In Our Time - Johnson

Episode Date: October 27, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Johnson, a giant of 18th century literature. “There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it." The poet Oliver Goldsmith was not alone in falling victim to the bludgeoning wit of Samuel Johnson. The greatest luminaries of 18th century England, including the painter Joshua Reynolds, the philosopher Edmund Burke and the politician Charles James Fox, all deferred to him... happily or otherwise. Samuel Johnson was credited with defining English literature with his Lives of the Poets and his edition of Shakespeare, and of defining English language with his Dictionary. Yet despite those lofty acclamations he failed to get a degree, claimed he had never finished a book, was an inveterate hack who told his friend James Boswell, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money". How did an Oxford drop-out become England's most famous and well connected man of letters? How did generations of readers come to see him as the father of English Literature? And why is he so little read today? With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Jim McLaverty, Professor of English at Keele University; Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, quote, there's no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with a butt of it.

The poet Oliver Goldsmith was not alone in falling victim to the bludgeoning wit of Samuel Johnson. the greatest luminaries of 18th century England, including the painter Joshua Reynolds, the philosopher Edmund Burke, and the politician Charles James Fox all deferred to him happily or otherwise. Samuel Johnson was credited with defining English literature

with his lives of the poets and his edition of Shakespeare and of defining English language with his dictionary. It despite these lofty acclamations, he failed to get a degree, suffered from violent depressions, claimed he'd never finished a book, and was an inveterate hack who told his friend James Boswell,

no man but a blockhead. ever wrote except for money. How did an Oxford dropout become England's most famous and well-connected man of letters? And how did generations of readers come to see him as the father of English literature? With me to discuss Samuel Johnson

is John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Jim McLevety, Professor of English at Keel University. John Mullen, Johnson was rather an awkward child beset by physical ticks, scrofila,

possibly even Tourette's Syndrome, He was a son of a Litchfield bookseller. These two things, the illness and the father bookseller, must have played, they seem to have played a dramatic part in his life. Yes, I mean, he's a great lumbering, awkward provincial boy who becomes a kind of literary self-made man, and that's always very important to Johnson, I think.

His father was a bookseller, and of course Johnson's extraordinary erudition, which people notice from the very early age, is partly literally gleaned from browsing in his father's shop, where he sometimes also works. He must be one of the only great authors of English literature who actually was able physically to bind a book himself. But also his father's business is not very successful,

and a lack of money besets Johnson for much of his early life. You refer to him as an Oxford dropout. He goes to Oxford rather unexpectedly because his mother receives a small, legacy from a distant relative. But the legacy runs out and Johnson after just over a year at Oxford has to leave simply because he's impoverished. He can't afford to stay any longer. So the fact that he, as it were, comes to Litchfield, comes from Lichfield to London in his late 20s to seek his fortune is partly a kind of consequence of his sort of economic circumstances.

So we have these three strands fairly from. the beginning. A very straightforward journeyman, artisan, relationship with books, which as you pointed out is quite rare. A lot of physical problems. Yeah, I mean, he's actually blind in one eye, he's deaf in one ear, and these things kind of,

the things about him which everybody first notices when they meet him, when Boswell first meets him many years later, he says, as a man, a most terrible appearance. And somebody, was it, Girl Smith, refers him as an idiot until he starts to talk. Yes, yes. And the poverty. So he got three strands there from the start. Can you tell us a little bit more about how?

He spent 14 months at Pembroke College Oxford, don't he? And there were a few rebellions, but he couldn't continue. It was primarily because of the money? Well, there are arguments about this, but it seems certain that it was because of the money. And there are famous anecdotes that attach to this. And one which, it seems, is true, is that he only had one pair of shoes, and he stopped being able to leave his room to visit anybody because his toes are poking through his shoes.

and a kindly dawn worried about this brilliant man who couldn't walk around town, got one of the college servants to leave a new pair of shoes outside his door, and Johnson coming out in the morning found these, and of course took it as a terrible insult and threw them away. And this sense of kind of poverty, but also kind of pride attaches to him throughout his career. And he's one of the reasons that was something we might talk about later

that he is so impressed by the bohemian, the poor bohemian poet Richard Savage, who has the same combination of sort of pride and poverty. Jim McLebady, can you tell us about Johnson's attempt to make a living by going into teaching without a degree he couldn't go into the church, without a degree a lot was bound to him, but he was an educated man. You could set up a school he did.

