The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  Fear, on the other hand, is a response to an immediate threat, and the colour with which we’re most likely to associate it is red – the red of warning, danger, anger, fire, blood and power. Yet for his first illustration of the word in the Dictionary, Sam chooses an extract from John Locke that doesn’t evoke such a keen sense of scarlet passion or flaming hazard: ‘Fear is an uneasiness of the mind, upon the thought of future evil likely to befall us.’ To a modern reader this sounds more like anxiety (which the Dictionary defines as ‘Trouble of mind about some future event’), and Sam does not in fact distinguish clearly between fear and anxiety. But the quotation from Locke appeals to him because of the word ‘uneasiness’: though for us perhaps not very evocative, it makes him think of pain, disturbance, constraint and even cramping. Although Locke is referring to something that happens in the mind, ‘uneasiness’ captures some of the ways in which fear expresses itself through the body. ‘All fear is in itself painful,’ Sam argues in the Rambler. In one of his Idler essays he writes of how fear ‘is received by the ear as well as the eyes’ and can ‘chill’ the breast of a warrior, and in another he imagines a traveller who ‘in the dusk fears more as he sees less’ and ‘shrinks at every noise’. These are a few examples among many. Again and again he pictures fear as something invasive, nagging, goading, physically oppressive – a state that takes control of both mind and body.

  There was nothing that Sam feared more than insanity, which seemed proximate and hideous, and it was this that caused him to subdue his imagination, denying certain urges full access to his consciousness. In Rasselas, the philosopher Imlac speaks about what he terms the ‘dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ and refers to the need to ‘repress’ the ‘power of fancy’. This choice of verb again brings to mind Freud, who wrote about the ego’s rejection or censorship of ‘unwelcome’ impulses. Imlac is not identical with his creator and, unlike Freud, thinks of repression as straightforwardly beneficial, but the image is still an arresting one. Sam’s other observations on the matter foreshadow Freud’s notions about the mind’s hinterland. Even if the language only a few times prefigures Freud’s (in one of his sermons he refers to ‘the repression of . . . unreasonable desires’), the connection deserves notice. In Rambler 29 he describes how anxiety fills the mind with ‘perpetual stratagems of counteraction’ – psychological defence mechanisms, like the ones Freud later identified. An especially potent statement on this theme comes in Rambler 76, where he observes that ‘No man yet was ever wicked without secret discontent’; the last two words evoke the whole drama of muffled desire and neurosis. One of the most astute interpreters of Johnson’s thought, Walter Jackson Bate, identifies his ‘studied and sympathetic sense of the way in which the human imagination, when it is blocked in its search for satisfaction, doubles back . . . or skips out diagonally in some form of projection’. This, he argues, is probably ‘the closest anticipation of Freud . . . before the twentieth century’.4

  As he thought about the dangers of losing his mind, Sam sometimes pictured the poet Christopher Smart, sent to a madhouse in Bethnal Green at the insistence of his father-in-law John Newbery (Sam’s sometime publisher). Smart was a whirlwind of religious fervour, frequently unstable, but to Sam he seemed a cautionary figure. Had he been locked up for his own good or for other people’s convenience? At his lowest ebb, Smart could still claim that ‘I am not without authority in my jeopardy’, but his confinement denied him both his privacy – tourists came and gawped at him – and his access to public life and recognition. Sam saw how grotesque this was: ‘I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society . . . Another charge was that he did not love clean linen – and I have no passion for it.’ Those final words, replete with self-knowledge, invite laughter. But the possibility of being detained on grounds similar to Smart’s was real and appalling.

