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

by Henry Hitchings

  In an age when it was common to speak of ‘good taste’, Sam never used this form of words in his own writings. It appears in one of his translations, and Boswell once has him speak of ‘good taste’ when they are discussing differences of opinion about writers’ style.3 But Sam was unimpressed by the immediacy with which taste operated: there was no time for reason to arrest it. John Gilbert Cooper’s Letters Concerning Taste, published in the same year as the Dictionary, described good taste as ‘that instantaneous glow of pleasure which thrills thro’ our whole frame, and seizes upon the applause of the heart, before the intellectual power, reason, can descend from the throne of the mind’.4 Much of the contemporary discussion of taste invoked its force and irresistibility: taste draws people towards objects.

  Sam was addressing this long before he started the Idler. In Rambler 49, he writes about the ‘new desires and artificial passions’ that spring up once our basic needs are answered: ‘from having wishes only in consequence of our wants, we begin to feel wants in consequence of our wishes’. In short, ‘we persuade ourselves to set a value upon things which are of no use, but because we have agreed to value them’. Here he identifies the imitative impulse that drives our behaviour as consumers. This is what the philosopher René Girard has since termed ‘mimetic desire’. Writing about Girard in 2017, John Lanchester quoted his dictum that ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind’. Lanchester had fun translating this into the odious corporate motto ‘Look around, ye petty, and compare.’5 The tone may not be Johnsonian, but the argument is. In Rambler 49, Sam remarks on the folly of ‘all those desires which arise from the comparison of our condition with that of others’ and pictures the sad figure created by this hollow rivalry – ‘He that thinks himself poor, because his neighbour is richer.’

  Even as we tell ourselves that we hate viral marketing and product placement, decoy pricing and commercial propaganda, we are drawn to advertising. It has threaded mimetic desire into our lives. Tim Wu, author of a recent study of what he calls this ‘industrialization of human attention capture’, portrays a world ‘cluttered with come-ons’. Thanks to smartphones having become ‘technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities’, these come-ons are increasingly present in our private mental space, and we are subject to constant interruption. ‘What an irony,’ he comments, that this ‘lamentably scattered state of mind’ results ‘from the imperatives of one particular kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable most of the time’.6 Modern consumers have surrendered control of their attention to advertisers. Now it is not just the promises that are magnificent, but also the means by which they find us: as we click and post, search and ‘like’, each of us is part of a giant network that powers the engines of commerce.

  When Sam discusses advertising in Idler 40, he imagines the pioneer ‘who first took advantage of the general curiosity that was excited by a siege or battle, to betray the readers of news into the knowledge of the shop where the best . . . powders were to be sold’. Later in the same essay he writes, ‘as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions’. In each of these quotations, there is one word that stands out: in the first betray, in the second wantonly. Sam’s phrasing presages a world in which the false promises of consumerism, pseudoscience, religious extremism and sound-bite politics multiply ungovernably and colonize our souls.

  23

  Of tea and Abyssinia – a chapter about Choices, in which we have chosen to include the word ‘lumbersome’ (a curio you may reasonably think a mistake for ‘cumbersome’)

  If the Idler was one profitable diversion, another was writing reviews, and Sam cast his eye over dozens of books, on subjects as disparate as beekeeping, the history of Jamaica, the national debt, techniques of bleaching, and the Isles of Scilly. This was hack work that brought in a little money and was completed while sitting in a three-legged chair that had only one arm. Sometimes he fell into the age-old trap of spending his fee three times – at the point of commission, when he had executed it, and again after he received the funds. When the rewards seemed too modest or slipped too easily through his fingers, he could convince himself on other grounds that a job was worth his while. Reviewing books was an opportunity to test his knowledge and his powers of analysis, to educate himself and highlight other writers’ achievements. He was drawn, here as before, to works that dealt with practical matters: what it meant to be a butcher or tanner, how cheese and butter were made, the production of coinage. From 1756 to 1762 he was active in the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufactures, which existed to stimulate interest in new solutions to problems such as how best to drain fields and rotate crops, and many of the volumes he reviewed were aligned with the Society’s aims, publicizing innovative schemes and research.

  It was against this background that Sam took exception to an attack on tea drinking by Jonas Hanway. A London merchant who had spent several years in Russia, Hanway shared some of Sam’s enthusiasms, not least a concern for the welfare of prostitutes. But in 1756 he published An Essay on Tea, a trite criticism of the drink’s various ways of ‘obstructing industry’. Reviewing it, Sam described himself as ‘a hardened and shameless tea drinker’. Reading those words, I recall Boswell’s line ‘I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson’. This is enough to make me brew a pot; I pour some, and it’s reddish gold, at once delicate and assertive, grapey on the palate. Why even imagine that there might be any shame in taking a restorative cup? Sam’s reference to being ‘hardened and shameless’ is joco-serious; he’s laughing at Hanway, but also acknowledging the prevalence of the view that tea is a drug, dangerous to ingest. The practice had established itself in London by the 1660s, and the first tea shop in England opened three years before Sam was born, but mass consumption didn’t start till the 1720s, and, as tea’s popularity boomed, doctors worried that it increased flatulence, made the body weak and aggravated melancholy. An Essay on the Nature, Use and Abuse of Tea, published anonymously in 1722, claimed that it was ‘very hurtful’ and ‘not less destructive . . . than opium’.

