SAMUEL JOHNSON SELECTED ESSAYS
SAMUEL JOHNSON was born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller, and was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and, for a short time at Pembroke College, Oxford. He taught for a while, after which he worked for a Birmingham printer, for whom he translated Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Jervis Porter and with her money opened a boarding academy. The school was a failure and in 1737 Johnson left for London. There, he became a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine and struggled to earn a living from writing. But it was not until the award of a government pension in 1762 that Johnson gained financial security. His London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal was published anonymously in 1738 and attracted some attention. The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated appeared under his own name in 1749. From 1750 to 1752 he issued the Rambler, a periodical written almost entirely by himself, and consolidated his position as a notable moral essayist with some twenty-five essays in the Adventurer. The Idler essays, lighter in tone, appeared weekly between 1758 and 1760. When his Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, Johnson took on the proportions of a literary monarch in the London of his day. In need of money to visit his sick mother, he wrote Rasselas (1759) reportedly in the evenings of one week, finishing a couple of days after his mother’s death. In 1763 Boswell became his faithful follower and it is mainly to his Life that we owe our intimate knowledge of Johnson. Founded in 1764, ‘The Club’ (of literary men) was the perfect forum for the exercise of Johnson’s great conversational art. His edition of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in 1765. From August to November 1773 he and Boswell toured Scotland and in 1775 his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared. His last major work was Lives of the Poets. He died in December 1784.
DAVID WOMERSLEY is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. His book The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published by Cambridge University Press in 1988. He has also edited Augustan Critical Writing, a three-volume complete edition of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, all for Penguin Classics.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Selected Essays
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID WOMERSLEY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank ,2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
Essays published 1739–61
This selection first published 2003
10
Selection, Introduction and Notes copyright © David Womersley, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196054-8
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
THE RAMBLER (1750–52)
1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87, 90, 93, 101, 106, 108, 113, 114, 115, 121, 129, 134, 135, 137, 142, 145, 146, 148, 151, 156, 158, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 181, 183, 184, 188, 191, 196, 207, 208.
THE ADVENTURER (1753–54)
39, 45, 50, 67, 69, 84, 85, 95, 99, 102, 107, 111, 119, 126, 137, 138.
THE IDLER (1758–60)
1, 5, 10, 17, [22], 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 72, 81, 84, 88, 94, 100, 103.
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
‘A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage’ (1739)
‘An Essay on Epitaphs’ (1740)
‘Introduction’ to the Harleian Miscellany (1744)
‘Observations on the present State of Affairs’ (1756)
‘Of the Duty of a Journalist’ (1758)
‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’ (1760)
Appendix I: Johnson’s prayer on beginning The Rambler
Appendix II: Parallel texts of the original and revised states of The Rambler No. 1
Appendix III: Bonnell Thornton’s parody of The Rambler
Notes
A Chronology of Samuel Johnson
1709 Born on 18 September in Lichfield; son of Michael and Sarah Johnson.
1712 Touched for the king’s evil (scrofula) by Queen Anne.
1717–25 Attends Lichfield Grammar School.
1728 Enters Pembroke College, Oxford, in October.
1729 Leaves Oxford in December.
1731 Death of his father, Michael Johnson.
1732 Works as an usher at Market Bosworth school.
1733 Translates Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia; contributes essays to the Birmingham Journal.
1735 Marries Elizabeth Porter; takes out lease on school at Edial.
1737 Leaves for London in March, accompanied by one of his pupils, David Garrick; begins working for the publisher Edward Cave, and contributes to The Gentleman’s Magazine.
1738 Publication of London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.
1739 Publication of A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage.
1744 Publication of Life of Mr. Richard Savage, and Harleian Miscellany.
1746 Contract signed for Dictionary.
1747 Publication of the ‘Plan’ of the Dictionary.
1749 Publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes; Garrick produces Irene.
1750 Begins The Rambler.
1752 Death of Elizabeth Johnson; The Rambler concludes.
1753 Begins contributing to The Adventurer in March.
1754 Ceases to contribute to The Adventurer in March; publishes biography of Cave.
1755 Publication of the Dictionary; awarded honorary MA, Oxford.
1758 Begins The Idler, published in The Universal Chronicle.
1759 Death of his mother, Sarah Johnson; publication of Rasselas: The Prince of Abyssinia.
1760 The Idler concludes.
1762 Receives pension of £300 per annum from George III.
1763 Meets James Boswell.
1764 Founding of ‘The Club’ (an informal group founded at suggestion of Joshua Reynolds).
1765 Awarded LL D, Dublin; publication of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (8 vols.). Meets Henry and Hester Thrale.
1770 Publication of The False Alarm.
1771 Publication of Thoughts on the lat
e Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands.