  Hester Thrale spoke of Sam’s ‘particular attention to the diseases of the imagination’, and his understanding of that faculty was certainly complex. He believed in the power of the imaginary to activate our empathy, and, even though he tended to claim that the more inventive sorts of fiction were puerile and ‘too remote from known life’, he could revel in stories of adventure and romance. In his life of Milton, he proposed that ‘Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.’ But the imagination could breed despair and shameful wishes – not the least of which was the urge to masturbate – as well as the overripe daydreams that he called ‘this secret prodigality of being’ and likened to ‘the poison of opiates’. In Rasselas, Imlac voices the thoroughly Johnsonian anxiety that a solitary person can become fixated with a single idea and will feast on ‘luscious falsehood’ whenever ‘offended with the bitterness of truth’. Indulging the imagination creates the impression of deliciously concentrated flavours, but it is only that – an impression. The result is a treacherous sense of the world’s insufficiency.

  At its best, then, imagination is a passport to enlightenment, and at its worst a route into madness. Sam thinks of it as a person, often ‘licentious and vagrant’ and capable of what he calls ‘seducements’ – yet with the potential to be ‘bright and active’ and to ‘animate’ one’s knowledge. It can also be a cancer, ‘a formidable and obstinate disease of the intellect’ which ‘preys incessantly upon life’; a vessel, which it is natural to keep trying to fill; a muscle, easily strained; or an appliance that overheats when charged with the ‘blaze of hope’ and needs cooling down with a dose of realism.

  The double-edged nature of imagination means that the mind is in a state of perpetual turbulence. Sam writes in Rambler 8 of the need to ‘govern our thoughts, restrain them from irregular motions’, and in Rambler 125 of imagination’s tendency to ‘burst the enclosures of regularity’. But how to achieve regularity? He searched for means of keeping imagination under control, and in later years one of these consisted of carrying out small experiments. For instance, he shaved the hair on his arms, curious to see how long it took to grow back, and kept track of the weight of forty-one leaves he had cut from a vine and laid out to dry on his bookshelves. His interest in such matters chimed with a broader interest in science, but was a means of grounding himself, attaching his thoughts to exact details of reality when otherwise they might float off into fancy – or proliferate into frenzy.

  In his diaries, Sam echoes the cries of Shakespeare’s Lear – ‘Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.’ He did not subscribe to the view, which has since been periodically fashionable, that madness is a form of protest or some kind of higher authenticity, an instinct for the poetic or an alertness to hidden truths. ‘Reason is the great distinction of human nature’, he wrote in Rambler 162, and in Rambler 137 he emphasized its capacity to ‘disentangle complications and investigate causes’. In his view, whatever interfered with the powers of reason was dangerous, and insanity seemed always to be encroaching on them. But those powers often seemed most acute when he believed he was teetering on the brink of insanity; attending to their functions was a way to stop himself disintegrating.

  His notion of reason was heavily influenced by his reading of Locke, who identified what he called ‘the wrong connection in our minds of ideas’ as a ‘great force to set us awry’. In the Dictionary Sam cited Locke in his entry for madness: ‘There are degrees of madness as of folly, the disorderly jumbling ideas together.’ False associations can crystallize fanaticism and prejudice, and they have a tendency to persist stubbornly. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke gave the example of a young man who learns to dance in a room that contains an old trunk: he is able to dance only in the presence of this trunk, and being unable to dance in a public place (at least without lugging a trunk around) is a social handicap, perhaps not tragic but certainly insidious. Sam believed that by inspecting his thought processes he could identify and undo crippling associations of this kind.

  But this was
something to be done in private, when alone. He reserved commentary on his precarious state of mind for his diaries, or for discussion with his most intimate friends; in public, and especially in his published writings, he made a point of maintaining an impression of mental equilibrium. Though revealingly quick to express sympathy for people whose minds were in distress, he translated his own painful experiences of what he called the ‘invisible riot of the mind’ into wisdom. When he discussed with Boswell how to deal with upsetting thoughts, he was clear that diversion was the best remedy. Boswell wondered if it wasn’t possible to combat them through the direct application of one’s intelligence, and Sam replied, ‘To attempt to think them down is madness.’ Introspection is not its own cure.

