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Copyright by John Steven Kinkade 2005 Copyright by John Steven Kinkade 2005 The Dissertation Committee for John Steven Kinkade certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: SAMUEL JOHNSON’S RAMBLER AND THE INVENTION OF SELF-HELP LITERATURE Committee: ___________________________ Elizabeth Hedrick, Supervisor ___________________________ Samuel E. Baker ___________________________ Jeffrey Barnouw ___________________________ James D. Garrison ___________________________ Neil Kamil SAMUEL JOHNSON’S RAMBLER AND THE INVENTION OF SELF-HELP LITERATURE by John Steven Kinkade, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2005 SAMUEL JOHNSON’S RAMBLER AND THE INVENTION OF SELF-HELP LITERATURE Publication No. ___________ John Steven Kinkade, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Elizabeth Hedrick This dissertation argues that Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, a series of essays written between 1750 and 1752, helped established a new genre of advice writing, the self-help book. This genre depends on a method of caring for the self that privileges an autonomous identity that defines itself, through labor, against upper class values. Though Johnson employs many of the tropes and tactics of courtesy and civility literature, his work offers a new focus on the discipline of one’s mind and the assertion of an independent self in an urban culture. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of conduct literature, following its changes from Renaissance courtesy literature, which focused on the court, to civility literature, which emphasized the importance of participation in a broader public sphere. Johnson was conscious of the civility tradition, especially as a context in which periodical essays were written, and of the didactic possibilities of literature. The second iv chapter examines how Johnson’s Rambler adopts the topics of earlier conduct literature but shifts the focus of his advice from sociability to the cultivation of the self. He teaches his readers the importance of an interior discipline, as opposed to the discipline of the body that marked courtesy and civility literature, and of the centrality of labor in developing a self. The third chapter argues that Johnson writes a self-help text geared specifically towards writers and scholars. Johnson frequently invokes this audience, advising them on what constitutes professional behavior for writers, and producing in The Rambler a manual of professionalization for a previously ill-defined profession. Chapter 4 argues that Johnson tries to extend his ethic of self-help to a female audience, arguing for the importance of learning and an autonomous self. However, because Johnson cannot imagine contexts in which women’s labor truly becomes meaningful, self-help fails to make sense as a tactic for women, a limitation imposed by a culture that does not value women as equals. Reading The Rambler as a self-help book offers us a better understanding of the importance of Johnson’s work and an appreciation of an under-studied genre. v Table of Contents Introduction . 1 Chapter 1: Samuel Johnson, Self-Help Literature, and the Conduct Book Tradition. .7 Chapter 2: The Rambler and Mastery of Common Life: The Discourse of Self-Help. .56 Chapter 3: Establishing the Profession: Self-Help for “Men of Study and Imagination”. .103 Chapter 4: The Rambler and Women. 156 Conclusion. .201 Works Cited . 204 Vita. .. .215 vi Introduction James Boswell, whose journals suggest a profound immunity to The Rambler’s moral exhortations, nonetheless praised the essays for providing “bark and steel for the mind.”1 He seems to have held The Rambler, among all of Johnson’s works, in especially high regard, turning to the text throughout his life (Sisman 21). Boswell took Johnson seriously as a guide to the conduct of life, as his response to the text when he grew depressed in Utrecht in 1763 indicates: “I have received most valuable instruction from his Rambler. Several papers seem to have been just written for me. I shall make out a cento (if I may use the expression) of philosophy for the happy conduct of life from his works. He is the ablest mental physician that I have ever applied to” (Boswell in Holland 28).2 However much he may have swerved from the lessons of Johnson’s precepts, Boswell read the papers intensively, seeking concrete instructions on how to live his life and benefiting, or at least claiming to benefit, from Johnson’s help with ordering his psychology (hence “mental physician”). In the Life, Boswell praises Johnson for helping to keep the reader’s soul out of “despondency and indifference” by “every where inculcat[ing] study, labour, and exertion” (1:213). Boswell’s responses to The Rambler rarely merit much attention, and his use of The Rambler as therapy and guide-book may strike us as strange. Many of Boswell’s contemporaries might have found his response odd as well, for The Rambler’s fame was sometimes closer to infamy because of its abstruse diction and complex syntax or its 1 “Bark and steel for the mind” is a proverbial phrase referring to quinine and iron; the italics are Boswell’s. 2 See also page 18, where Boswell describes the lessons he learned from specific Rambler papers. 