1773 Tour of the highlands of Scotland and the Hebrides.
1774 Publication of The Patriot; tour of Wales with the Thrales.
1775 Awarded DCL, Oxford; visits Paris with the Thrales; publication of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Taxation No Tyranny.
1777 Begins work on the Lives of the Poets.
1779 Publication of first instalment of the Lives of the Poets.
1781 Publication of second instalment of the Lives of the Poets.
1783 Founding of the Essex Head Club.
1784 Dies on 13 December.
Introduction
When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, William Hamilton saw the event as an irreparable calamity: ‘He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. – Johnson is dead. – Let us go to the next best: – there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’1 This is not just testimony to the warmth of Johnson’s friendships, for his death had also made a rent in the literary life of the nation. Ever since 1759, when the novelist and man of letters Tobias Smollett had referred to Johnson as ‘that great CHAM of literature’, Johnson had contended for a station at the centre of English literature.2 His claims were not everywhere acknowledged – in 1770, for instance, Gilbert Cowper had dismissed him as ‘the Caliban of literature’.3 But Joseph Towers, writing in 1786, two years after Johnson’s death, believed that he had in the end prevailed:
His works, with all their defects, are a most valuable and important accession to the literature of England … his Dictionary, his moral essays, and his productions in polite literature, will convey useful instruction, and elegant entertainment, as long as the language in which they are written shall be understood; and give him a just claim to a distinguished rank among the best and ablest writers that England has produced.4
For the quarter of a century before he died, Johnson’s output as a poet, a novelist, a critic, a lexicographer, a biographer, an editor and (as we shall see) perhaps primarily as an essayist had made him a dominant figure in English literary life.
However, no one is born to such a position. It has to be attained. And Johnson seems to have taken the first, crucial steps towards that position in the early 1750s, when he composed a series of periodical essays published twice weekly as The Rambler. It was here that he created the literary character, identified the distinctive preoccupations, and forged the prose style, which established him in the mind of the reading public. As Johnson’s friend, Arthur Murphy, said in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), The Rambler ‘may be considered as Johnson’s great work. It was the basis of that high reputation which went on increasing to the end of his days.’5 Therefore this selection from Johnson’s journalism includes a generous proportion of essays from The Rambler, and a conscious attempt has been made to include examples of all the different kinds of essay Johnson composed for that paper. Furthermore, and to throw into relief how marked an innovation The Rambler was for Johnson, a number of his earlier essays and short pamphlets are also included. Finally, also included is the best of Johnson’s later journalism, whether published as separate items or in the two successors to The Rambler, namely The Idler and The Adventurer. Aside from their intrinsic interest, in these later works we can see Johnson at moments struggling within and even against the persona and literary style which he had so successfully created for himself in The Rambler.
What was that persona, and what was the style Johnson forged in order to express and give body to it? In his Life of Johnson, James Boswell records a conversation with Johnson on the subject of death which is of help here. Boswell had deliberately introduced this subject, and had provocatively cited instances of those who professed to be untroubled by their mortality, in order to draw Johnson out. It was a ploy which later caused him some remorse:
Here I am sensible I was in the wrong, to bring before his view what he ever looked upon with horrour; for although when in a celestial frame, in his ‘Vanity of human Wishes’, he has supposed death to be ‘kind Nature’s signal for retreat,’ from this state of being to ‘a happier seat’, his thoughts upon this aweful change were in general full of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.6
This image of Johnson’s mind as a place of interminable, endlessly renewed and never concluded struggle helps us to appreciate his prose style. In conversation Johnson tended to the simple and vigorous: ‘He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis.’7 But on paper his prose was marked by the ebb and flow of contrary qualities, as satire succeeded compassion, and inspiration was checked by reflection. In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) William Hazlitt was sensitive to this quality in Johnson’s style, although he did not care for it:
Dr. Johnson was also a complete balance-master in the topics of morality. He never encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth, but he suggests some objection in answer to it. He seizes and alternately quits the clue of reason, lest it should involve him in the labyrinths of endless error: he wants confidence in himself and his fellows.8
A more sympathetic analysis of the dynamics of Johnson’s style will be offered below. The restlessness of Johnson’s prose is the signature of a moral wisdom which is always alert to the vanity of dogmatizing, and which therefore speaks to us most powerfully, not so much in what it says as in what it implies. Arthur Murphy sensed in Johnson’s essays the powerful presence of what is either left unsaid or unable to be said, when he reflected on how in The Rambler the powers of language seem to be exhausted: ‘the language seems to fall short of his ideas’.9 This falling short is not a defect, still less (as Hazlitt seems to imply) a case of fence-sitting. It is instead a means of dispelling what George Gleig, writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1793), referred to as ‘that inattention by which known truths are suffered to lie neglected’.10 As we attend to it, we discover a Johnson who can speak to our condition with a surprising directness, either when writing about, for instance, lotteries,11 or when reflecting with more sombreness on the permanent features of our moral existence.