  At the same time, he wondered whether sanity was a substantive quality. The concept seemed vague – and still does. In his book Going Sane (2005), Adam Phillips writes that ‘The language of mental health . . . comes to life . . . in descriptions of disability, incompetence and failure’, whereas ‘the rules of sanity that are being broken are never properly codified, or even articulated’. It is as though we think that ‘if we look after the madness the sanity will take care of itself’. Maybe, in truth, we are ‘unaccustomed to valuing things, to exploring things, that are not traumatic’, and sanity ‘has been invented as some fictitious vantage point from which the trauma that is madness can be observed’. The language of sanity is ‘like propaganda for a world . . . that has never existed’.5

  In the Dictionary, Sam defines sanity as ‘soundness of mind’. The sole quotation he uses to illustrate this is from Hamlet, in which Polonius speaks of ‘A happiness that often madness hits on, / Which sanity and reason could not be / So prosp’rously delivered of.’ Polonius is referring to Hamlet’s ‘pregnant’ utterances, full of wit and wordplay. It’s an interesting choice of illustration, since it values madness rather than sanity. If we turn to the entry for mad, there are personal notes in Sam’s defining it as ‘delirious without fever’, ‘broken in the understanding’ and ‘overrun with any violent or unreasonable desire’. Under madness he cites Locke’s statement that ‘There are degrees of madness as of folly’ – a view he certainly endorsed, though his contemporaries tended to disagree. The sole illustrative quotation for madhouse comes from a seventeenth-century collection of fables – in which an inmate in such a place explains that ‘the mad folks abroad are too many for us, and so they have mastered all the sober people and cooped them up here’.

  ‘Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.’ So says Imlac, arguing that any moment when fancy gets the upper hand over reason is tinged with insanity. While it isn’t safe to assume that a quotation from Rasselas represents Sam’s views, Imlac is the closest thing in it to his mouthpiece, and the spirit of his creator is audible in this suggestion that we are all susceptible to inexplicable compulsions and the darker urgings of the unconscious. Humankind is fallible; even the most sublime mind will err, and all of us from time to time lose contact with our better judgement. In this view, which looks ahead to ideas developed in the twentieth century by such scholars of madness as Michel Foucault, unreason is simply one of the places that the strange pilgrimage of life takes us.

  On his fifty-first birthday, Sam vowed to ‘reclaim imagination’, and the verb naturally makes one think about what it’s being reclaimed from: benightedness, desire (he says that ‘Every desire is a viper in the bosom’), thoughts of suicide perhaps, and twisted fantasy. It’s worth noticing, too, that the verb reclaim was originally, in the fourteenth century, used of a hawk, and in Sam’s time continued to be used in this way. The imagination, like the hawk, can glide gracefully, but there are moments when it slips beyond one’s reach, when its violence and the drama of its flight can obliterate all other sensations. Here I’m reminded of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, a memoir in which training a hawk is a means of dealing with grief. ‘Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human,’ writes Macdonald. ‘Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future.’6 For Sam, it’s essential to rein the imagination back in before it can take him past the edge of being a human – past it, over it, into the abyss.

  An element of his heroism was a willingness to pay attention to any and every thought he had, no matter how unpleasant or painful. His choosing to look inside himself in this way feels unexpectedly modern, as does his urging the habit upon others. ‘Make your boy tell you his dreams,’ he instructed Hester Thrale, explaining that ‘the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream’. He would not tell her what this was, but clearly he had reflected on it, probing the source of a dark thought. Dreams seemed a particularly disquieting example of imagination’s tyranny, continuing by stealth the mind’s diurnal work, compensating for the steady hand of rationality, or dramatizing those conflicts and connections that lay low in his waking life. When he describes a dream as ‘a phantasm of sleep’ (his Dictionary definition) or ‘a temporary recession from the realities of life’ (in the Idler), he captures their fantastical quality and hints at their purpose: as a form of review, a solution to problems that under one’s waking scrutiny seem insoluble, a means of correcting misperceptions or fulfilling socially unacceptable urges, a detox programme, and a repository for messages from the future.