Can you tell us about the school which he set up where he befriended his pupil, David Garrick? Yes, Johnson, I think he thought he ought to be a school, because it was a way of handing on the cultural heritage. He'd had a try at it in Market Bosworth, where he'd gone as usher or assistant teacher, and that had been a disaster, I think, not probably because of the teaching,

but because of the patron of the school who didn't treat him well. But then when Johnson married in 1735, his wife, a widow, Teddy Porter, brought with her £600 or so. And he used that to start a school at Edgel near Litchfield It wasn't a success

Boswell says he never had more than three pupils of whom two were the Garrix, David and his brother George. A more optimistic view is that he had as many as eight at one point. But he clearly wasn't cut out to be a teacher. The boys made fun of him and so on. And we actually know more about the Johnson's bedroom than we really do about the schoolroom.

Garrett used to do impersonations of Johnson and his wife, his wife anxious for them to get to bed, and Johnson's sitting on the bed, reading his tragedy to her, and at the same time, thinking he's tucking his shirt into his trousers, but actually tucking the sheet from the bed in, so that Mrs. Johnson's left with no clothes. So it was altogether, rather a failure, I think. So then he came up to London and tried to make a living there,

and he lived apart from his wife for a while, because they hadn't enough money to live together, and he was trying to strike out, and began to work as a hack, writing for the gentleman's magazine, doing anything that came his way? Yes, he was sort of literary assistant. He'd written, when he was still in Litchfield,

telling Edward Cave, who ran the gentleman's magazine, that he thought he could improve it a great deal. There was too much buffoonery in its pages, Johnson said. But then when he came to London, he got work as a general assistant, and he was writing all sorts of bits and pieces, Latin verse, occasional verse, writing the account of the foreign books, for example, and writing a series of little lives of people

which were serialised in the gentleman's magazine. We have a man who's driving on year after year after year. I mean, it took him about 20 more years to become famous. He's hammering these things out, making something ever live in, and Judith Hawley makes friendships all over the place. He's very sympathetic to people who are at the margins of life throughout his life, people who fall in the hard times, young writers who can't get published, people who need succour.

And he forms a friendship, as John Mullen said, with Richard Savage and writes a life of him in this. Can you tell us why was he attracted to Richard Savage, who seems an unlikely company for Johnson's palate? Yes. Johnson, as you said, was a great, a fatherly figure in some ways who took responsibility for people he thought was struggling, had no child of his own,

but took people under his wing. But he also, I think, very strongly identified with Richard Savage, who was a starveling poet, and like Johnson himself, a very talented man who didn't have the right connections to get on. And also, like Johnson, rather proud and arrogant. Johnson's social awkwardness often came across as extreme arrogance. And he and Savage would walk around London late at night,

putting the ills of the world to rights, talking and talking, and they would end up in the small hours with no money for lodging and would sleep under the stars. So they had this fantastic sort of bohemian rambling life together for a while. Richard Savage was supposedly the illegitimate son of a titled woman and spent a lot of his time trying to get her to acknowledge him. And Johnson certainly supported his sense of disempowerment.

Johnson also supported him when Savage was accused of murder. And so Johnson was very interested in the relationship between this great talent but messy life. He wrote this poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and it's fairly depressed about what is going on. I mean, how rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, rules the bold hand up, prompts the suppliant voice, are two lines I am reading and quoting. and the manage of him which it almost says it all, doesn't he?

Yes, it's a poem which crystallises Johnson's vision of the world and is consistent with a lot of the things he wrote throughout his life. It's consistent in that it has this sense of failure. You know, we've already looked at people around him whose lives failed. It also is consistent in that he continually criticised people in power who were corrupt and used their positions merely for the sake of wealth. But it's not just a kind of satire in the sense of exposing corruptions. And it's also a very religious poem. That sense of vanity that comes from the Bible, vanity of vanity is all is vanity.

That there is nothing to human endeavour that will save you. And really it ends with a religious resignation that you have to put your trust in God. But there's one crucial thing about all of this. All the time that he's attacking delusion, all the time he's, all the time that he's knocking things down to size. He's constantly aware that man has to live by hope. That there's a wonderful journal entry when he's 65, and he says, I've done nothing with my life. My body is a complete wreck.

I may achieve nothing in my life at all. This is after he's written the dictionary in Shakespeare. It is the greatest figure of age. He said, but I still have hope. So where are we arriving with him, John Mullen? He's worked on this. And just pre-dictionary. What sort of figure is he cutting?

