Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers (Basic) The Life of Samuel Johnson (unabridged edition) by James Boswell (Penguin Classics) James Boswell met Samuel Johnson on 16 May 1763, while drinking tea in the back room of Thomas Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden. Boswell had arrived in London during the previous winter, and in his journal he recorded his sentiments when the capital was laid out before his eyes:

When we came upon Highgate hill and had a view of London, I was all life and joy. I repeated Cato's soliloquy on the immortality of the soul, and my soul bounded forth to a certain prospect of happy futurity. I sung all manner of songs, and began to make one about an amorous meeting with a pretty girl, the burthen of which was as follows:

She gave me this,
I gave her that;
And tell me, had she not tit for tat?
I gave three huzzas, and we went briskly in.'

'Cato's soliloquy' is, of course, the famous speech from the coda to Joseph Addison's immensely popular play in which, on the point of being defeated by Caesar's forces and contemplating suicide, Cato the Younger is persuaded by the arguments advanced by Socrates in the Phaedo concerning the immortality of the soul:

It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well —
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us:
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.'

It is typical of Boswell that his recollection of this high-minded and improving speech should be followed immediately by an intimation of a more earthly kind of future happiness, in his extemporized song about a sexual encounter with a 'pretty girl'. The pages of his London journal oscillate between moments of pious, hopeful sobriety — I went to Mayfair Chapel and heard prayers and an excellent sermon from the Book of Job on the comforts of piety. I was in a fine frame. And I thought that GOD really designed us to be happy. I shall certainly be a religious old man. I was much so in youth. I have now and then flashes of devotion, and it will one day burn with a steady flame.'

— and episodes of debauch, occasionally furtive — I was really unhappy for want of women. I thought it hard to be in such a place without them. I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [i.e. a condom]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl's maidenhead, I would make her squeak.'

— occasionally more uninhibited, as in his consummation of his liaison with the actress he refers to as 'Louisa':

A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance.'

However, beneath the varied surface of Boswell's London life there lies a common denominator. Boswell's piety and profligacy are both informed by the self-dramatizing, self-regarding quality of his character. In this respect Boswell's journal is not a record of his actions, nor even a record of the impressions that his actions made upon himself. It is rather the transcript of his appreciation of actions undertaken with more than half an eye to their eventual reception and remembrance.' Boswell's London life was a dramatic performance, and metaphors of the theatre run insistently through his journal entries, perhaps most strikingly in this encounter with Louisa: 'When I came to Louisa's, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure as I enjoyed her as an actress who had played many a fine lady's part.' It would be hard to find a more concentrated example of Boswell's performative idea of character, so perfectly parallel are its reflecting planes of performance and reception.

Into this strange world of dissoluteness, fantasy and delusion walked Samuel Johnson. At the time, Boswell recorded Johnson's arrival with these words:

I drank tea at Davies's in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr. Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, 'Don't tell where I come from.' However, he said, 'From Scotland.' `Mr. Johnson,' said I, 'indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.' `Sir,' replied he, `that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.' Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king's evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable. I shall mark what I remember of his conversation.'

However, when it came to writing this up in The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell chose slightly different words, and a more elaborate treatment:

At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us, —he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.' I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair in deep meditation, which was the first picture his friend did for him, which Sir Joshua very kindly presented to me, and from which an engraving has been made for this work. Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, 'Don't tell where I come from.' — 'From Scotland,' cried Davies roguishly. 'Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.' I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expence of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression `come from Scotland,' which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, 'That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.' This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next.'