  Hanway was resuming a familiar battle. This was not his only idiosyncratic mission; he campaigned against the practice of tipping, argued in favour of solitary confinement for difficult prisoners, talked about the health benefits of flannel waistcoats, and is often said to have been the first Londoner to walk the streets carrying an umbrella. According to Hanway, tea destroyed the teeth, distressed the bowels and caused the hands to tremble. Striking a note that might have reminded Sam of his father, he claimed that women were apt to spend too much money on tea and imperil domestic finances. More seriously, he believed that the drink had weakened Britain’s army. ‘Since tea has been in fashion,’ he insisted, ‘even suicide has been more familiar amongst us’ – it would be less common if less tea were consumed.

  Sam was rather better than Hanway at telling the difference between correlation and causation, and his review makes it plain that he was unimpressed by its arguments and the style in which they were set forth. He portrayed himself as someone ‘whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning’. Yet on one point he could agree with Hanway: England had succumbed to a ‘general languor’. Though in his eyes tea itself was not responsible, its popularity was an excuse ‘for assembling to prattle’, and such prattling was a symptom of society’s love of idle self-indulgence.

  The first illustration of tea that Sam provides in his Dictionary comes from a poetic tribute in 1662 to both the drink and new queen Catherine of Braganza, whose enthusiasm for it percolated through the court of King Charles II. The poem is the work of the enthusiastic royalist Edmund Waller, and identif
ies tea as ‘The muses’ friend’, a substance which gives the imagination welcome aid and can ‘repress those vapours which the head invade’. Yet shortly after this, Sam introduces a quotation from Jonathan Swift, which pictures young students of religion who are afraid of being thought drily pedantic and exchange their serious labours ‘for plays, in order to qualify them for tea-tables’. Something of the atmosphere Swift had in mind can be seen in a popular print published around 1720, which celebrates the tea table but includes (on the table itself) an open book that identifies the taking of tea as an occasion for ‘chit chat’.1 For all his enjoyment of tea and his criticism of Jonas Hanway’s essay about it, Sam understood that those who loved the drink most could end up drowning in the accompanying gossip.

  Always confident in his approach to the books he reviewed, he brought a special zest to evaluating works of moral philosophy. In 1757 he examined the recently published A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, which was the work of Soame Jenyns, a Member of Parliament. The dandyish Jenyns, who that same year sat for Joshua Reynolds, also had ambitions as a poet, and in The Modern Fine Gentleman pictured, with no little irony, a chancer who sits in parliament ‘safe in self-sufficient impudence, / Without experience, honesty, or sense’.2 His Free Inquiry, though a much larger undertaking, was a shallow treatment of a solemn subject, arguing among other things that evil is a necessary feature of any kind of government, and that it is foolish to encourage the poor to read, lest they become more aware of how wretched their lives are. Jenyns thought that all beings are connected in a universal system (the Great Chain of Being), with the result that one person’s pain is beneficial to another. He believed that there are beings superior to us who ‘may deceive, torment, or destroy us, for the ends, only, of their own pleasure or utility’ (his words) and that ‘the evils suffered on this globe, may by some inconceivable means contribute to the felicity of the inhabitants of the remotest planet’ (Sam’s paraphrase).

  Jenyns was not the first or last MP to have little familiarity with the real world, but he was astonishingly incurious and complacent. In a remark about the necessity of poverty, he pictured it ‘now and then pinching a few’, and he claimed that all who are poor are compensated ‘by having more hopes, and fewer fears’ and ‘a greater share of health’. Sam feared that Jenyns’s arguments could be used to justify social inequality – not just to preserve it, but to increase it – and responded to his facile drivel with dramatic immediacy, mixing irony and contempt. For instance: ‘That hope and fear are inseparably or very frequently connected with poverty . . . my surveys of life have not informed me.’ He reproved Jenyns’s ignorance, calling him ‘this enquirer’ and ‘this great investigator’. Above all, he felt that Jenyns had failed as an author by being morally unserious. A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil was one of those books the reader suspects was written ‘for the sake of some invisible order of beings’, since they are ‘of no use to any of the corporeal inhabitants of the world’. Jenyns had failed to grasp what seemed to Sam a central truth of authorship: ‘The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’

  This is one of those statements that prompt either a nod of vague assent or blunt dismissal. Yet it is worth considering more closely. Looking at it a second time, one’s reaction may well be ‘The only end of writing . . . ?’ Sam is ascribing to literature a pretty limited range of effects. Or so it seems. But his statement has a discreet power. It invites us to wonder why we write. Even when we do so with a view to satisfying our vanity, the act involves an affirmative gesture: we pass on secrets, share the truth, convey a lesson, add a brick to the mansion of knowledge, preserve something for posterity, honour the freedom of the mind, envisage a world somehow less preposterous than our own.