Is he taking on, does he found, is he taking on Pope, swift, the Scribarians? What's his position in what is becoming literary life? Because we have beginning to have a free market in literature. The patron is being displaced by the reader. If you can get enough readers, you can make a living. The professional writers coming onto the scene, many of them, not just the odd one like Shakespeare and so forth in earlier time.

So the big movement of what we could call a literary London and with all sorts of landmarks and clubs which you come to. Where was he in that? Well, he is, as you said in your introduction. He is a hack. And until the dictionary, until he's done the dictionary, we should remember, I think, that this kind of life of writing for money

that he's embarked upon is not one which distins him for any fame at all. I mean, it's very difficult to think your way back, past Johnson, this kind of great monumental, physically monumental figure. of English literature. But one of the things that fascinates him about Savage, as Judith just said, is here's this man, you know, who dies in debtors' prison. And that's it.

And the sense that the abyss is there, that at best anonymity, and at worst, something more like kind of self-destruction and utter failure is always a possibility. So in relation to the Scriblerans, who you've mentioned, whilst Johnson is a man of his age, he's very influenced by, I think, Pope in particular, and the poetry that you've referred to the vanity of human wishes, I think to somebody who hasn't come across it before, is very reminiscent written in sort of popian couplets. And Johnson believes that people like Pope in particular have polished and refined English literature,

and he thinks he believes in that sort of graph of improvement. other hand, that scribblerian attitude, the attitude of men like Pope and Swift, to the world of booksellers, of people writing for money, their disdainful, contemptuous attitude is one to which Johnson is deeply hostile, I think. And all Johnson's great projects of his life are the ideas of booksellers, of commercial men. And he many, many times refers to booksellers in sort of approbatory terms. Pope writes a dark satire called the Dunciad in which, whose ludicrous figures are booksellers, publishers, as we would call them. Johnson, the son of a bookseller, describes these men who commission writing and then sell it for profit as the patrons of literature,

generous and liberal-minded men, he says, to the horror of most literary men and women who surround him. He was approached by booksellers in 174 to 6, and it's useful to reiterate, I think, that the great books he gave us were not inspired by himself sitting, oh, I'll write my next great book. It's booksellers, let's call them in. Coming to him and saying,

there's a gap in the market for a dictionary. The French have got one. I think the Italians have got on by that time. We haven't got one. We haven't got a really big one. We haven't got a good one. You seem to us the man to do it, and we can set you up for a few years

and away you go. Can you tell us, Judith, why you think they chose him? Yes. He had been working very closely with Robert Doddley, who's one of the booksellers he most admired. Doddley had been a footman and then a poet and rose to be a bookseller. He'd been working with Doddsley on an educational journal called The Preceptor, which made Doddly think that Johnson was the man to do it, because strong educational bias, his failed schools and so on,

but also very strong moral bias. Johnson had also expressed an interest in revising Ephraim Chambers' great cyclopedia of 1728. He'd written a preface, so dictionary of scientific terms, even though he hadn't actually read the dictionary, but he said, I know what such a book ought to be, so he was able to write the preface. He also had a great interest in the English language, the history and development of it. He had expressed an interest in it. It's not that he had no projects for books, and he left a notebook of projects on his death, but the dictionary was such a large project

that it could only be funded and supported by a conjure a group of booksellers. Is there some sense, John Mullen, and when he came to our dictionary, that we have an example of an autodidact driven more urgently to find out more because he's not been able to, through the normal channels get to know.

And does this spill into the dictionary? Yeah, I think it does. I mean, I think perhaps your listeners, it might help just to describe very briefly how he did it. Because, I mean, I think if you're listening, actually think about it. How would one write a dictionary? Especially when no very good dictionary already exists, so you can't go to them. And Johnson did an extraordinary thing, really. He essentially sat down and for some eight years read his way through what he thought of as the

best authors. And every time he came upon a line of poetry or a sentence of prose which he thought illustrated well the sense of a particular word. He underlined it, marked it for the poor hacks who were helping him, who were mostly Scottish, sitting up in his... He had an attic full of Scottish hags. And handed the book at the end to them, and they transcribed all these sentences, cut them out, pasted them in books, ordered them alphabetically and so on.

Where he could, he supplied his quotations from memory. So there's lots of sort of little mistakes in his quotation of Shakespeare Beer and Milton and things because he believed he knew those things off my heart anyway. And this dictionary, therefore, is not just an extraordinary arrangement of definitions, sorted out into all sorts of shades of meaning. The word take, for instance, has 134 different senses of take, take up, take off, take on and so on, all defined very succinctly. And each one is illustrated by at least one quotation in the dictionary as it was published, there are 120,000 of these.

