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

by Henry Hitchings

  29

  A short chapter on politics and public life, wherein the radical John Wilkes does rear his head

  Only in the 1770s did Sam turn to writing the sort of political pamphlets that his £300-a-year pension had, in many people’s eyes, been designed to encourage. The publications that resulted were by his own standards undistinguished, written ‘with a fraction of his mind’.1 The False Alarm, scribbled down in the space of twenty-four hours in January 1770, defended the government’s decision to eject from parliament John Wilkes, the MP for Middlesex. Wilkes was a daring radical and crackerjack self-publicist whose writings had been condemned as seditious and obscene, and the ‘alarm’ was the result of his supporters persuading voters that his expulsion was an assault on their liberties. Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771) argued that there was no need for a war with Spain to decide the question of who should be ‘the undisputed lords of tempest-beaten barrenness’. The Patriot (1774) was an election pamphlet, written at the urging of Henry Thrale. It contrasted Thrale’s authentic patriotism with the gestures of political agitators who, like Wilkes, used professions of how much they loved their country to mask darker purposes. Taxation No Tyranny (1775) condemned the American colonists who were staging protests – notably the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 – against the imposition of taxes by a British parliament in which they were unrepresented. Here Sam would turn out to be on the wrong side of history, but the pamphlet contains one of his most memorably acerbic lines, as he notes the hypocrisy of people who complain of being oppressed while still feeling able to keep slaves. ‘How is it,’ he wonders, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’

  Traditionally he has been represented as a royalist and a conservative, and in adverse accounts as a blindly dictatorial reactionary – which is still how many people picture him. Beginning in the 1960s, the Canadian scholar Donald Greene offered a very different reading: Sam was an instinctive rebel with a deep mistrust of authority. Greene’s version proved influential, but its validity has been debated, sometimes with that rancid ferocity that’s a common feature of scholarly argument. One aspect of this controversy is the reluctance of some Johnsonians to accept that in the course of a fairly long life their hero might have changed his political outlook. Such a shift hardly seems implausible, but it undermines Sam’s image as a figure of unswerving consistency, and there are diehards who insist on his adherence to a strict party line, rather than seeing him as either a realist whose attitudes never quite settled or as a complex individual whose political and personal journeys were equally tortuous.

  During his childhood, Sam was surrounded by people who questioned the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession to the throne. Why was Britain ruled by George I, a German who could speak no English, rather than one of the large number of people more closely related to his predecessor, Queen Anne? The answer, of course, was that George was Anne’s nearest Protestant relative; all those with closer ties to her were Catholics, disqualified from inheriting the throne by the 1701 Act of Settlement. Staffordshire, though, was a bastion of support for Anne’s Catholic half-brother James, the Prince of Wales.2 Favour for the cause may have thrived even in Sam’s own home – his early biographers identify Michael Johnson as a Jacobite – and the general political mood of Lichfield made a keen impression on him. Yet equally he had friends who were emphatically pro-Hanoverian, such as Gilbert Walmesley.

  There is evidence of Jacobite sympathies in some of Sam’s early writings. Among these is the pamphlet Marmor Norfolciense (1739), a spoof of clodhopping scholarship that was in fact an attack on the German king (George II) and the venal premiership of Robert Walpole. According to Sir John Hawkins, the government reacted so badly to its satire that Sam, once fingered as its author, had to go to ground for a while in ‘an obscure lodging in a house in Lambeth marsh’. After the fall of Walpole in 1742, and with Richard Savage no longer in his life, Sam became noticeably less interested in overt politicking of this kind. Later he concentrated on developing a less jarring identity as a judicious non-partisan thinker. When he returned seriously to political writing in the 1770s, his prose was vigorous, but by this time he was prepared to concede that there was no credible alternative to the Hanoverians, reflecting that ‘the long consent of the people’ meant that ‘the family at present on the throne has now established as good a right as the former family’.

  ‘Faction seldom leaves a man honest,’ he wrote in his life of John Milton, and in another of the Lives of the Poets he identified ‘composure’ as a desirable alternative to the political sphere’s ‘tumult of absurdity and clamour of contradiction’. Though he was referring to the instability of the seventeenth century, when ‘every man might become a preacher, and almost every preacher could collect a congregation’, he was clear that such conditions persisted, imbuing political and religious differences with an ugly emotionalism. In the Dictionary he treated faction as a synonym for ‘discord’; factious meant ‘Given to faction; loud and violent in a party; publicly dissentious; addicted to form parties and raise public disturbances’. For present purposes, it is less important to identify his (shifting) factional allegiances than to recognize his commitment to certain political causes: the end of slavery, the advancement of women, strong government and renouncing the violent excesses of colonialism.

  Reflecting on the subject of reputation, Sam told Boswell that ‘A man, whose business it is to be talked of, is much helped by being attacked.’ The conversation had begun with Boswell remarking that David Garrick kept a written record of all who had praised or abused him. Sam thought this a good idea, but believed that ‘it could not be well done now, as so many things are scattered in newspapers’. He continued: ‘A man who tells me my play is very bad is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence.’ It seems that for a moment here (in 1773) he recalled the reception of Irene and grasped the sour half-truth that all publicity is good publicity: ‘Every attack produces a defence; and so attention is engaged.’

  There is a lot to elucidate in this exchange. To begin with, Garrick’s book of praise and abuse seems a recipe for self-harm, and keeping a list of people who’d talked him up was potentially just as bad for him as maintaining an archive of grudges. What did Sam like about this? Quite simply, I think, it appealed to his taste for documenting life’s shifts and novelties; he thinks we should keep accounts, registering highs and lows and in-betweens. His diaries are the closest he comes to this, a ledger of debits and credits (mainly debits); he uses them as a means of ‘studying little things’. For Sam, a book like Garrick’s would serve as a form of therapy more than an aide-mémoire. For Garrick its purpose was different; Sam could see that he had been ‘perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived’, and ‘So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.’ A written record of his acclaim was an appurtenance of vanity.

  As for the notion that all publicity is good publicity, the phrase itself is a twentieth-century coinage, but the principle is an old one. In essence, negative impressions fade faster than awareness; in the short term, a bad story stimulates interest in a product, person or issue, and in the longer term the very fact that there was a story becomes more salient than the exact nature of that story. Such, at least, is the wisdom of PR. It’s easy to think of bad stories that would permanently damage one’s image, not to mention one’s self-confidence. It’s also easy to think of other people or products permanently disfigured by unfavourable exposure. But attacks that miss the target are useful. They become, as Sam says, opportunities for self-defence, which may be robust or rude or eloquent but will enhance the sense that you’re substantial, resilient, serious . . . and not going away.

  Public figures adopt inflammatory attitudes in order to make themselves memorable. This is especially true in politics and the media. Vitriol and outrageousness catch the eye and ear; carefully developed arguments and initiatives do no
t. Often politicians strike provocative poses in order to divert attention from the shoddiness, shabbiness or sheer ordinariness of their achievements and plans. Each of us, I’m sure, can think of an apt example; Sam’s was Wilkes, who campaigned with rare efficiency, drilling into the electorate the idea that he was a ‘patron of liberty’, and at all times acting as if his prosecution was really persecution. Wilkes’s inheritor is the rabble-rouser who fires up both his fans and his haters with crude un-jokes, slathering his false assertions in a hot chilli sauce of zingy adjectives. On some issues he is as bland as white bread – best to keep them out of sight. For in his mind, as long as there’s a commotion he is winning. It’s when the noise dies down that he’s in trouble. His supporters feel the same, and the uproar attracts more of them, on the grounds that anyone so rowdily controversial must be authentic – and must pose a danger to the shopworn hubris of the political establishment.

  30

  Containing a sketch of Dr Johnson’s visit to the Caledonian regions – and matters pertinent thereunto

  When Sam received his pension, he declared that if it had happened twenty years earlier he would have gone to Constantinople to learn Arabic. At various points in his life he nursed fond notions of visiting Poland, India and China. The purpose of such travel was the study at first hand of people, customs and manners, and this required a daunting total immersion. In the Idler he wrote scathingly about mere tourists, whose ‘method of travelling’ equipped them only to be bores:

  He that enters a town at night and surveys it in the morning, and then hastens away to another place, and guesses at the manners of the inhabitants by the entertainment which his inn afforded him, may please himself for a time with a hasty change of scenes, and a confused remembrance of palaces and churches; he may gratify his eye with a variety of landscapes, and regale his palate with a succession of vintages; but let him be contented to please himself without endeavouring to disturb others.