Comparing the two versions, one notices at once the fuller and more ceremonious form the episode takes in the Life; next, perhaps, the softening of Boswell's original sense of Johnson's disagreeableness into the milder emotion of nonplussed embarrassment. But it is the characteristic Boswellian allusion to the theatre — 'he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, "Look, my Lord, it comes"' — which is the pivotal element in the transformation of the original impression into the eventual work of literary art. The encounter between Hamlet and his father's ghost is the event which determines the shape of, and gives direction to, young Hamlet's life; at the same time, it is the occasion when old Hamlet lays an obligation on his son to do for him what death prevents him from doing for himself. Boswell's reference to Hamlet was apt to his own case — in addition, of course, (and this is once again characteristically Boswellian) to being ludicrously self-flattering, casting Boswell as the glamorous protagonist in the momentous drama of his own life. But it was pertinent also to the case of Johnson. The task of memorializing Johnson gave shape and direction to Boswell's life (and it was a task he performed with occasional Hamlet-like waverings and delays)!° Moreover, the friendship launched by that meeting in Davies's back-parlour bestowed on Johnson a posthumous reach which would have eluded him had he been obliged to rely on his other biographers — that troop of the now all but unread, comprising Sir John Hawkins, Mrs Piozzi, Isaac Reed, George Steevens, Thomas Tyers, William Cooke, William Shaw, Joseph Towers, James Harrison, et al.' That meeting, then, was not only the beginning of Johnson and Boswell's friendship. It was also the seed of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and it is therefore appropriate that Boswell should have folded into his account of that primal scene a reference to the book which would result from it, when he mentioned the Reynolds portrait of Johnson 'from which an engraving has been made for this work'.

Boswell offers further implicit comment on the self-reflexive complexity of his book at the end of his account of his first visit to Johnson's lodgings, when he congratulates himself on 'having now so happily established an acquaintance of which I had been so long ambitious':

My readers will, I trust, excuse me for being thus minutely circumstantial, when it is considered that the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson was to me a most valuable acquisition, and laid the foundation of whatever instruction and entertainment they may receive from my collections concerning the great subject of the work which they are now perusing!'

In this awkwardly articulated sentence, Boswell tries to express the relationship between a number of distinct entities: his appetite for literary detail; his friendship with Johnson; the production of literary instruction and entertainment; his 'collections' preparatory to the writing of the book; the Life of Johnson itself, which its readers are 'now perusing'; and its 'great subject'. It is tempting to take that last phrase as referring simply to Johnson himself: what could be more self-evident than that the great subject of the Life of Johnson is Samuel Johnson? But so to construe the final limb of Boswell's ungainly sentence would be to short-change the Life of Johnson.

It is about Boswell; it is about Johnson; it is about the friendship between Boswell and Johnson; and finally it is also about the process whereby those individuals and that friendship gave rise to the material 'collections' which made possible its own creation. Nothing less than all of this is the 'great subject' of Boswell's book, and it is this complex amplitude which makes the Life of Johnson the richest example of life-writing in English. As Boswell himself put it in a letter of 21 April 1786 to Hugh Blair, 'I will venture to promise that my Life of my revered Friend will be the richest piece of Biography that has ever appeared. The Bullion will be immense, whatever defects there may`be in the workmanship.' That final note of diffidence is rather uncharacteristic for Boswell, inclined as he was to bounce and preen." It was also misplaced, as the workmanship — that is to say, Boswell's deliberate and creative manipulation of the materials he had collected over many years — was, and remains, essential to the book's triumph, as Bruce Redford has recently demonstrated." It was because of the workmanship that Vicesimus Knox would in 1791 recognize in Boswell's Life of Johnson 'a new Species of Biography'!'

`Hyperion to a satyr': so Hamlet expressed the profound discrepancy between Old Hamlet and Claudius!' The difference between Boswell and Johnson was perhaps less absolute, but it was still pronounced. In 1763 Johnson was a literary figure of substance: a poet, the author of The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, a novelist, and the heroic compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language. In 1755 he had received an honorary MA from Oxford, and in 176z he had been given a pension of L300 per annum by George III. Boswell, by contrast, was unknown, and virtually unpublished!' Johnson was both admired and censured as the spokesman for a severe and Christian morality in a mid-century society which was given, perhaps with a certain disabling self-consciousness, to seeing itself as gripped in moral crisis." Boswell was fond of drink and women. Nevertheless, the friendship between this unlikely pair struck root and thrived.

It was not the first time that Johnson had been drawn to everything which he seemed himself not to be. In the early 1750s, before he knew Boswell, he had also formed an improbable friendship with Bennet Langton's college acquaintance Topham Beauclerk:

Johnson, soon after this acquaintance [with Bennet Langton] began, passed a considerable time at Oxford. He at first thought it strange that Langton should associate so much with one who had the character of being loose, both in his principles and practice; but, by degrees, he himself was fascinated. Mr. Beauclerk's being of the St. Alban's family, and having, in some particulars, a resemblance to Charles the Second, contributed, in Johnson's imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. 'What a coalition! (said Garrick, when he heard of this;) I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Roundhouse.' But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable association.'

This is not just a case of, in our well-worn phrase, opposites attracting. At the end of his life, sick, and provoked by Boswell to think about what might be the fate of one's friendships in the afterlife, Johnson replied 'with heat': 'How can a man know where his departed friends are, or whether they will be his friends in the other world? How many friendships have you known formed upon principles of virtue? Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly.'" No doubt great allowance must be made for the extremity of the moment. Nevertheless, we are here far from any Montaignean extolling of `amitié'," and Johnson's awareness of the complexity and possible impurity of the motives to friendship is germane to any consideration of his association with Boswell.

An incident from early in the friendship between the two men sheds light on the curious quality of what held them together. Once again, as was so often the case, Boswell launched the exchange by being provoking:

I teized him [ Johnson] with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, `That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was Boswell.

A tendency to self-torment was a characteristic the two men shared." In his journal, Boswell admonished himself to remember that he was subject to melancholy and low spirits.' And writing to the Revd Ralph Churton in 1792 on the subject of Johnson's view of the unhappiness of human life, Boswell linked the subject and the biographer: 'his "morbid melancholy" may have made life appear to him more miserable than it generally is. But the truth, Sir, is as you have judiciously observed, that I myself have a large portion of melancholy in my constitution ...'27 It was surely for this reason that Boswell chose the persona of 'The Hypochondriack' — that is to say, one afflicted by 'melancholy, hypochondria, spleen, or vapours' — for the series of essays he contributed to the London Magazine in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and also why he would write of himself in the very first of those essays that 'I have suffered much of the fretfulness, the gloom, and the despair that can torment a thinking being.'" As for Johnson, Richard Brocklesby's analysis of his mental condition, sent in a letter to Boswell in December 1784, emphasizes how Johnson's undoubted intellectual powers did as much to unsettle as to steady the precarious balance of his mind. Johnson 'often expressed the feelings and uncertainties of his mind' to Brocklesby, so this is no superficial or cursory opinion:

He had the most logical apprehensive, and book informed vigorous Mind, that I have ever known, but withal, his views of Nature and of the Universe and of all the various objects to contemplate which Philosophy invites an unfetterd, speculative mind, were narrow, partial and much confined. His Religion was the true [superstition] of Plutarch, which narrowed the wonderful powers of his judgement and made his extraordinary talents of Mind continually at war with each other, so that in his later days his Philosophy seemed to draw his mind one way and his Religion byassed him to the contrary, and this may have occasioned that continual perplexity, and doubts, and fears, in which the greater portion of his life was passed . .

William Bowles concurred: 'It is very well known that in the latter part of Dr. Johnson's life he became much dejected with gloomy apprehensions respecting his reception in a future world.'' The object of Johnson's melancholy was futurity, but its cause may have been more earthly. The Revd William Adams ascribed it to the resumption of alcohol: 'The History of his Melancholy about 20 years before his death, which was indeed dreadful to see, I am not enough acquainted with: but I always conjectured it to be owing to the sudden transition from water drinking, which was his Habit invariably for z 5 years or more, to drinking Wine, in which by his own Account he indulged himself very liberally.'" But, whatever the cause, and whatever the object, it was the case that Boswell and Johnson were both prey to melancholic self-torment.