  Hence Sam’s suggestion to Samuel Richardson that Clarissa, his great novel about the darkness of desire and the rewards of virtue, should have an index, which would allow readers to consult it like a manual. In 1751 Richardson acted on this, appending to the seventh volume of his novel’s fourth edition ‘An Ample Collection of Such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments interspersed throughout the Work, as may be presumed to be of General Use and Service’. Sam used this when compiling the Dictionary, welcoming its convenient array of bite-size precept.3 Not long after the review of Soame Jenyns, he created a work of his own that provided a similar portfolio of useful principles.

  At the beginning of 1759, Sam’s mother Sarah fell ill. He received from his stepdaughter Lucy Porter a narrative of her failing health, and on 13 January wrote to his mother that ‘The account . . . pierces my heart.’ More letters, full of anguish, followed in the next few days. But he did not travel to see her, and she died on the night of 20 January. He could have done nothing to alleviate her suffering; they had long been separated, and he may have thought that his sudden arrival would be distressing, not calmative. The prospect of going back to Lichfield must have awakened bitter memories: of his melancholy father, his parents’ tense marriage, his dead brother, and his own woebegone years there after prematurely leaving Oxford. Inevitably, there were memories of disappointing his mother; like his father and his brother, he had felt the force of her judgement and done what he could to avoid it.

  While he had many times professed love for Sarah, it had seemed impossible to please her. Yet in London he had forged an identity that was entirely independent of her and not subject to her persistent disapproval, and it is telling, surely, that since settling there in the late 1730s he had not once returned to Lichfield – whereas after her death he went back at least thirteen times. In Rambler 148, a vision of despotism with a distinctly personal hue, he writes that ‘The regal and parental tyrant differ only in the extent of their dominions’ and notes that the abused child will, when its parent is dying, ‘forget the injuries which they have suffered, so far as to perform the last duties with alacrity and zeal’. When it came to performing his own last duties, he found that he could not forget so easily. Being in his mother’s presence was beyond him; even the thought of her was enough to link him to his losses and defeats.

  When Sam had received the first news of her decline, he’d quickly considered how best to raise money for her expenses. The result, which he wrote in a single week, has come to be known as Rasselas; on the title page of the first edition it is billed as The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale. His biographers have tended to treat Rasselas as a sudden effusion of his creative genius, and it’s not unusual for people to dismiss it as yet another European fantasy of the Orient, or as Abyssinian only in name. But the choice of Abyssinia as its location was not casual. In the twenty-five years since he’d translated Jerónimo Lobo’s account of that country, he had kept abreast of works about the region, and although he wrote Rasselas quickly, it was the culmination of a long period of imaginative engagement with African history and travelogue.4 It also marked the end of a ten-year period in which – the Dictionary aside – his published writings had dwelled on the practical problems of leading a moral life. Was it the publication of Rasselas or the death of his mother that ended that phase? Perhaps, rather than thinking of Sam’s writing it in the shadow of his mother’s death, we should think of his now emerging from the shadow of his mother’s life.

  Rasselas depicts an Abyssinian prince of that name, twenty-five years old and living in the wide and fruitful Happy Valley, a place where ‘the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils . . . excluded’. Frustrated by the blandness of his existence, he withdraws from the mushy routines of this utopia – where piped music plays on loop to heighten its occupants’ opinion of their bliss – and contemplates his escape. He meets an engineer who makes wings that he believes will enable them to fly beyond the mountains that enclose the Valley. Rasselas suspects that this is wishful thinking – or, as he puts it, ‘you now tell me rather what you wish than what you know’. Sure enough, the engineer’s aeronautical career lasts a matter of seconds; the first time he uses the wing
s, he bellyflops into a lake, and Rasselas has to drag him to safety, half-dead and wholly disillusioned. A while after this, though, the prince meets the poet Imlac. Keen on philosophy, but not on a world that has little respect for intellectualism, Imlac has retreated to the Happy Valley. The conversation that passes between the two men invigorates both of them, and Imlac becomes ‘the companion of my flight, the guide of my rambles, the partner of my fortune’. Inspired, Rasselas heads off in search of experience, never to return. Plausibility is sometimes stretched – one chapter is headed ‘They enter Cairo, and find every man happy’ – but the journey is revelatory.

  The book has been interpreted as gloomily pessimistic or a fable of Christian redemption, as an attempt to create a philosophical novel or a misshapen comic squib. What’s for sure is that it has an air of the Old Testament, a splendid tone of legislative seriousness that makes one travel through it at tortoise pace. It seems fitting that in Jane Eyre, when Charlotte Brontë imagines Jane arriving at Lowood, the charity school where she spends eight grim years, she has her catch sight of a girl sitting on a stone bench, absorbed in what she’s reading; it’s Rasselas, and Jane thinks it sounds strange and attractive, but on inspection it disappoints her, because there’s nothing about fairies or genies and ‘no bright variety seemed spread over the closely printed pages’. Many modern readers share her reaction, and it is true that Rasselas, his sister Nekayah, her maid Pekuah and his tutor Imlac don’t have the psychological richness we now expect of major characters in a novel.