But actually, Johnson collected some quarter of a million and had to shave them down. It's a staggering amount of work you're doing such a short time. In that small space in Goffsquare, and you go to Goff Square, you're kind of taken aback that in that comparatively small house, there were the hacks upstairs, hacks in the attic. There was something he said, Jim McLeveter. I'd like to ask you what you make of it. in his preface he wrote, I'm not so lost in lexicography

as to forget the words are the daughters of earth and that things are the sons of heaven. Now it's got a good swing to it, but what does he mean? Well, I think he means that words stand for ideas rather than things. That is, when he first started on the dictionary, he says he wanted it to be a dictionary of things as well as words.

And I think it's part of the attitude to knowledge generally that Judith was talking about. I think Johnson ideally would have liked a situation in which words fitted exactly on things. So the dictionary could have worked, if you like, horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, it would have given a complete

account of the world, so to speak, through definition, through genus and specific difference. And so the whole world would be organised within the dictionary and then vertically, you would see the development of the terms from the original signification to metaphorical ones. But of course,

once you realise, or Johnson agreed with Locke, that words stand for ideas, then you've got the whole area of human failure coming into it. And so you're not sure what the words mean. They mean different things in different minds. Some of them are too simple to be explained. Can you give us an example to, as John did with the other one? Can I give an example of, well, any substance you wouldn't be sure exactly what it was.

So gold, for example, you wouldn't be able to define. Justice, you wouldn't be able to define. And Johnson says, late in the preface to the dictionary, that for some of these very difficult words, you need actually to work through his examples, and they will start to reveal the structure of the idea. After the dictionary, John Mullen, Samlon Johnson became a great figure in London,

and in his life, Boswell's great life, he has Johnson say, when a man is tired of London, he's tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford. So he emerges as a great London, figure. Can you tell us what happened to him? He began to be a magnetic figure and this club came into existence, this

very famous club which I'm particularly interested in. So can you... He emerged from the dictionary as a different person. He went in as a hack, he came out as a famous person. Yes, I mean, it took a little bit of time after 755 when it was published, but yes. And in a way

the Johnson that we know best is the Johnson, the famous man. And it's partly why it's so important to get the first bit of the story in. Because from the early 1760s onwards, he does become a kind of authority figure. And of course, a dictionary makes you that.

This extraordinary book written by one man. And as a figure of authority, who has seemed to sort of dignify literary learning and made the business of, you know, being a lexicographer, a harmless drudge. Johnson defines it in the dictionary. But he's not that anymore. So he does attract other writers, other literary, would-be literary figures.

And, of course, he also meets Boswell in the 1760s. And one of the peculiarities of Johnson is that he's a writer best known from a book written by another man, which is a kind of accident. It's a wonderful book, Boswell's Life of Johnson. But that records him as the presiding figure at the club, dispensing wisdom, battering down other people's assertions and certainties, a man with a wonderfully kind of deflating nose for cant and pretension. And the club eventually becomes an arrangement of sort of notable figures that includes actually lots of people who, as Johnson said, would deserve hanging for their view. Can we just...

Jim McLaughlin, can you take us on about this famous club? They met irregular... Can you just give us a lowdown on the club? Who was in it, what they did when they met? Well, there were nine members originally. Joshua Reynolds, I think, had the idea with Johnson. And there's Edmund Burke, Dr. Nugent, who's Burke's father-in-law.

Tophambeau-Claire, Bennett Langton, Goldsmith, Anthony Shemier, who's not a well-known figure, financier, and an MP. MP for Tamworth, distinguished by never saying anything in the House of Commons, and Sir John Hawkins. I think you can tie this in. Obviously, the conversations were very often informal,

and it was for pleasure, but you can tie it in with the ordering of arts in the 18th century. These figures are really quite interesting for the role they had in writing the first accounts of music, for example, in the case of Hawkins and Bernie, or Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful, and Johnson's own work on Shakespeare and the Dictionary. He agreed to 35, Adam Smith, Jim and a Jim and a businessman came a member,

and you just look at it and you think, well, the sort of galaxy of the Enlightenment is there, really, in one place. So how did they go about it? Did they just turn up and start arguing with each other? Well, they used to meet, the arrangement at first was to meet at 7 o'clock every Monday evening, I think, so once a week in... Turks Head. ...in Gerard Street in Soho, until that closed down,

and then they moved on to different taverns. The idea would be to have a light supper and then for the conversation to go on pretty late was the phrase. When the club became bigger, too big to handle and with more important and public figures in it, it met only during the parliamentary terms and then only once a fortnight. And I think it's this shared sense amongst people

who actually disagree in all sorts of their political or religious views of kind of intellectual purpose. You know, Bernie does this. extraordinary, huge history of music. Johnson writes a dictionary, and then next he does an edition of the works of Shakespeare. Gibbon does the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. These are kind of all works which in their sort of compendiousness express the spirit of kind of improvement and sort of national cultural self-confidence.

