The Life of Samuel Johnson

by James Boswell

  Talking of the family of Stuart, he said, ‘It should seem that the family at present on the throne has now established as good a right as the former family, by the long consent of the people; and that to disturb this right might be considered as culpable. At the same time I own, that it is a very difficult question, when considered with respect to the house of Stuart. To oblige people to take oaths as to the disputed right, is wrong. I know not whether I could take them: but I do not blame those who do.’ So conscientious and so delicate was he upon this subject, which has occasioned so much clamour against him.107

  In the same vein, when Johnson fancifully supposed the existence of a club ‘to drink confusion to King George the Third, and a happy restoration to Charles the Third’, he was in no doubt that this club ‘would be very bad with respect to the State’.108

  There is a similar weighing of contrary benefits and evils evident in Johnson’s conversation in 1783 with General Oglethorpe about the Glorious Revolution. Oglethorpe maintained that government ‘is now carried on by corrupt influence, instead of the inherent right in the King’, to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, the want of inherent right in the King occasions all this disturbance. What we did at the Revolution was necessary: but it broke our constitution.’109 But inherent right may not be the only kind of right, particularly in the mind of one who was able to balance political necessity and consequent destructiveness. Johnson was of course and famously a great friend to subordination, but he was too wise to believe that even that virtue could be carried to an extreme without harm, as he revealed in a celebrated exchange with Sir Adam Fergusson:

  Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.110

  When he acknowledged the existence of a remedy for oppression in human nature, Johnson took a large step towards the Whig position on resistance, as adumbrated in that classic text of Whig political theory Locke’s Second Treatise of Government: ‘But if… they [the people] are perswaded in their Consciences, that their Laws, and with them their Estates, Liberties, and Lives are in danger, and perhaps their Religion too, how they will be hindered from resisting illegal force, used against them, I cannot tell.’111

  All the evidence, then, reveals that towards the end of his life Johnson’s political sentiments were more complicated and reflective than his reputation for adhering to a monochrome Toryism would suggest. Johnson’s friend William Maxwell saw in him a more subtle political animal than many of his recent critics have been prepared to concede:

  In politicks he was deemed a Tory, but certainly was not so in the obnoxious or party sense of the term; for while he asserted the legal and salutary prerogatives of the crown, he no less respected the constitutional liberties of the people. Whiggism, at the time of the Revolution, he said, was accompanied with certain principles; but latterly, as a mere party distinction under Walpole and the Pelhams, was no better than the politicks of stock-jobbers, and the religion of infidels.112

  Is this another instance of the simple and familiar story of the strong passions of youth being supplanted by the more tepid judgements of old age? In part, perhaps. His views on the abolition of the fast of 30 January commemorating the execution of Charles I show an understanding on Johnson’s part of how political emotions necessarily wane, and of how in consequence politics can never be conducted sub specie aeternitatis: ‘Why, Sir, I could have wished that it had been a temporary act, perhaps, to have expired with the century. I am against abolishing it; because that would be declaring it was wrong to establish it; but I should have no objection to make an act, continuing it for another century, and then letting it expire.’113 The misfortunes of the House of Stuart had, for Johnson, no permanent claim on the attention, sympathy and – most important – loyalty, of the nation.

  Boswell supposed that Johnson was inclined to display more Jacobitism than he really felt, and he connected that to Johnson’s disposition towards combativeness:

  There was here, most certainly, an affectation of more Jacobitism than he really had; and indeed an intention of admitting, for the moment, in a much greater extent than it really existed, the charge of disaffection imputed to him by the world, merely for the purpose of shewing how dexterously he could repel an attack, even though he were placed in the most disadvantageous position; for I have heard him declare, that if holding up his right hand would have secured victory at Culloden to Prince Charles’s army, he was not sure he would have held it up; so little confidence had he in the right claimed by the house of Stuart, and so fearful was he of the consequences of another revolution on the throne of Great-Britain; and Mr. Topham Beauclerk assured me, he had heard him say this before he had his pension. At another time he said to Mr. Langton, ‘Nothing has ever offered, that has made it worth my while to consider the question fully.’ He, however, also said to the same gentleman, talking of King James the Second, ‘It was become impossible for him to reign any longer in this country.’ He no doubt had an early attachment to the House of Stuart; but his zeal had cooled as his reason strengthened. Indeed I heard him once say, that ‘after the death of a violent Whig, with whom he used to contend with great eagerness, he felt his Toryism much abated.’114

