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

by Henry Hitchings

  3. Adam Gopnik, ‘Man of Fetters’, New Yorker, 8 December 2008.

  4. The letter and observations relating to it appear in Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, 11 vols (privately printed, 1909–1952), I, 1–2; VI, 58–61.

  5. This is discussed in detail in Gillian Williamson, British Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 33–70.

  6. See Jacob Sider Jost, ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine, Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, Review of English Studies 66 (2015), 915–935.

  7. Liza Picard, Dr Johnson’s London (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 10–11, 13.

  8. According to the historian Roy Porter, it was a place for ‘families seeking country calm close to town’. Other such spots included Blackheath, Chiswick, Richmond and Chelsea. See Porter’s London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 120.

  9. James Ralph, A New Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments, in and about London and Westminster, 2nd ed. (London: J. Clarke, 1736), 75.

  10. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 103.

  11. The image is used by the journalist Jasper Milvain in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (1891) – but of the British Museum reading room.

  8.

  1. Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972), 363–364.

  2. Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (London: Flamingo, 1994), 39.

  3. Ibid., xii.

  10.

  1. Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 87.

  2. James Yeowell, A Literary Antiquary: Memoir of William Oldys (London: Spottiswoode, 1862), xxii.

  11.

  1. Richard Holmes, ‘Inventing the Truth’, in John Batchelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 24.

  2. It is The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., Comprehending an Account of His Studies and Numerous Works, in Chronological Order; a Series of his Epistolary Correspondence and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Pieces of His Composition, Never Before Published: the Whole Exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great Britain, for Near Half a Century, During Which He Flourished.

  3. These figures come from John B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012), 355–358.

  12.

  1. The subject is addressed at length by Morris R. Brownell in Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

  2. An Essay on Tragedy, with a Critical Examen of Mahomet and Irene (London: Ralph Griffiths, 1749), 17, 19. The author is thought to have been an actor, John Hippisley.

  13.

  1. Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), 3–4.

  2. Ernst Verbeek, The Measure and the Choice: A Pathographic Essay on Samuel Johnson (Ghent: E. Story Scientia, 1971), 127–128.

  14.

  1. Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (London: Faber, 2015), 4–5, 16, 20.

  2. Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber (London: Yale University Press, 2015), 47–48. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016), 100, 81–82, 85.

  3. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–94), I, x–xi.

  15.

  1. DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, 4–15.

  16.

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9.

  17.

  1. Steven Lynn, Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction: Rhetoric and the Rambler (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 19–20.

  2. This redeployment of scientific terminology is discussed in W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1948).

  3. At the time of writing, he is the OED’s first cited user of all these words.

  4. Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 22.

  5. The example comes from Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1941), 41.

  18.

  1. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1459 Retrieved 13 March 2017.

  2. James G. Basker, Samuel Johnson in the Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Virginia: privately printed for the Johnsonians, 1999), 6.

  20.

  1. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943), 329–332.

  2. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 389–391.

  3. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (London: Faber, 1993), 54–55.

  4. Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 93–94.

  5. Adam Phillips, Going Sane (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 44–45, 48, 60.

  6. Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), 195.

  21.

  1. Helen Louise McGuffie, Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 1749–1784: A Chronological Checklist (New York: Garland, 1976), 32–33, 35, 83, 203.

  2. Ian McIntyre, Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of the First President of the Royal Academy (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 99.

  3. On the question of the preface’s indebtedness to the work of others, see Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 28–45.

  4. Edgar says, ‘Here in the sands / Thee I’ll rake up’, and the note reads: ‘I’ll “cover” thee. In Staffordshire, to “rake” the fire, is to cover it with fuel for the night.’

  5. Fred Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 62.

  22.

  1. The best discussion of these changes is Alvin Kernan’s Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).

  2. These examples are from E. S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising (London: Michael Joseph, 1952), 24–47.

  3. Jack Lynch, ‘Samuel Johnson’s “Love of Truth” and Literary Fraud’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 42, No. 3 (2002), 605, 616.

  4. John Gilbert Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste, 3rd ed. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), 2–3.

  5. John Lanchester, ‘You Are the Product’, London Review of Books, 17 August 2017.

  6. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention is Harvested and Sold (London: Atlantic, 2017), 72, 339, 344.

  23.

  1. See https://qmhistoryoftea.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/teatable.jpg Retrieved 23 January 2017.

  2. Soame Jenyns, The Modern Fine Gentleman (London: M. Cooper, 1746), 4.

  3. W. R. Keast, ‘The Two Clarissas in Johnson’s Dictionary’, Studies in Philology 54, No. 3 (1957), 436, 439.

  4. Donald M. Lockhart, ‘“The Fourth Son of the Mighty Emperor”: The Ethiopian Background of Johnson’s Rasselas’, PMLA 78, No. 5 (1963), 516–528.

  24.

  1. The subject is interestingly explored in Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

  25.

  1. Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (London, 1709), 48.

  2. I explore the changing nature of nocturnal life in my book Sorry! The English and their Manners (London: John Murray, 2013). My thinking about the character and consequences of nocturnal sociability draws on Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Universit
y Press, 2011).

  3. McGuffie, Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 45–46, 61, 64, 43.

  4. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), 1045, 1051.