Not more than I think than Johnson's additions of Shakespeare. Was that another commission, John Mullen? Yeah, it was. It was. It was another commission, another bright idea on the bookseller's part, which reflected the growing status of Shakespeare. It's not the first... Partly because of Garek. Back to Garek.

Well, the thing is that Shakespeare, there's kind of two bits of Shakespeare. There's Shakespeare, the author on the shelf, and there's Shakespeare on the stage. And in the 18th century, those are two rather different things. I mean, literally different in that many of... But surely, Gary's portrayal of Shakespeare parts must have stirred up general interest.

Absolutely, it did. So they would then maybe go to the shelf. So there's a connection there, as well as the personal connection. Yes, but I mean there's a difference in that, for instance, even the versions of Shakespeare's plays that Garrick famously performs have often been rewritten and changed by 18th or 17th century authors. So the idea of Shakespeare as a sacrosanct kind of dramatic poet doesn't exist on the stage in the 18th century.

And what Johnson does, as it were, in tandem with Garrick, who makes Shakespeare the great dramatist on the London stage is that Johnson makes Shakespeare the kind of cornerstone of English literature. And he rediscovered, didn't he? He actually said he compared Shakespeare to the classical authors, and Shakespeare had been criticised by people of taste saying he didn't obey the classical model and therefore he wasn't in the great... And he said he outdid them because he followed nature.

That's exactly right. I mean, famously Voltaire had attacked Shakespeare because he is barbarous, but it's a widely held opinion among the sort of the polite, cultured classes in Britain, that he didn't follow the rules. And Johnson says, I mean, this is part of the honesty that he has in the vanity of human wishes too, that Shakespeare gives you life as it's lived. He has no illusion that his literary forms are a mess, they're tragic and comic, their tragic comic, because that is what life is like.

And that association between nature and Shakespeare becomes extremely, important for the romantics. It becomes extremely important in the 17th, 17th, 60s and 70s when Garrick has his Shakespeare jubilee. Boswell turns up in Corsican national dress. Now this is an absurd connection, but it's to do with this sense of national peoples. Boswell was very interested in the Corsican liberation cause. So Shakespeare then becomes a figure of nature and the people and humanity.

Jim McLeveter. Well, I think this ties in isn't it, with the general development of nationalism at the time? You can see Johnson's interest in Scotland, for example, as being part of an interest in Englishness as well, and that's one of the reasons that Shakespeare becomes so vitler, an English figure. And then perhaps we'll talk about this later, Johnson becomes an important symbol of Englishness himself.

Well, let's talk about it now. Well, I think it's already happening with Boswell's life, which, of course, comes out in 1791, and Boswell makes the point, that Johnson's life and ideas are so different from recent events in France. And so you've already got him building up Johnson as being a contrast with revolutionary France. And then later on, I think in 19th century writing by people like, say, Leslie Stephen, Johnson is taken to be a symbol of English manliness.

And it's the empiricism, the downrightness, the willingness to argue and to be brave. Those are some of the things that I think feed into this idea of Johnson as a representative of the best English qualities. And do the Johnson's again commissioned by booksellers, publishers lives of the poets fit into this as well? Yes, indeed. I mean, it's one of these major ordering of the arts, I think, the sense that there's a tradition of English poetry

which you can grasp. Though the project does very much come from booksellers again because they've just lost perpetual copyright in the Donaldson case in 1774. Scott's publishers are bringing out these whole collections of poets. So how do they keep the grip on the works that they've had before

and the ways that Johnson writes prefaces to them? Well, I thought that was terrific. Thank you all very much indeed. Thanks to John Mullen, Jim McLevety and Judith Hawley. Next week we'll be discussing asteroid, which are hurtling through space

at thousands of miles an hour as we speak. I finish it tidily because this is the last programme which was produced by my friend Charlie Taylor. who now moves on to other things, and to whom many thanks and good luck, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.