The Cambridge Dr. Johnson

There's a fuzzy symmetry in the stories that Shakespeare didn't go to university because his father's glove-making business in Stratford wasn't doing very well and he was required to help and that Dr. Johnson returned to Lichfield 'sullenly' in 1729 when his 'impecunious' father, Michael's, book-selling business failed. It does suggest, though, that talent is what one needs to be a writer, not a university education.

Philip Davis writes Chapter 1 on the 'life' of Johnson in the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham, 1997. It's not so much a life, which has been done in more detail by a number of others elsewhere, but an essay on character. 

The book proceeds with some logic, next to Johnson and the arts of conversation by Catherine M. Parke which is more academic than it need be but then to Johnson's poetry, essays, on women, the dictionary and politics, building a comprehensive guide to the man, his writing and attitudes as it goes and that's only the story so far.

Our idea of poetry has changed since the C18th and to appreciate the witty verses of Johnson, Pope and their contemporaries is an effort we might not feel is worth the reward we might get from it but that might be something to return to when I get as far as The Complete English Poems which is not a priority. Paul J. Korshin's survey on the essay and The Rambler inevitably overlaps with its companion pieces but extracts his main themes and then Eithne Henson finds Johnson more sympathetic to the position of women than some of his characteristic C18th attitudes might allow us to give him credit for.

Robert Demaria Jr.'s Johnson's Dictionary, though, finds a valid way into the man and his way of thinking. The definitions are his own and the quotations with which he illustrates them are chosen by him, highlighted in his volumes as he read and methodically sought them out. There had been a similar project in France but his was the first in English. He abandons the idea of classifying words under their 'head' word' because that would demand eymological knowledge that the general reader, coming to the book to learn, wouldn't have.

There's the hint of a contradiction in the ideas that,

the Dictionary must also be seen as an expression of Johnson's life-long interest in empirical, historically verifiable truth,

and that,

'the end of learning is piety'.

We are told that in Johnson's The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe, 

the pilgrims marching up the Mountain of Existence must depart from the guidance of Reason and find their direction only from Religion.

 

By now, some of us might think that being devoted to empircism and verifiable truth is one thing but to then undermine it by puttting into the service of religion is a travesty but Johnson is even more devoted, we ascertain, to the established order of things and that includes God.

He defines himself as a Tory and defines Tory in its turn as,

One who adheres to the constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.

That, from Robert Folkenflik's Johnson's politics, put him for all of his early career in the opposition, thus a critic and satirist, but these terms have shifted in their connotations and Johnson's humanity and enquiring mind make him far more advanced than Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Tory born 260 years later.

On the way we have found out that 'wanton' really 'is applied to any thing of which the motion is irregular without terror'. But we are in a difficult area in defining things when he quotes a poem that says,

Your God, forsooth, is found

Incomprehensible and infinite

 

and so the definer can't know it. Whether these great minds come from Classical times, the C18th or post-Structuralism, it all falls down in the end and leads us back to scepticism. We can take partial truths rather than complete, workable systems from them. One of Johnson's many memorable lines was that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel which was most appropriate to our more recent Johnson who fancied himself as a man of letters on flimsier evidence. But Dr. Johnson was patriotic and his words must be understood in the context of others that went with them meaning to expose 'what  Johnson sees as interest and ambition masquerading as love of country'. And that does sound familiar.

 

The Cambridge Companion is convincingly fulfilling its remit and I'm sure there'll be more good things in the second half. After that, not weanting to live by Johnson alone, I think I'll have Wuthering Heights and Antony and Cleopatra from the library, prompted by references in other places. I've never read Wuthering Heights and perhaps one ought to. I've seen Antony and Cleopatra but not read it and there might be advantage to be had from doing that. David Copperfield keeps suggesting itself from time to time and they have it on the shelves round the corner but it's huge and will have to wait.