In the company of the other, each may have been distracted from this tendency in himself by the display of the same quality in his friend. Hence, perhaps, Johnson's enigmatic 'sly look' — the moth's name might with equal propriety have been Johnson. To escape from the self by contemplating an image of the self may seem paradoxical. Nevertheless, it may be psychologically plausible, and furthermore it resonates with the complexities of Johnson's attitude towards the self — Johnson who could on the one hand write essays enforcing the principle of `cognosce to ipsum' (know thyself ) as enshrining 'all the speculation requisite of a moral agent', but who also confessed to Reynolds that the 'great business of his life . . . was to escape from himself '. Friendship satisfied both imperatives by providing distraction as well as indirect introspection. To be in the company of Boswell was like viewing the head of Medusa in a mirror: through reflection, the harmful could become useful. Friendship, alongside all its moral benefits and social Pleasures, might also serve as one of those techniques for the 'management of the mind' which Johnson thought so necessary, and which he believed could be obtained by 'experience and habitual exercise'.' In this respect, Boswell was the most useful of Johnson's friends, the man who played the part of psychological lightning rod perhaps better, certainly for longer, than had either Richard Savage (his companion during his early days in London) or Beauclerk. But this utility did not necessarily make him Johnson's dearest friend.' There is no mention of Boswell in Johnson's will —an oversight which roused anger and disappointment in friends of Boswell such as William Johnson Temple and Mary Adey. To Mrs Piozzi, Johnson asserted that it was Dr Taylor of Ashbourne who was 'better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive'." It was to Bennet Langton — not to Boswell — that the dying Johnson tenderly quoted Tibullus' line 'Te teneam moriens deficiente manu' ('When I expire, let my trembling hand hold yours'): a gesture which is saturated with a sense of strong yet delicate friendship." And it was Langton who informed Boswell of the strength of Johnson's feeling for Topham Beauclerk: 'His affection for Topham Beauclerk was so great, that when Beauclerk was labouring under that severe illness which at last occasioned his death, Johnson said (with a voice faultering with emotion,) "Sir, I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk."

The stubborn trace of instrumentality in Boswell and Johnson's friendship — the uneasy feeling repeatedly awakened in the reader of the Life of Johnson that each man to some extent pursued his own goals by means of the other — is most vivid in those moments, of which the engineering of a meeting between Johnson and John Wilkes is the most celebrated," when we see Boswell tampering with the life as lived in order to produce sensational material for the life as written. Johnson occasionally growled at this treatment:

He sometimes could not bear being teazed with questions. I was once present when a gentleman asked so many as, 'What did you do, Sir?' `What did you say, Sir?' that he at last grew enraged, and said, 'I will not be put to the question.
Don't you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what, and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy?'

But for the most part Johnson seems to have been complicitous in this unstated, but nevertheless palpable, process of literary production which was advantageous both to him and to Boswell." Later in life Johnson touched again on this subject: `To be contradicted, in order to force you to talk, is mighty unpleasing. You shine, indeed; but it is by being ground.'" But the chance to shine often reconciled Johnson to the grinding.

It is a paradox of play that, in any game, the opponents are also collaborators, and a further paradox that they collaborate precisely by opposing one another — their conflict engenders the game they create together. The moments of disagreement, of opposition and of conflict, between Boswell and Johnson which we encounter in the Life sometimes have this gaming quality to them: they are the grinding which produces brilliance. Boswell repeatedly draws his reader's attention to issues or topics on which he disagreed with Johnson: topics such as the respective merits of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, the current crisis in Corsica, the significance of Sir John Dalrymple's discovery that the Whig martyrs Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell had been secret pensioners of Louis XIV, the war with the American colonies, and the institution of slavery, which Johnson consistently attacked, and Boswell shamefully defended:

I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his [ Johnson's] general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say — that his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information ... To abolish a status, which in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.'

When he does this, Boswell is in part preening himself before the reader and displaying the fact that he is not merely Johnson's creature — this is the function of these passages in the life as written." But in the life as lived, these episodes served the different function of drawing Johnson out. In the transition from experience to literature, they migrate from utility to ostentation.

To draw Johnson out was also, one suspects, at least at times the purpose of another kind of difference between the two men, namely their occasional bouts of coolness or sullenness.' The Life records a number of interruptions in their friendship: for instance, in 1764 and 1765 (when Boswell records that Johnson 'did not favour me with a single letter for more than two years'), in 1767 CI received no letter from Johnson this year'), in 1770 (`a total cessation of all correspondence between Dr. Johnson and me'), in 1778, and in 1784.46 Doubtless some of these apparent estrangements were innocent; but surely not all. In 1779 Boswell reveals that 'I did not write to Johnson, as usual, upon my return to my family, but tried how he would be affected by my silence.'47 In 178c) Johnson began a letter by chiding Boswell for having 'taken one of your fits of taciturnity, and [having] resolved not to write till you are written to; it is but a peevish humour, but you shall have your way.'" And plainly Johnson suspected another of these experiments of silence in the winter of 1784, when he wrote to Boswell (who acknowledges that he had been 'with much regret long silent') and commented on the absence of the letters which had provided comfort in the midst of his ailments: 'In this uncomfortable state your letters used to relieve; what is the reason that I have them no longer? Are you sick, or are you sullen?'"

To sickness and sullenness might be added calculation, and Boswell's willingness to work upon Johnson by employing what seem close to the arts of coquetry. All this was part of the greater artfulness which produced the Life, but it was a risky strategy. In a character as labile as that of Boswell, it was (as we have seen) hard always to keep the feigned clearly separated from the felt, and the felt could easily have led to rupture, as it nearly did in 1778, in consequence of a dinner party at which Boswell had not been able to control Johnson's environment:

there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for a week; and, perhaps, might have kept away much longer, nay, gone to Scotland without seeing him again, had not we fortunately met and been reconciled. To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable."

And also human books, for this tiff might have not only ended Boswell's friendship with Johnson, but also aborted the Life of Johnson. So the reader of the Life might shudder at this passage, which reveals the slenderness of the thread by which the 'work which they are now perusing' (to return to that Boswellian phrase) once hung.'

If, for Boswell, resistance could be an instrument for literary production, for Johnson it was a trait much more deeply etched into his character, and which even assumed an ethical significance. Many of the most vivid phrases and images of the Life reflect the centrality of the practice and principle of opposition in Johnson's personality. Johnson's appetite for opposition could take the form of a simple combativeness directed towards others, as when Boswell summed up an evening's conversation in the words 'Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons.'" This is the Johnson who loved above all else to prevail:

This [an explanation of how medicated baths might bestow curative benefits] appeared to me very satisfactory. Johnson did not answer it; but talking for victory, and determined to be master of the field, he had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber's comedies: 'There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.'"

This is the Johnson who was animated by the 'spirit of contradiction' and a 'love of argumentative contest', who might at any moment be overtaken by the 'humour of opposition'.' Sometimes the motive for this was ostentation, as Johnson confessed to Boswell: 'When I was a boy, I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.'" It was a failing he did not entirely outgrow, as Boswell noted in 1776: The truth, however, is, that he loved to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong, but in supporting which, his reasoning and wit would be most conspicuous.'" Boswell thought this characteristic so central to Johnson's personality that he allowed it to stand at the climactic point of the summary assessment which closes the book:

In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing: for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could, when he pleased, be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and, from a spirit of contradiction and a delight in shewing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity; so that, when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk ...

Yet it was also a principle not exclusively aggressive, since it existed in Johnson in close conjunction with other, milder, emotions. As David Garrick's description of Johnson's way of wit suggests — 'Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no' — there was a roughness even in his affection, a thread of violence woven through his gambolling."

But contradiction or 'dexterity in retort' for Johnson was much more than a foible of character." His great dictum that 'Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth' installs the fact and experience of contradiction as the virtuous centre of any search for the true. Towards the end of his life, he cited this understanding of the value and purpose of contradiction as almost the summation of his philosophy: 'In short, Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.' Not all Johnson's friends, even the closest of them, shared this understanding of the utility of contradiction, but Johnson was adamant in defence of it, as he showed in a revealing exchange with Langton:

He however charged Mr. Langton with what he thought want of judgement upon an interesting occasion. 'When I was ill, (said he) I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending Christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, — that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?' BOSWELL. 'I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly, — and harshly.' JOHNSON. 'And who is the worse for that?' BOSWELL. 'It hurts people of weak nerves.' JOHNSON. 'I know no such weak-nerved people.

Samuel Johnson—moralist, poet, essayist, critic, dictionary maker, conversationalist and larger-than-life personality—had a formidable intellect and a passion for ideas. A man of humble background, he used his great mind and dominant character to overcome his physical defects, complete ambitious literary projects, and gain acceptance and honors. He also had a compassionate heart and a heroic capacity for suffering. He endured constant pain, long years of profound depression and two decades of failure. Ford Madox Ford called him "the most tragic of all our major literary figures."

Johnson struggled with disease from the moment of his birth to his final fight. From infancy he was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. In childhood he had tubercular lesions on his neck and smallpox that left scars on his face; from early manhood he suffered from convulsive tics and twitches. Reflecting on the contrast between his mind and body and striving for control of his life, Johnson asserted, "There are perhaps very few conditions more to be pitied than that of an active and elevated mind, labouring under the weight of a distempered body." His struggle to overcome his disabilities suggests Nietzsche's aphorism "what does not destroy us makes us stronger."

Born in straitened circumstances, but keenly aware of his genius, Johnson was alienated from his elderly parents. Physically repulsive and slovenly in dress and habits, by nature indolent and melancholy, he experienced humiliating poverty at Oxford and left without a degree. He had a perennially unsatisfied craving for love and sympathy, and as a young man contracted a bizarre and sexually frustrating marriage to a much older woman. After her death, despite uncommonly strong sexual passions, he remained celibate for more than thirty years.

Johnson was a mass of contradictions: lazy and energetic, aggressive and tender, melancholic and humorous, commonsensical and irrational, comforted yet tormented by religion. In his life and work he exalted virtue, propagated knowledge and alleviated suffering. The miserable, the victimized and the oppressed always had a claim on his compassion. His social ideas were progressive and humane. He strongly opposed vivisection and foxhunting, debtors' prisons, Negro slavery and the exploitation of native people from India to America. He gave generously to beggars and homeless children, rescued prostitutes, secured clothing for French prisoners of war and defended criminals who had been condemned to hang. For decades he supported a household of pathetic, impoverished and contentious dependents. But these charitable acts could not dispel his overwhelming guilt and fear of eternal damnation.

Despite his physical disabilities, Johnson was unusually tall and strong, with immense vitality and great physical courage. His character and manners were aggressive, and he saw life itself as a perpetual contest. James Boswell compared Johnson's continual attempts to control the demons of his mind to the efforts of a Roman gladiator in the Colosseum. He fought "the wild beasts of the Arena . . . ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him." Johnson's description of himself at Oxford defined his essential qualities: poor, bitter, angry, violent and combative; challenging his superiors, dominating others by his brains and his talent. He told Boswell, "I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority." "The gradations of a hero's life," he believed, "are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book."2

Johnson, a literary hero, battled from book to book and struggled against formidable obstructions. His violence and surprising athletic feats were essential outlets for his frustration, his anger and his sexual passion. When one publisher urged him to work faster on the catalogue of Sir Robert Harley's vast library, he knocked him down. When another pressured him to produce more copy for the Dictionary of the English Language and threatened to cut off his funds, he adopted a military metaphor and a typically combative stance: "my citadel shall not be taken by storm while I can defend it, and if a blockade is intended, the country is under the command of my batteries." He described the inevitable limitations of his edition of Shakespeare's plays as if he'd been battling the text itself: "from many [passages], after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse."

Johnson's mental problems forced him to live in a state of siege. He hoped "always to resist, and in time to drive [away]" the black dog of melancholy. Failure to prepare for death, he believed, "is to sleep at our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack." His battles lasted till the very end and there was never any possibility of surrender. "Time cannot always be defeated," he bravely claimed, "but let us not yield till we are conquered." During his final illness, he again insisted, though greatly weakened, "I will be conquered; I will not capitulate," and went down with all guns firing. Johnson believed that "to strive with difficulties and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity."

Johnson always enjoyed a fight. When he traveled to Plymouth with Joshua Reynolds in August 1762, he became embroiled in a quarrel between the old and new parts of town. He resolutely took the side of the established town and, violently partisan, derided the dockers of the recently built area as upstarts and aliens. When the dockers, destitute of water, petitioned their rivals for a share of the precious commodity, Johnson zealously exclaimed: "No, no! I am against the dockers; I am a Plymouth man. Rogues! Let them die of thirst. They shall not have a drop!" He urged the gentle author Fanny Burney to topple a rival from her literary eminence. He even encouraged discord in his own household. Inciting a half-reformed prostitute to defend herself against the intimidating blind poetess Anna Williams, he cried: "At her again, Poll! Never flinch, Poll." In the last year of his life, at the age of seventy-five, he started a riot to protest a cancelled display of fireworks.

In the nineteenth century, when Johnson was generally out of favor, two emotionally troubled writers identified with his sufferings and paid tribute to his noble character. Thomas Carlyle asked, "shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, like a right-valiant man?" John Ruskin called him "a man entirely sincere, and infallibly wise." Johnson's lifelong struggle against overwhelming disadvantages was inspired by a belief that his superior intellect was a gift from God and that he was obliged to use it to the fullest extent.

Boswell's monumental Life of Johnson and private journals are the most authoritative sources of information about Johnson. But he devotes only one-fifth of his book to the first fifty-five years of Johnson's life and four-fifths to his last twenty years. He had an extraordinary ability to record Johnson's talk and bring him uncannily to life, and through him we know Johnson as a living, breathing man. Yet even Boswell was unaware of crucial aspects of Johnson's history, and deliberately suppressed some sensitive but revealing sexual material. He did not know that Johnson wrote a substantial part of Robert Chambers' Oxford law lectures. Apart from a few entries that he secretly transcribed in Johnson's house, Boswell had not read Johnson's private diaries. He certainly did not know Johnson's "secret far dearer to him than his life."

Boswell could not have known the quite shocking entry of 1775 in the Reverend Thomas Campbell's Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, which was not published until 1947. Johnson almost never used obscenities and condemned those who did. But the chaste widower was certainly thinking of himself when—according to his lifelong friend, the actor David Garrick—he was asked to name the greatest pleasure in life. Instead of mentioning religious devotion or intellectual conversation, convivial company, foreign travel or literary fame, Johnson said that the first pleasure was "fucking & the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho' all could not fuck."

Since Johnson's wife had been dead for more than thirty years when Boswell's Life of Johnson was published in 1791, and he had no children or blood relatives who might protest, Boswell was unusually free to write whatever he wished. He was astonishingly frank about recording intimate details in his own journals. But he felt obliged to draw a discreet veil around certain aspects of Johnson's life that he did know about but felt would detract from his friend's prestige and dignity.

Johnson's covert sexual life was far more interesting than Boswell's own frantic fornication and punitive doses of clap. But Boswell listed under the Latin heading tacenda (unmentionable) a great many incidents that make Johnson more vulnerable and more human. As the editor of Boswell's correspondence observed: "[His] treatment of those materials which deal with Johnson's weaknesses, real and alleged—his indolence, his oddities and asperity of manner, his excesses in eating and drinking, his profanity and bawdy, his sexual lapses, his intellectual narrowness and prejudice, his use of drugs, his insanity—all of these subjects appear among the unused sources, and seem to compose themselves into a pattern of editorial suppression."

When Boswell did discuss these delicate matters, he tended to sanitize them. Johnson's learned friend Bennet Langton told Boswell, who was assiduously gathering material for the Life of Johnson, that when Johnson's play Irene was staged at Garrick's playhouse, he used "to go occasionally to the green room of Drury Lane Theatre where he was much regarded by the Players and was very easy and facetious with them." Harmless enough, so far. But the real interest of this anecdote is the effect these uninhibited, scantily clad actresses had on the impressionable Johnson. Boswell recorded, but did not publish, Johnson's confession to Garrick that he was sorely tempted by these young beauties: "I'll come no more behind your scenes David; for the silk-stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my genitals." Another version of this confession, which Garrick told the radical MP John Wilkes, was that "the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses do make my genitals to quiver." This pulsating vibrato is decorously and moralistically tamped down in the Life, where both "bubbies" and "genitals" disappear. Using Latinate diction, Boswell makes him more moral and "Johnsonian": "Johnson at last denied himself this amusement, for considerations of rigid [a nice pun] virtue; saying, 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities."'? The effect is to mock the sexual urges of a respectable man, rather than allow us to see the misery of his sexual frustration.