  21

  A chapter one might, in a more facetious spirit, have chosen to label ‘Shakespeare matters’

  The idea of Johnson the hero is bound up with the Dictionary, which, even more than the Rambler, has the potential to illuminate his character. As he translates his vast programme of reading into a work of encyclopedic scope, there is plentiful evidence of his curiosity and learning, his tastes and priorities, the rareness of his judgement. Yet that evidence is not readily discernible because the details of the Dictionary’s entries, though cumulatively revealing, disclose only a modest amount about his state of mind and personal qualities when read one (or a few) at a time – and that has always been how most of the Dictionary’s audience have consumed it: in small doses rather than great gulps. Indeed, most have consulted not the data-rich pages of the whopping folio volumes (which originally cost £4 10s.), but one of the 120 abridgements or 309 miniature versions that followed. It is one of these condensed Johnsons that Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair flings from the window of her carriage as she leaves Miss Pinkerton’s academy. In having her do so, her creator William Thackeray means to show that this resourceful young woman is casting aside tradition and authority. For Thackeray, writing in the 1840s about events thirty years earlier, Johnson’s magnum opus was the embodiment of both stout Englishness and its compiler’s force of mind and personality.

  From the moment the Dictionary appeared, and for the next hundred years, that was its prevailing image. But while it made Sam’s reputation, it failed to solve his money problems. Those would continue until 1762, when George III granted him a pension of £300 a year. A reward for his literary achievements, the pension was dreamed up by Alexander Wedderburn, a Scottish lawyer and MP. Wedderburn had put the idea to the Earl of Bute, his fellow Scot, who was then prime minister (a role he occupied for a mere ten months). The intention was to relieve Johnson’s financial distress, but the pension made him look like a docile servant of the monarch and the government. He knew he would be criticized for taking it, and soon enough the vitriol began to flow. The Gazetteer dubbed him ‘Mr Independent Johnson’ and sniffed at writers who ‘feast on state pensions’, while the Public Advertiser included in a list of spoof book titles ‘The Charms of Independence, a Tale, by Sam. Johnson, Esq.’. This kind of comment would not abate and became a trope of lazy journalism; among the more striking examples are an item in the London Evening Post in April 1771 that calls him ‘Dr Pomposo, Pensioner Extraordinary alias Extraordinary Pensioner’ (the name Pomposo had b
een coined by the satirical poet Charles Churchill) and one in the Morning Post in March 1777 that refers in passing to ‘the surly pensioned Dictionary-maker’.1 Inevitably, and insistently, the sneerers drew attention to his Dictionary definition of pension – ‘pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.

  By the time the pension was offered, Sam longed to be free from financial anxiety. The years that followed the Dictionary were hard. In March 1756, he was arrested for a debt of £5 18s., and only when the novelist Samuel Richardson sent him six guineas was he spared a spell in a louse-ridden, fetid, violent debtors’ prison. The indignity of having no money was all the greater because he was surrounded by evidence of wealth. Grub Street, it’s true, was home to many penniless characters, and he had only to walk along Fleet Street to see droves of the down and out. But among his circle were people of means. An example was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Prolific and successful, he was able to collect the work of other artists – in 1756 he acquired a Rembrandt.2 In the year he accepted his pension, Sam could report in a letter that Reynolds was earning £6,000 a year, which we might tentatively equate to £600,000 today.

  Whenever Sam received visitors, they were astonished to find him dressed like a beggar, rising at noon and breakfasting at one, surrounded by papers but with little furniture and few comforts, coughing amid the dust. Lodgers traipsed in and out of his quarters, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. They contributed little and stretched his meagre resources. He was, in any case, reluctant to demand much of them. Hester Thrale relates that, rather than send Francis Barber to fetch oysters for his cat Hodge, Sam would lumber off to do so himself; even when it was inconvenient for him, he feared injuring Frank’s pride by sending him on an errand ‘for the convenience of a quadruped’.