  Even Johnson’s juvenile Toryism has in it a trace of contrariness, since it is capable of being construed as a sturdy rejection on Johnson’s part of the political attitudes common amongst the young: ‘all boys love liberty, till experience convinces them they are not so fit to govern themselves as they imagined.’115 So in this respect the movement in Johnson’s political opinions traced the common course, only in reverse. In later life, Johnson could be moved to the strident Jacobitism and anti-Hanoverianism of his youth only by egregious Whiggery – as happened, for instance, on 17 September 1777, over dinner with his friend Dr John Taylor of Ashbourne.116 Provoked by Taylor and moved by ‘the spirit of contradiction’, Johnson rewound the years and vigorously re-entered the vivid Jacobitism of his earlier days.117 But one suspects that, for Johnson, the political substance of the conversation was only a pretext which allowed him once again to reap the emotional and intellectual benefits which, for him, flowed from intellectual collision.

  To feel a strong and strengthening flow of opinion may be to feel both stronger and simpler than, in reality, you are. Johnson’s defiant and energetic simplicity of manner was the product of habit and will, as he explained to Reynolds:

  Sir Joshua Reynolds once asked him by what means he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language. He told him, that he had early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company; to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it became habitual to him.118

  This relentless disciplining of the self in the direction of care, forcefulness and premeditation suggests a congenital deficit of those qualities. Boswell tells us that Johnson’s mind was naturally ‘gloomy and impetuous’, and given to melancholic anxiety: ‘To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement.’119 But if the exercise of soundness and vigour of judgement is displayed as the deliberate remedy for an underlying ailment, then nothing is more likely than that it should follow so closely upon, and even appear to coincide with, ‘dismal appre-hension
’.120

  Johnson’s religious faith also lends itself to being construed not as the straightforward fruit of a fundamental conviction, but rather as the antagonist that Johnson employed against an underlying scepticism. That he was not originally of a religious disposition was something which Johnson frankly confessed to Boswell:

  ‘I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.’ From this time forward religion was the predominant object of his thoughts; though, with the just sentiments of a conscientious Christian, he lamented that his practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to be.121

  Not steady faith and a confidence in salvation, but a troubled meditation on the likelihood of being ‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly’ – this is the keynote of Johnson’s religion.122 It is therefore revealing that Johnson’s first expression of liking for Boswell follows immediately upon Boswell’s confession of religious doubts:

  I acknowledged, that though educated very strictly in the principles of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of infidelity; but that I was come now to a better way of thinking, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox. Being at all times a curious examiner of the human mind, and pleased with an undisguised display of what had passed in it, he called to me with warmth, ‘Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.’123

  What Johnson warms to in Boswell is the shadow of his own religious misgivings and imperfections. This strenuous conforming of his mind and conduct to an ideal of belief explains why Johnson was so irritated by even dispassionate speculation on subjects such as the doctrine of the Trinity or predestination and theodicy, and perhaps also why he would occasionally speak affectionately about Roman Catholicism. On some subjects, freedom of inquiry entailed unwelcome psychological risks.124 The relentless disciplining of the mind to an external standard both allowed Johnson to control his psychological turbulence and at the same time brought him up hard against something outside himself which both checked and confirmed him. This perhaps also explains Johnson’s lifelong affinity for the law. He was always prone to giving energetic expression to cases which were not, in the fullest sense, his own.125

  The pages of the Life of Samuel Johnson contain vivid impressions of two extraordinary characters, of their friendship, of the material world through which they moved, and of the imaginative world they created together. However, the Life of Johnson is in itself, as an artefact and as a literary project, just as fascinating as what it describes and preserves. In respect both of how it was put together and of the general ideas about biography by which it is informed, the book is as extraordinary as its subject.