  Were he to travel much himself, he thought, it would be to enlarge his mind and make useful discoveries; he hoped he might be able to bring back some wisdom that would benefit his compatriots.

  The idea of his going to China to see the Great Wall was received by others with amused enthusiasm, for they knew, as he did, that it would be a momentous achievement – and that it would never happen. Less adventurously, he thought of a trip to Scotland, which he mentioned to Boswell as early as the summer of 1763, a couple of months after their first meeting. He was particularly keen to see the Hebrides, having as a child read A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, an account published in 1703 of a trip made in 1695. Its author, Martin Martin, had revelled in describing ‘isles . . . but little known, or considered . . . even by those under the same government and climate’. The resulting book was informative and sometimes fascinating, though also sometimes hard to follow – a sample sentence being ‘There is another coarser scurf called crostil, its of a dark colour, and only dyes a philamot.’1

  Boswell was amused, if not entirely convinced, by a proposal that struck him as a ‘very romantic fancy’. But for Sam the point of travel was precisely, as he had written in his preface to Lobo’s Voyage, to correct ‘romantic absurdities’: one could improve on the information picked up through reading, anecdote and rumour. Going to the Hebrides was an opportunity to remedy misconceptions, replacing received images with immediate ones. Which is not to say that Sam’s interest in this trip was untouched by yearning. Islands have an intriguing doubleness: are they the last remains of a broken landscape or the seeds of a new culture? To visit an island is to indulge one’s fantasies of escape while also containing them, and for Sam, who mostly found such fantasies unsettling, islands seemed manageable and knowable, possessing both observable boundaries and rich possibilities. His vision of island life was, of course, coloured by his reading – Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and Robinson Crusoe, a portrait of self-sufficiency that was one of a handful of books he believed readers wished were longer.

  Ten years after first discussing a Scottish trip, he and Boswell finally made the journey. As we have seen, they both wrote about it, and the difference between their accounts is illuminating. Their chosen titles are subtly different: Sam’s book, published in 1775, is A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and Boswell’s, published a decade later, is The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. If we turn to these two volumes, we find that Sam’s Journey gives very little indication of time and is instead structured by place, whereas Boswell’s Journal is a day-by-day narrative; Sam is reflective, a social and cultural historian, often disenchanted, whereas the comparatively well-travelled Boswell resembles a busy choreographer. ‘I am, I flatter myself, a citizen of the world,’ writes Boswell, the phrase not really covering up how callow he still is. He is half-aware, but no more than that, of the ridiculousness of promising an ‘account of the transit of Johnson over the Caledonian hemisphere’ – Scotland is huge, Johnson is a planet, the trip is an epic and recalls Captain James Cook’s recent observation of the transit of Venus. When he tries to muffle his boastfulness, he ends up sounding more boastful, and when he excitably claims that a mountain is ‘immense’ – proof that Scotland has some impressive sights – Sam corrects him, enjoying his own pedantic polysyllables, ‘No, it is no more than a considerable protuberance.’

  There were differences from the moment Sam arrived in Edinburgh, on 14 August 1773. He and Boswell met at Boyd’s Inn at the head of the Canongate, where he took exception to a greasy-fingered waiter who plopped a sugar lump into his glass of lemonade. He threw the drink out of the window, and it fell to Boswell to keep the waiter from being hurled in the same direction. The English visitor would need some mollifying on other counts: he complained of the city’s stench (Boswell’s, too) and, even once persuaded that there was no need for the pair of pistols he had brought north with him, insisted on being armed with a mighty stick carved from oak.

  They set out four days later – Sam in a roomy brown coat that had huge pockets like panniers, giving him the appearance of a collector expecting to accumulate a great many oddments. Travelling north, by carriage, the two of them followed the coast – St Andrews, Arbroath, Aberdeen – and then headed west to Inverness. From there they proceeded on horseback, and where necessary by boat. They were in the Hebrides for seven weeks, four of which were spent on Skye, before returning to the mainland, to Glasgow and the Boswells’ family home at Auchinleck in Ayrshire, and at last back to Edinburgh.

  In the course of a tour that lasted until late November, Sam examined the landscape, its ruins and inscriptions, the country’s past conflicts and traditions. Along the way, he took in the heath where Macbeth met the weird sisters, admired caves and waterfalls, paused to appreciate the clear water of Loch Ness (full of salmon, trout and pike), and slept in a bed once occupied by Bonnie Prince Charlie as he fled after the Battle of Culloden. Wherever he could, he spoke with prominent locals, including Flora MacDonald, who’d aided the Bonnie Prince in his escape. Sometimes he had to make do with less rewarding company; on the island of Raasay he met a woman who seemed so inert it was as if she had been ‘cut out of a cabbage’. At least he had Boswell, ‘whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners’ were ‘sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel’. But there were days when the younger man, prone to pouty homesickness, needed reminding that these were the qualities expected of him. There were also spasms of rivalry. When they were on Skye, Sam raised eyebrows by saying that he had often thought of keeping a seraglio, adding that his companion, ‘if he were properly prepared’, would make a very good eunuch – a ludicrous notion, given Boswell’s priapic urges, and an embarrassing one.

  A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland contains the sort of particulars that devotees of travel writing adore: a woman near Loch Ness boiling goat’s flesh in a kettle, the detail that candles on the island of Coll have wicks made from tiny shreds of linen, Sam describing brogues as ‘a kind of artless
shoes . . . that though they defend the foot from stones . . . do not exclude water’, and the taste of Hebridean labourers for whisky, with each of them swallowing ‘the morning dram, which they call a skalk’. It is also an account of disappointment. In a letter he sent from Skye to Hester Thrale, Sam reflected that ‘The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.’ He had headed north expecting to see ‘a people of peculiar appearance’ and ‘a system of antiquated life’. But he had got there too late. Since the Act of Union in 1707, and especially since the second failed Jacobite uprising of 1745, English influence had penetrated Scotland, dissolving its ancient culture. Legislation passed in 1746–47 had weakened the old clan system, replacing it with a market economy; now the Highland Clearances were under way, and many Scots were seeking better prospects in America. Sam found a society in the midst of upheaval, and acted like a conservationist. He speaks with feeling about the importance of community, the threat posed by rapacious landlords, the dangers of rapid social change and of meeting it with nothing more than apathy. In addition, he recognizes that reform, especially in the realm of law-making, tends to be fumbled.

  Sam emphasizes the decline of Scotland’s monuments and its people’s learning. He claims that illiteracy and anti-intellectualism are rife, and refers to the ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ that has superseded the land’s ancient dignity (and the edifices that were once its markers). Skipping over the sights of Glasgow and Edinburgh – the latter ‘a city too well known to admit description’ – he is drawn to less familiar terrain, commenting that ‘to the Southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo and Sumatra’. Here, as when he comments on his ‘delight in rarity’, he draws a link between his activities and the endeavours of Captain Cook and other contemporaries whose voyages opened a new age of discovery. He is curious about rough and obscure places, and in the extent to which their barrenness is the result of neglect, ignorance, poor record-keeping and an addiction to myth. At the same time, he is interested in disappointments of another kind: the traveller’s risk of feeling trapped or in peril, the scarcity of food and shelter, the impossibility of taking precise measurements, the obstructions and disruptions that prevent him from enjoying ‘extensive views’, and the constant challenge of being scientific while also identifying universal themes in what he sees. He thinks of travel writing as, in two respects, a literature of omission: a report of local deficiencies, struggles and errors, and an account of the traveller’s own failings. Although his trip was no washout, he articulates the travel writer’s vexing sense of mobility-as-futility – how hard it is to render the genuinely alien in terms that are both vivid and accessible, and how constrained one is by a narrative form that typically consists of departure, adventure and return.