–8. |
| 72 | Thraliana, ed. K.C.Balderston, 1942, i. 186. |
| 73 | Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Scott, 1810, i. x. But see below, p. 421. |
| 74 | Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii. 339. |
| 75 | See James T.Boulton, ‘Arbitrary Power, an Eighteenth-Century Obsession: a Lecture’, University of Nottingham, 1967. |
| 76 | Lives, i. 233. |
| 77 | Mac Flecknoe, ll. 5–6. |
| 78 | The Ghost, 1v, ll. 872, 997–8, 1679–84. |
| 79 | Memoirs of the Life and Writings of…Johnson, 1785, 189. |
| 80 | Deformities, 31, 46 n., 82. |
| 81 | Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Richard Hurd, ed. F.Kilvert, 1860, 254. |
| 82 | Correspondence of Gray, ed. P.Toynbee and L.Whibley, 1935, i. 295. |
| 83 | Collected Works of Goldsmith, ed. A.Friedman, 1966, v. 320. |
| 84 | Memoirs, 71. |
| 85 | European Magazine, xviii (November 1790), 331. |
| 86 | ‘Sleep and Poetry’, l. 195. |
| 87 | Letters, 1811, i. 305. |
| 88 | George Colman, Prose on Several Occasions, 1787, ii. 99. |
| 89 | Poetical Works, i. xc. |
| 90 | Rambler, No. 8. |
| 91 | Spectator No. 253. (Cf. No. 9 below.) |
| 92 | Deformities, 58, 66, 72. |
| 93 | Prose on Several Occasions, i. 185. |
| 94 | Essay on…Johnson, 1786, 38. |
| 95 | Unfinished Letter to Pitt, 1788, 38. |
| 96 | Op. cit., ed. Harry R.Warfel, in ‘Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints’, Gainesville, Florida, 1951, xi, 19, 168. |
| 97 | James H.Sledd and Gwin J.Kolb, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, 204. |
| 98 | Nevertheless, on average, three editions of Rasselas (including translations into major European languages) have appeared every two years since 1759. Of this approximate figure of 600 editions, 400 are in the English language. |
| 99 | See head note to No. 30. |
| 100 | Preface, in Shakespeare, 108. |
| 101 | Remarks, Critical and Illustrative, on…Last Edition of Shakespeare, 1783, iii. |
| 102 | Percy Letters: Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, ed. A. Tillotson, Louisiana State University Press, 1944, 249. |
| 103 | Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii. 424; Critical Review, xxxi (1771), 196. |
| 104 | Peter Brown, The Chathamites, 1967, 150. |
| 105 | Monthly Review, lii (1775), 253. (Edward Bancroft (1774–1821) was responsible for most reviews on American affairs in the Monthly, 1774–7. See D.N.B. and Dictionary of American Biography for Bancroft’s remarkable career.) |
| 106 | London Packet, 22 January 1770. |
| 107 | Critical Review, xxxix (1775), 44. |
| 108 | Boswell, Life, i. 392. |
| 109 | Op. cit., 11. |
| 110 | Journals and Correspondence of Thomas S.Whalley, ed. Hill Wickham, 1863, i. 348 (Letter from Anna Seward). |
| 111 | Op. cit., 131. |
| 112 | Cited by Peter Brown, The Chathamites, 387. |
| 113 | Lucubrations, 1786, 218 n. |
| 114 | Letters, ed. H.E.Rollins, 1958, i. 385. |
| 115 | The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933, 64. |
| 116 | Dissertations on the English Language, 34. |
| 117 | Letters, 1811, i. 212; ii. 267. |
| 118 | Boswell, Life, iv. 388–92. |
| 119 | Ibid., i. 2. |
| 120 | Op. cit., lxxvii (1787), 457. |
| 121 | Temple, Character of Johnson, 10–13; Memoirs of Hurd, 296. |
| 122 | Monthly Review, lxxvii (1787), 457. |
| 123 | Hawkins, Life of Johnson, ed. B.H.Davis, 1962, xxiv. |
| 124 | Boswell, Life, i. 30. |
| 125 | Ibid., iii. 105, 439. |
| 126 | Letters and Journals, ed. R.E.Prothero, 1922–4, v. 564; see also ii. 356; iv. 488, 490. |
| 127 | English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1963 edn, 114. |
| 128 | Quoted by James Clifford, A Survey of Johnsonian Studies, 1887–1950, reprinted in Samuel Johnson, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. D.J.Greene, Spectrum Books, 1965, 47. |
| 129 | Op. cit., 23, 27. |
| 130 | In ‘The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson’, reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James Clifford, New York, 1959, 286. |
| 131 | Books and Characters, 1922, 68. |
| 132 | In Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carroll Camden, Chicago, 1963. |
| 133 | The Common Pursuit, 1962 edn, 113. |
| 134 | See Bibliography, page 449. |
| 135 | Boswell, Life, i. 215. |