  5. This idea is explored in detail in Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  26.

  1. Tom Bingham, Dr Johnson and the Law, and Other Essays on Johnson (London: Inner Temple, 2010), 12, 25.

  2. For a detailed account of these two visits, see Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2015), 148–182.

  27.

  1. Monthly Review 74 (1786), 379, 383.

  2. Some of this detail comes from John Cresswell, ‘The Streatham Johnson Knew’, New Rambler E:3 (1999–2000), 22–28.

  3. Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 434.

  4. Quoted in Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life, 259.

  5. Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography, 388; Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 365.

  6. A. Edward Newton, Doctor Johnson: A Play (London: J. M. Dent, 1924), 114.

  7. The quotations are from Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Touchstone, 1993), 257–258.

  8. See Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 143–162, 295–305.

  9. Frederik N. Smith, Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 110–111, 118, 126, 130.

  10. Quoted in Bair, Samuel Beckett, 253–254.

  11. Monthly Review 78 (1788), 325–326.

  28.

  1. See Fred Parker, Scepticism in Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 232–281.

  2. For further detail of the story see Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 141–148.

  29.

  1. Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, 48.

  2. On Jacobitism in Staffordshire, see Paul Monod, ‘A Voyage out of Staffordshire; or, Samuel Johnson’s Jacobite Journey’, in Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (eds), Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 11–43.

  30.

  1. Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (London: Andrew Bell, 1703), Preface, 135.

  2. For a full account of the dispute, see Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  3. Pat Rogers, The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 352.

  4. Leigh Hunt, Table-Talk (London: Smith, Elder, 1851), 2.

  5. Pat Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 26.

  31.

  1. My thinking here is influenced by Adam Potkay’s The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000).

  32.

  1. George Cheyne, The English Malady: Or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London: G. Strahan, 1733), 111, 125.

  2. All the Works of Epictetus, Which Are Now Extant, 2nd ed. (London: Millar, Rivington, R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), xx, xxvi.

  33.

  1. Stefka Ritchie, The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017), 47–48.

  34.

  1. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1990), 100.

  2. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2.

  35.

  1. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 78.

  2. The other four women in the picture are essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld, playwright Elizabeth Griffith, the painter Angelica Kauffman and the singer Elizabeth Sheridan.

  3. The claim that he did so is efficiently debunked by O M Brack, Jr, and Susan Carlile in ‘Samuel Johnson’s Contributions to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote’, Yale University Library Gazette 77, No. 3/4 (2003), 166–173.

  4. Boris Johnson, ‘Dr Johnson was a slobbering, sexist xenophobe who understood human nature’, Daily Telegraph, 14 September 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/6186117/Dr-Johnson-was-a-slobbering-sexist-xenophobe-who-understood-human-nature.xhtml Retrieved 2 June 2017.

  5. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (New York: Scribner, 2003), 190.

  6. Quoted in James G. Basker, ‘Multicultural Perspectives: Johnson, Race, and Gender’, in Philip Smallwood (ed.), Johnson Re-Visioned: Looking Before and After (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 65.

  7. On the ‘myth of Johnson’s misogyny’, see James G. Basker, ‘Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers and the Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 3 (1990), 63–90, and Donald Greene, ‘The Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny: Some Addenda’, South Central Review 9, No. 4 (1992), 6–17. For broader discussion of the issue, see Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer, ‘A Neutral Being Between the Sexes’: Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1998).

  36.

  1. See John Allen Stevenson, ‘Sterne: Comedian and Experimental Novelist’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Columbia History of the British Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 162, and also Julia H. Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 98–135.

  2. Philip Smallwood, ‘Johnson and Time’, in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  3. See, for instance, C. M. Vicario et al., ‘Time processing in children with Tourette’s syndrome’, Brain and Cognition 73, No. 1 (2010), 28–34.

  4. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 55–60.

  37.

  1. Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), 18–19.

  2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (London: Chapman & Hall, 1863), 191.

  3. Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978), 82–83.

  38.

  1. McGuffie, Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 335, 338, 341.

  2. Thomas Percy, Verses on the Death of Dr Samuel Johnson (London: Charles Dilly, 1785), 14. Thomas Hobhouse, Elegy to the Memory of Dr Samuel Johnson (London: John Stockdale, 1785), 9.

  3. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), 1.

  4. Jean H. Hagstrum, ‘Samuel Johnson among the Deconstructionists’, in Nalini Jain (ed.), Re-Viewing Samuel Johnson (London: Sangam, 1991), 116.

  5. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 380.

  Henry Hitchings was born in 1974. He has written mainly about language and history, starting in 2005 with Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. The Secret Life of Words (2008) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, as well as seeing him shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. 2011’s The Language Wars completed what was in effect a trilogy of books about language. He is a prolific critic and has made several programmes for radio and television on subjects including Erasmus Darwin, the eighteenth-century English novel and the history of manners. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Also by Henry Hitchings

  Dr Johnson’s Dictionary

  The
Secret Life of Words

  The Language Wars

  Who’s Afraid of Jane Austen?

  Sorry! The English and their Manners

  First published 2018 by Macmillan

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  Copyright © Henry Hitchings 2018

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