  The Life of Johnson is, self-evidently, a very large book. It is however also, and much less self-evidently, a work of furious compression. The volume of the Boswell papers discovered by Colonel Ralph H. Isham in Malahide Castle126 indicates how large and difficult to control was the mass of material which Boswell had over years accumulated in connection with the project of writing Johnson’s life. Exactly when Boswell began collecting this material is not quite clear.127 In March 1785 he wrote to Herbert Croft soliciting information about Johnson, and at the same time informing him that ‘for upwards of twenty Years, I with his knowledge Collected materials for writing his life, which will be a large work, and require a Considerable time to make it ready for publication.’128 ‘Upwards of twenty years’ from 1785 would place the decision to compose the Life very close to the first meeting of Boswell and Johnson in 1763, and it is very difficult to find evidence to corroborate this, unless a letter to Wilkes from Venice in 1765, expressing the hope that ‘could my feeble mind preserve but a faint impression of Johnson, it would be a glory to myself and a benefit to mankind’, might be thought to do so.129 Nevertheless, at the very beginning of the Life Boswell asserts that ‘I had the scheme of writing his [Johnson’s] life constantly in view,’ and he furthermore claims that Johnson ‘was well apprised of this circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my inquiries, by communicating to me the incidents of his early years’.130 Here again corroboration is thin on the ground. In particular the implicit claim that Johnson was aware of Boswell’s biographical plan from the outset, and approved of it, is hard to reconcile with the entry in Boswell’s journal for 31 March 1772, which reads, ‘I have a constant plan to write the life of Mr. Johnson. I have not told him of it yet, nor do I know if I should tell him.’131

  Boswell may have taken the decision to write the Life of Johnson soon after meeting his subject, but the earliest evidence from within the Life itself that Johnson was aware of Boswell’s design comes from March 1772, in a fragment which derives from the same journal entry just quoted:

  I said, that if it was not troublesome and presuming too much, I would request him to tell me all the little circumstances of his life; what schools he attended, when he came to Oxford, when he came to London, &c. &c. He did not disapprove of my curiosity as to these particulars; but said, ‘They’ll come out by degrees as we talk together.’132

  In the following year, while Boswell and Johnson were on their Scottish tour, we find another important landmark in the composition of the Life:

  That Sunday evening [22 August] that we sat by ourselves at Aberdeen, I asked him several particulars of his life from his early years, which he readily told me, and I marked down before him. This day I proceeded in my inquiries, also marking before him. I have them on separate leaves of paper. I shall lay up authentic materials for The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and if I survive him, I shall be the one who shall most faithfully do honour to his memory. I have now a vast treasure of his conversation at different times since the year 1762 [1763] when I first obtained his acquaintance; and by assiduous inquiry I can make up for not knowing him sooner.133

  And Boswell added this amplifying note: ‘It is no small satisfaction to me to reflect that Dr. Johnson read this, and, after being apprised of my intention, communicated to me, at subsequent periods, many particulars of his life, which probably could not otherwise have been preserved.’134

  Alongside this, however, should be set Mrs Piozzi’s record of a conversation which she claims took place on 18 July 1773 (a bare month before Johnson arrived in Edinburgh to begin his tour of the Highlands), in which the subject of Johnson’s future biography was raised by Johnson himself:

  ‘And who will be my biographer (said he), do you think?’ Goldsmith, no doubt, replied I, and he will do it the best among us. ‘The dog would write it best to be sure, replied he; but his particular malice towards me, and general disregard for truth, would make the book useless to all, and injurious to my character.’ Oh! as to that, said I, we should all fasten upon him, and force him to do you justice; but the worst is, the Doctor does not know your life; nor can I tell indeed who does, except Dr. Taylor of Ashbourne. ‘Why Taylor, said he, is better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive; and the history of my Oxford exploits lies all between him and Adams; but Dr. James knows my very early days better than he. After my coming to London to drive the world about a little, you must all go to Jack Hawkesworth for anecdotes: I lived in great familiarity with him (though I think there was not much affection) from th
e year 1753 till the time Mr. Thrale and you took me up. I intend, however, to disappoint the rogues, and either make you write the life, with Taylor’s intelligence; or, which is better, do it myself, after outliving you all. I am now (added he), keeping a diary, in hopes of using it for that purpose some time.’135

  It may be that this autobiographical intention was suspended or discarded after Boswell had shown his hand to Johnson in Scotland a month or so later. It is nevertheless striking that the name of Boswell does not arise.

  The first public announcement of the Life is easier to pin down. At the end of his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), Boswell included an ‘Advertisement’ for the Life, said to be ‘Preparing for the Press, in one Volume Quarto’. Its first paragraph confirms some details of the chronology of the project, and indicates the miscellaneous format of the eventual book: