The Dr. Johnson Collection

I'm calling it the Dr. Johnson Collection to be sure we know which Johnson it is. Wilko Johnson was fine but I have none of his work and I have no particular animosity towards Lyndon B. Johnson but there could be a Johnson of whose work I wouldn't have a word in the house. I even have a small volume of Ezra Pound, not that it makes much sense to me but at least I tried, but one has to draw the line somewhere.

Dr. Johnson has expanded into a collection recently as he becomes this year's thing for me. Now that I've found him I can't let him go, I'll build my world around him, I need him so even though he don't need me.

My order for Rasselas got lost in the post and is being refunded and re-ordered from elsewhere but I don't know how much I need his Shakespeare yet because there's plenty to be getting on with.

A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland was a more casual stroll than the exacting standards of the Lives of the Poets or the incessant enquiries of the brilliant Selected Essays, which is the one you really want, but a great pleasure still, if a milder one.

In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Greg Clingham identifies the downside of him as, for some,

symbolizing...the worst excesses of absolutist and ethnocentric rationalism produced by the Enlightenment.

but if that's the worst the Enlightenment - which was for the most part a good thing - can do, and if he only 'symbolizes' it and it's 'rationalism' then I'm sure it could be worse. It could be Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, it could be Papist, Presbyterian or as befuddled and vacuous as the more recent Johnson. One can be disappointed or disabused by meeting one's heroes but meeting Johnson might not have involved not liking him but being overwhelmed by him and his ever-questioning intellect. He's trying his best to be as good as he can be. That is what he's worrying at.

In the introduction to A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (with Mr. Boswell's parallel text), Peter Levi suggests that,

It seems that Johnson thought the purpose of travelling was largely in order to understand what was meant by the words used for the phenomena of nature.

He didn't go on holiday for sunshine, cheap booze and in the hope of a casual fling. He went for an investigative purpose rather than to indulge himself although it might be conceded that in resolving any disparities he perceived between the world and the words used to describe it as he understood them, that might have been his idea of self-indulgence. Having been tormented about having got 'fetlock' wrong in his dictionary, he perhaps understood all the better that if you want to know what a mountain is, you'd best go and look at one.

He was English and had traits in him that have since become more hardened in a desperate few but have become more relaxed in others. In Montrose, he is disappointed in the reception he is afforded at an inn until Mr. Boswell,

desired me to observe that the innkeeper was an Englishman, and then I defended him as well as I could.

We might compare the reverse situation in Fawlty Towers when the hotelier accepted his guest's masquerade as an aristocrat and fawned upon him but revised his attitude when discovering him to be a charlatan. Dr. Johnson, though, readily admits his prejudice and is less a victim of the tendency that,

we are all partakers, insiders, unable to get outside life and to take a clear view of ourselves.

One of his greatest fears was madness and that it might overtake him. He did well to achieve such self-awareness and yet remain so sane.

But the value he puts on education, culture and sophistication as he sees them can make him unsympathetic when encountering the Erse language which he considered primitive for being unwritten and,

is a rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood.

Whereas today you'd have a better chance of getting on Ian MacMillan's The Verb to recite your fashionable attempts at self expression if you wrote in a non-standard dialect because by now it is cool and the done thing to embrace diversity. And I'm not saying it isn't if it's any good.

Travel, in Dr. Johnson's day, was a good thing because,

If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

He's allowed that idealism and optimism in the C18th when the chance of progress must have seemed even more possible than it did to me in 1971 in the examples of Marc Bolan and David Bowie but they've been and gone, too, now.  

He is afforded generous hospitality in Scotland, as I always was when I went there and quite taken with how the people there survive in less cosmopolitan surroundings than those he's used to and he undertook his journey at an advanced age, prepared to undergo what hardships he had to endure and grateful of what assistance he was offered on his way.

It's idyllic, really. The world has not improved much for the enlightenment that he and his age brought with them. While I for my part have no reason to complain and consider that I was born in the time and place only a few years later and not far away from the most fortuitous that I ever could have been, I acknowledge that I've been lucky and how many others suffered worse and how badly I cannot calculate.