Johnsonian News Letter

Volume LXVII, No. 1, March 2016

EDITOR FOUNDING EDITORS Robert DeMaria, Jr. James L. Clifford John H. Middendorf ASSOCIATE EDITORS Nancy E. Johnson PUBLISHER Joanne Long Peter Kanter

Published with the support of Vassar College

VICE PRESIDENT PROOFREADER DESIGN & PRODUCTION Dru Rigney Grant Sue Mangan SENIOR TYPESETTER TYPESETTING DIRECTOR Suzanne Lemke Jayne Keiser PRODUCTION MANAGER Jennifer Cone

The Johnsonian News Letter is published twice a year, in March and September. Sub­ scription rates are $12 per year. For subscriptions outside of the U.S. add $7 (U.S.) per year for postage. Send editorial submissions or inquiries to Robert DeMaria, Jr., Editor, Johnson­ ian News Letter, Department of English, Box 140, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, or e-mail the editor at [email protected]. We ask that submissions conform to the style of this journal and that, when possible, digital files (preferably in Microsoft Word, or RTF format) accompany printed articles. Send subscription orders or customer service inquiries to Cus­ tomer Service, Johnsonian News Letter, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855, or e-mail [email protected]. The material in this newsletter is Copyright © 2016 by the Johnsonian News Letter and its contributors, all rights reserved.

Cover art: William Powell Frith, Before Dinner at Boswell's Lodging in Bond Street 1769 (1868), Ashmolean Museum, detail. See p. 12 below.

Printed in the U.S.A. Table of Contents

From the Editor 4

Articles and Talks Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting Stephen Clarke 5

Johnsoniana Nel Gusto del Doctor Johnson Submitted by Brian Grimes 22 Dull as a Torpedo Submitted by Matt Davis 23 Message with a Flyer for a Play by James Runcie Submitted by Gordon Turnbull 24

Reports Johnson and Shakespeare at Pembroke College Corinna Readioff 25 The Johnsonians Dinner (USA), 2015 Peter Kanter 27 Yale Boswell Editions Notes Gordon Turnbull 29

Notes and Queries Who Annotated My Copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson? Tim Savage 36 Johnson and Procopius Thomas Kaminski 48

2 Puzzle The Samuel Johnson Dictionary Puzzle, No. 7 Gordon Turnbull 50

Book Review Jonathan Israel: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750; Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752; Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 Carey Mcintosh 53

Remembrance In Memory of John L. Mahoney Stephen Fix 63

O^CO/TCI A Call For Contributions The editors of the JNL invite contributions of notes, queries, Johnsoniana, and short articles on any and all matters regard­ ing Johnson and his circle (social, political, and intellectual). Contributions to the March issue are due 1 December; those for the September issue are due 1 June. From the Editor

t the kind invitation of Professor Giovanni Iamartino, a fellow Johnsonian, I spent three weeks at the Uni­ versity of Milan this autumn lecturing to undergradu­ ates on Johnson and Boswell, talking to some graduate students there, as well as in Pavia and Bergamo, and finally participating in a conference in Milan called "Writing the Body in Eighteenth- century Britain." It was a pleasure to interact with learned, culti­ vated professors and graduate students in that civilized part of the world, but the real challenge was in addressing the undergraduates and trying to interest them in Johnson. It is an ongoing challenge for me to interest American undergraduates in Johnson, but the challenge in Italy was different, as different as the two education­ al systems and the two cultures. I would say, however, that despite their great differences cultur­ ally, both groups are about equally apt to appreciate Johnson. I perhaps got the greatest response from Italians when I was talking about the pyramids in Rasselas, those monuments to human vanity, and comparing them to the purposeless, though gorgeous, towers built to display wealth and power in Pavia. Of one hundred or more such monuments only a handful remain, many having fallen, in a satiric collapse, on the heads of the builder's progeny. My American students, too, respond most to Rasselas, but it's life in the Happy Valley and "the wants of him that wants nothing" that most engage them. It's not surprising when you stop to think about it. Meanwhile, I can report and our correspondent (see p. 25 below) confirms that in the rarefied air of Pembroke College, Oxford, love of Johnson is thriving. Lynda Mugglestone, with help from Jim McLaverty, Tiffany Stern, and others, celebrated the 250th anniver­ sary of Johnson's Shakespeare. Johnson's room over the gatehouse, refurbished through a generous gift from Judy McCartin Scheide, was officially opened, and the celebration proceeded, like Johnson himself, from Pembroke College to Johnson's House in Gough Square. But most impressive of all at Pembroke was the cadre of young scholars learning Johnson and seeing him afresh. Oxford is special ground for the cultivation of Johnsonian studies, of course, but it was nevertheless heart-warming to find the young scholars spreading their future labors o'er Bodley's dome.