Meyers, on the other hand has profited from previous biographies of Johnson, but also differ from them in significant ways. James Clifford's first two volumes (1955 and 1979)—heavily reliant on the discoveries of A. L. Reade---are extremely academic, adhere to a rigid chronology and try to cover every event in Johnson's life. I sometimes depart from strict chronology to narrate major themes and try to emphasize not the events of his life, but what they mean. Walter Jackson Bate's biography (1977) is also academic and sometimes stretches credulity with dubious psychoanalytic theories. John Wain's life (1974) is more readable, but he confessed "there is no research in this book," which lacks endnotes to substantiate his argument. All these books were published 3o or more years ago. I have benefited from the great contributions to Johnson scholarship since then.

A crucial issue in Johnson's life concerns his use of padlocks, chains and whips, first discovered by Katharine Balderston in 1949. Hester Thrale loyally kept this matter secret, and contemporary biographers like Sir John Hawkins, James Boswell and Arthur Murphy knew nothing about it. Joseph Wood Krutch's modern biography (1944) appeared before Balderston published her essay. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Johnson's darkest secret, his modern biographers have not been able to reconcile his obsession with their exalted image of the great moralist and stern philosopher. Preferring to keep Johnson safely on a pedestal, they've consistently refused to face the implications of Balderston's discovery. James Clifford's unfinished life stopped before this episode occurred, and his biography of Hester Thrale (revised in 1968) completely ignored the issue. Christopher Hibbert (1971) was cautious and indecisive. Though Hester had said "do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the Rod enough," Hibbert wrote, in an awkward style that expressed his own uneasiness: "whether or not the rod was actually used, whether or not Johnson's fantasies [sic] about manacles and fetters were erotic and masochistic in their nature, it is impossible now to say."

John Wain devoted an entire chapter to "The Padlock." But he, too, with an unconvincing "absolutely certain," shied away from the inevitable conclusion: "if one thing can be taken as absolutely certain, it is that Hester did not engage in any degrading sexual activity with Johnson." The psychoanalytic Walter Jackson Bate was most likely to be receptive to Hester's comment that a woman's power to tie and whip a man like Johnson was "literally and strictly true." Yet Bate maintained: "not only is the `evidence' so slender and disconnected as to come close to nonexistence, but it flies in the face . . . of both psychological probability and practical good sense." In 1979 the psychoanalyst Bernard Meyer criticized Bate for denying the obvious: "in the face of rather compelling evidence to the contrary, [Bate] has spared no effort to rescue Johnson from any suspicion of deviant behavior, specifically in the form of bondage and related perversions." Robert DeMaria (1993), following the well-worn path, repeated Bate's denial and concluded that Johnson's whipping by Mrs. Thrale was merely a lighthearted frolic: "there is no convincing evidence that [Johnson's "jest"] was realized in anything beyond polite behaviour and a kind of country-house theatrical life."' Biographers, like lawyers, should be required to take a course in evidence. I believe Johnson's secret life adds to rather than detracts from his greatness. It makes his character more complex and tormented, his struggle more extreme, his achievement more impressive.

Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, published to commemorate the 3ooth anniversary of his birth, places him in the social and historical context of eighteenth-century England. It describes his circle of London friends, each one preeminent in his profession—the politician Edmund Burke, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the biographer James Boswell, the author Oliver Goldsmith, the historian Edward Gibbon, the actor David Garrick, the novelist Fanny Burney—perhaps the most brilliant concentration of genius in English history. This book also reveals how Johnson's greatest works—The Vanity of Human Wishes, the Rambler, the Dictionary of the English Language, Rasselas, the edition of Shakespeare's works, the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and especially his late masterpiece The Lives of the Poets—evolved from his tormented character.

This book offers several new interpretations of Johnson's life and works: his reasons for leaving Oxford; his ability to become a lawyer without a university degree; his relations with women, marriage and sexual life; his intimacy with Hester Thrale; his tendency to tears; his hostility to Jonathan Swift; the paternity of his servant Francis (Frank) Barber; the similarities between Shakespeare's life and his own; the meaning of The Vanity of Human Wishes; his wife's influence on the heroine of Irene; the parallels between Shakespeare's Falstaff and Boswell; and Johnson's impact on five major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

Samuel Johnson

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