One of the moments in Johnson’s life which still has the power to move the sympathetic reader of today arose out of his composition of The Rambler. In the Life of Johnson Boswell records Johnson’s memory that, some time early in 1750 and after the publication of a few Ramblers, his wife Tetty had confessed that these most recent writings had transformed her understanding of her husband. They had revealed in him unsuspected powers: ‘I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written any thing equal to this.’12 Some two years later, on 13 March 1752, Johnson presented his wife with the four duodecimo volumes of the collected Rambler. A few days later she was dead. As Allen Reddick has said with compassionate insight of this episode: ‘The timing of her epiphanic comment – the discovery of the extent of her husband’s genius just as her own decline began to hasten – and Johnson’s touching and desperate attempt to reach her through a gift of his own work that she had valued are simply further sad and ironical elements characteristic of the Johnsons’ marriage.’ 13 The common view of Tetty – that she was a slothful woman of unleavenable ordinariness, who took no interest in the work of the literary genius to whom she was married, and who killed herself with drink and opium14 – might encourage us to see her surprise at The Rambler as just another instance of her inability to understand her own experience. But would anyone have guessed in the early months of 1750 that Johnson would be able to write, not only anything as good as The Rambler, but even anything like it?
Even those
who in 1750 knew Johnson well might have seen few clues. He had been born on 18 September 1709, the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield. In 1717 he entered Lichfield Grammar School, proceeding in 1728 to Pembroke College, Oxford. However, Johnson remained in Oxford for barely a year, leaving in December 1729. After the death of his father in 1731 he spent the early 1730s teaching and pursuing a literary career in the Midlands; for instance, in 1733 he had translated Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, a work eventually published in 1735. This was also the year in which Johnson married Elizabeth (or Tetty) Jervis, a widow with three children. In the following year he opened his own school at Edial near Lichfield, and began work on Irene, a moral tragedy set in Constantinople after its fall to the Turks (although the play was not to be performed until January 1749). Meanwhile, the school at Edial seems never to have flourished. It closed in 1737, and in March of that year Johnson, accompanied by David Garrick, moved to London and committed himself to a career as a man of letters. The late 1730s and early 1740s were accordingly for Johnson a period of Grub-Street hackery,15 interspersed with some brighter triumphs, such as the publication in 1738 of his Juvenalian imitation, London.16 He began writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine, contributing the ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ which, in a period when it was forbidden to report the debates in the House of Commons directly, were a mock-Swiftian vehicle for disseminating awareness of what was happening in Parliament. It was at this time, too, that Johnson composed two anti-government pamphlets, the anti-Walpolean Marmor Nor-folciense and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (the second of which is reprinted below, pp. 495–509); in both these works he revealed his antipathy to Whiggism, as well as a streak of literary inventiveness.
The other literary form Johnson pursued during these years was biography. He composed lives of his friend the poet Richard Savage, of the historian Paolo Sarpi and of the physician Herman Boerhaave, as well as a series of shorter biographical sketches which he contributed to The Gentleman’s Magazine. Now, too, he began to frame larger literary projects. He contributed to the Harleian Miscellany (writing the ‘Introduction’, which is reprinted below on pp. 517–23), and compiled the catalogue of the Harleian library. He proposed an edition of Shakespeare, and in 1746 signed the contract for the Dictionary (finally to be published in 1755). In 1747 he published the Plan of an English Dictionary, dedicated to Lord Chesterfield, and in 1749 there appeared a second Juvenalian imitation, The Vanity of Human Wishes. So when the first Rambler appeared anonymously in 1750, even had its readers known that the author was Samuel Johnson, that name would have identified a jobbing journalist and political pamphleteer, who was also an accomplished if not prolific poet, and who had recently branched out into lexicography, textual editing and antiquarianism. It would not have suggested a master of moral wisdom. Yet in a few years, it would be these moral essays which formed Johnson’s surest claim to regard. When in 1755 the Earl of Arran wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford to request that the degree of MA be conferred on Johnson, he emphasized that Johnson had ‘very eminently distinguished himself by the publication of a series of essays, excellently calculated to form the manners of the people, and in which the cause of religion and morality is every where maintained by the strongest powers of argument and language’.17 It was a judgement endorsed towards the end of the century by Arthur Murphy: ‘In this collection [The Rambler] Johnson is the great moral teacher of his countrymen; his essays form a body of ethics; the observations on life and manners are acute and instructive; and the essays, professedly critical, serve to promote the cause of literature.’18
Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) Page 1