jtkxXikMt^j ta,. Articles and Talks

Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

ne of the achievements of Boswell's Life of Johnson was the way in which, through anecdote, incident and con­ versation, it realised the living presence of the corpo­ real, physical Johnson. It is no coincidence that the decades after the publication of the Life saw a proliferation of images of Johnson, prints of him and his friends, and of places associated with him. That in turn fed into the growing popularity in early Victorian England of narrative painting, paintings that told a story in scenes taken from contemporary life, from history, or from literature. The consequence of this was that in the fifty years from 1840, over twenty narrative paintings featuring Johnson were created. The roots of narrative painting lie with Hogarth's moral scenes of contemporary life and with the tradition of theatrical paintings, stage scenes that run from Hogarth through Zoffany to Samuel De Wilde and George Clint. Like theatrical stage scenes, narrative paintings usually involve a group of people engaged in some animated activity, and this may be in an indoor setting that occa­ sionally takes on something of the stage set. One of the most famous early examples of nineteenth-century narrative painting was David Wilkie's The Village Politicians, exhibited to great acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1806, soon after the artist's arrival in London. Wilkie never looked back, and went on to produce a substantial body of narrative and historical genre paint­ ings. The early- and mid-nineteenth-century taste for narrative paint­ ings has been linked to the rise of the middle-class art buyer, whether the rich northern industrialist who could buy what he wanted, or the modest suburban householder who might spend a few guineas on a painting to go over the drawing room fireplace. Rather than the Old Masters, they preferred "works painted for a bourgeois society like their own, still lifes, landscapes, and... senti­ mental, anecdotal, narrative genre subjects in which art came Johnsonian News Letter closest to reflecting their own experience and the everyday world they lived in."1 A glance at the list of exhibits at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, or the Society of British Artists, particularly from the 1840s, reveals many works of this kind. As for the artists who supplied this market, they were not necessarily the most eminent of nineteenth-century painters; not Turner, or Leighton, or Burne-Jones—though there is a curious, claustrophobic Rossetti drawing of Dr. Johnson at the Mitre in which one of the pair of young women with Johnson bears more than a passing resem­ blance to Janie Morris. After Wilkie, the most prolific Victorian nar­ rative artists were C. R. Leslie, Daniel Maclise, E. M. Ward, and W. P. Frith, with behind them a horde of lesser-known names. The works of these artists were circulated by engravings, and successful artists such as Frith could make as much money from the sale of the engraving rights as from the sale of the painting. Firms such as Thomas Boys of Golden Square and F. G. Moon of Threadneedle Street, Printsellers to Her Majesty, attracted orders for the promised mezzotint or lithograph with small printed descriptive pamphlets with a folding outline etching of the print; Moon's catalogue of c. 1840 offered prints after Wilkie, Landseer, Lawrence, William Collins, and others, with titles such as Cottage Piety, Guilt and Innocence, and Hide and Seek. Blackwood's Magazine noted in 1850 that "probably no subjects are more generally popular than those that may be styled the homely-historical; scenes in the private apartments of royalty; the personal adventures and perils of princes..." and it was a short step from imagined historical scenes to imagined scenes re-created from literature.2 Burns and Scott provided much material for narrative artists, but so did eighteenth-century authors, especially Gold­ smith, Thomson, and Sterne. Some fifty or so paintings from The Spectator alone were exhibited in the 1840s and 1850s, and there were countless tearful images of Sterne's Maria. But it was Gold­ smith, above all in The Vicar of Wakefield, who carried away the prize, with over one hundred paintings from the novel exhibited, of which no less than thirty were shown in the 1840s. In 1845 Punch suggested that in future a large room at Royal Academy exhibitions should be set aside for paintings based on The Vicar of Wakefield.3 Along with paintings from novels, the Victorian taste for genre and anecdote encouraged paintings of incident from authors' lives.