1 failure to equal or improve upon The Spectator. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu attacked The Rambler for its lack of originality, complaining, “The Rambler is certainly a strong misnomer. He allwais plods in the beaten road of his Predecessors, following the Spectator (with the same pace a Pack horse would a Hunter)” (3:65-6; sic). The eighteenth-century rhetorician John Witherspoon was one of many who deplored Johnson’s style. He wrote in his Lectures on Eloquence (1768) that Johnson, whom Witherspoon identifies as “the author of the Rambler” with no mention of the Dictionary, “is so stiff and abstracted in his manner and such a lover of hard words that he is the worst pattern for young persons that can be named” (238). The voices against Johnson’s style were strong enough that even Boswell had to acknowledge the difficult style, though he loyally defends Johnson’s stylistic choices (Life 1:213-4). This chorus continued into the twentieth century, with James Clifford’s famous, delicate sentence serving as the best summary of how Johnson fails to live up to The Spectator: “If Johnson cannot ever quite catch the light touch of Addison and Steele, he does at times come close” (84). Defensiveness about Johnson’s style, however, soon gave way to arguments that maintained Johnson’s timelessness. Walter Jackson Bate’s influence still hangs heavily over criticism of The Rambler. Bate worked hard to ensure that readers appreciated Johnson’s greatness—hence the title of his work proclaiming Johnson not only as a major figure but as a major writer, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955). Bate’s book helped shape a decades-long critical project that emphasized Johnson’s greatness and set out to reclaim the writer Johnson from Boswell’s biography of a grand eccentric. Of course, Bate’s 2 work (including his biography of Johnson) most of all replaces Boswell’s quirky genius with a dark, tormented genius better aligned with twentieth-century expectations about artistic alienation. Harold Bloom, who claims Johnson as his “hero since boyhood,” similarly works to establish Johnson’s fundamental greatness, pronouncing that everything Johnson wrote “is essentially wisdom literature” (201-2; 184). Johnson’s prose can be difficult, and Johnson’s essays frequently have an impressive weight. But we have grown so used to reading Johnson as Johnsonian that we may be assigning a reading that the text does not always support. Boswell’s response to The Rambler—serious but practical—makes perfect sense if we consider that he might have been a member of the ideal audience: a young man with literary pretensions hoping to make his way in London and looking for practical instruction on how to live his life. Indeed, in this dissertation I suggest that Boswell’s response highlights essential elements of The Rambler that have long been overlooked. This dissertation offers a two-part argument. First, contrary to the critical tradition that assigns Johnson’s work the ponderous role of wisdom literature, I locate The Rambler within the tradition of conduct literature, the books that offer readers advice on making their way in the world. Johnson’s fealty to his title and the series epigraph (“Sworn to no master’s arbitrary sway, / I range where-e’er occasion points the way”) means that the essays present an odd mish-mash of topics. No description can adequately define the whole series, but to identify The Rambler as conduct literature does account for many of the essays that have long been overlooked (in large part because they never made it into anthologies) in addition to the more famous Rambler essays. Second, I argue that 3 Johnson breaks with past traditions of conduct literature to help create a new discourse of self-help. The first chapter offers a narrative history of conduct literature from the Renaissance into the nineteenth century. Conduct literature, the most popular name for books of advice that discussed codes of behavior for various audiences in society, saw a distinct shift in emphasis from courtesy to civility. Renaissance conduct literature focused on a courtly audience, defining a code of courtesy. But as literacy spread and societies become less centered around a monarch and court, the arts of being a participant in a society—a civilized society—became the focus of conduct writing, giving rise to the ethic of civility. Recent work, particularly that of the sociologist Jorge Arditi, has shown how etiquette arises as a discourse in eighteenth-century England.
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