1 Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books: Art Season" Blackwood's Magazine 68 (1850), 83, and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 (1985), quoted in Altick, p. 63. p. 73. 3 Figures and Punch quotation from Altick, pp. 2 Frederick Hardman, "The Pictures of the 383,405,407.

6 Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

As the merest sample there were Pope Makes Love to Lady Wortley Montagu, with the spurned poet being mocked for his presumption, various images of Chatterton (including Henry Wallis's iconic deathbed scene), and Burns and Highland Mary—a print of this last image also featured in Moon's catalogue mentioned above, along with Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy accused of Deer Stealing. And then there were pictures of Johnson. Raymond Lister noted that "The narrative picture's raison d'etre is anecdote; it is, in fact, visual literature, and many of its themes were derived from literary sources."4 Boswell had supplied the anecdotes that the paintings of Johnson celebrated, and the vast majority of the paint­ ings were based on a passage taken from the Life. The earliest and perhaps the most famous narrative paintings of Johnson are both by Edward Matthew Ward (1816-1879). They are Dr. Johnson Perusing the Manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield (now Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Doctor Johnson in the Ante- Room of Lord Chesterfield (now Tate Britain), shown at the Royal Academy respectively in 1843 and 1845. Both of them were subse­ quently engraved, and both are familiar images—Johnson engrossed in Goldsmith's manuscript under the watchful eye of the author and the suspicious stare of his landlady and the bailiff: and Johnson glowering in Chesterfield's ante-room, surrounded by the unrewarded and the unworthy, while Chesterfield entertains the despised Colley Cibber. Both incidents were taken from the Life (1.416 and 256-7), though in the case of Chesterfield Boswell adds that Johnson assured him that there was not the least foundation of fact for it; Boswell tells the story so well, however, that it was an irresistible subject for a painter, and Ward contrasts the shadow of the ante­ room, where the supplicants wait, with the glow of light shining through the arch where His Lordship dispenses his bounty to the fortunate few. Johnson (whose likeness is taken from the Barry portrait of some twenty-five years later than the date of the supposed event) sits under a portrait of the Earl wearing his Garter Star, just as Goldsmith in the Johnson Perusing the Manu­ script painting sits under a framed picture of the Good Samaritan; viewers of Ward's paintings would be expected to spot the Hogar- thian touches, noting the difference in real worth between the impoverished Johnson and the worldly Earl in the one picture, and to see that it is Johnson acting as Good Samaritan in the other. A particularly telling painting of Johnson is Johnson at Cave's, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854 by Henry Wallis 4 Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Paintings (1966), p. 15. Johnsonian News Letter

(1830-1916)—the painter of Chatterton on his deathbed. It is based on an anecdote collected by Boswell of the indigent Johnson, writing at a desk behind a screen while a servant girl brings him a plate of food, being too ill-dressed and too proud to join a conversa­ tion beyond the screen in which his Life of Savage was being praised (Life, 1.163, n. I).5 The painting is carefully detailed, and catches the tension between Johnson's concentration and the unthinking look of the servant girl, who like Johnson works for limited reward. A number of the Victorian paintings featuring Johnson are lost and are known only from their having been included in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy or the Society of Artists, or by the print that was made from them. Morris Brownell has listed what he described as the "Subject Pictures of Johnson," a list including eighteen paintings and one print, from 1843 onwards.6 The print is an example of a painting now known only from its engraving: it is A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, engraved in 1851 by William Walker after a painting by James William Edward Doyle (1822-1892), a painter and illustrator who became an antiquary and genealogist. It shows nine members of The Club at table, with Johnson in an armchair talking and using his hands to emphasise a point, Burke facing him and concentrating intently, Reynolds with his ear trumpet, Boswell in attendance, Garrick staring out at the viewer, and Goldsmith at the far right, looking more question­ ing, while Reynolds's black servant waits at table. It is a Victorian re-imagining of the dynamics of Johnson's circle. Two further subject pictures not on Brownell's list are Doyle's version of Johnson Reading the Manuscript of The Vicar of Wake­ field, engraved in 1848, and a painting by Eyre Crowe of Boswell's Introduction to The Club (the fifth of the pictures illustrated later in this article), known by the print of it engraved in 1852. Other images on Brownell's list are simply lost: what did John Irvine's two pictures of Johnson and Richard Savage walking the Streets of London by Day and the same subject by Night look like? Or William James Grant's Johnson Carries Home the Poor Girl He Found Deserted in the Streets, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855? That came from a passage in Boswell (IV 321-2) in which he describes how Johnson carried an abandoned woman home on his back and had her nursed back to health: a gift to any painter. Recurrently, these paintings show Johnson as conversationalist, 5 This painting, in a private collection, is repro- 6 Morris R. Brownell, Samuel Johnson's duced as the dust jacket of Samuel Johnson: Attitude to the Arts (1989), Appendix, pp. 185-6. New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard Weinbrot (2014).

a Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting as moralist, as exemplar. Only one of them shows Johnson in the act of writing; we are here very much in the post-Macaulay terri­ tory of Johnson as Boswellian construct, a remarkable man, "regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion." As Edmond Gosse enquired in 1884, "Must we not admit now, at the close of a century, that it is practically impossible to read him?" 7 The Johnson that is celebrated in these narrative paintings is Johnson as moralist and mentor, a social being, but one whose achievement was brokered through Boswell's pages. This article features the Johnsonian pictures of two Victorian artists, William Powell Frith (1819-1909), and Eyre Crowe (1824-1910). Frith was one of the most celebrated and successful painters of the age, and his panoramas such as Derby Day and The Railway Station are among the most famous images of Victorian life. The son of a butler and cook employed at Studley Royal, York­ shire, he (most unusually) had to be persuaded by his father to take up the profession of artist: he was always pragmatic about his skills, acknowledging in his fascinating and often unintentionally revealing Autobiography "I know very well that I never was... a great artist, but I am a very successful one."8 On six separate occa­ sions in his career the Royal Academy were obliged to put a rail in front of one of his paintings to protect it from the crush of viewers at their exhibitions—an unprecedented achievement. A friend of Dickens and of successive editors of Punch, and well-integrated into London artistic life, Frith cultivated the art trade and his patrons (a group that included a good number of prosperous middle-class businessmen) with skill and acumen. It was recorded of him in the ditty of his friend Shirley Brooks, a Punch editor:

I paints and paints, hears no complaints, And sells before I'm dry. 9

Frith had no sympathy at all for the Impressionists, or for the Aesthetic movement at the end of the century, and he continued into old age to produce a combination of pictures of modern life and literary and historical paintings which showed little stylistic devel­ opment from his early successes, though the handling becomes looser. Both in his panoramas and his genre pieces, he excelled in 7 Thomas Babington Macaulay, review of 8 W. P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminis- Croker's edition of Boswell's Life, Edinburgh cences (1887), I, 7. Review (September 1831), rpt. in Samuel 9 Quoted in Sally Woodcock, "'Very efficient as a Johnson: The Critical Heritage, ed. James T. painter': The painting practice of William Powell Boulton (1971), p. 431; and Edmund Gosse, Fort- Frith", in William Powell Frith: Painting the Vic- nightly Review, 42 (December 1884), 780-786, at torian Age, eds. Mark Bills and Vivien Knight 784, quoted in John Wiltshire, The Making of Dr. (2006), p. 41. Johnson: Icon of Modern Culture (2009), p. 170.

9 Johnsonian News Letter the arrangement of small and large groups of people. He also, remarkably, managed by his wife and by his mistress (for whom he maintained a separate household) to father nineteen children: as the art historian and dealer Jeremy Maas was fond of saying, Frith seems to have liked crowds.10 His three Johnsonian paintings reproduced here, Before Dinner at Boswell's Lodgings in Bond Street, 1769 (1868), Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Siddons (1884), and Dr. Johnson's Tardy Gallantry (1886), come from a period when the popularity of narrative painting was beginning to fade, and the last two come from the end of Frith's active career, when he had ceased to concern himself with artistic fashions. All three of them show the social Johnson: the second and—particularly—the third, the awkwardly social Johnson. The portrayal of Johnson among a group of friends, often around a table, was a staple of Victorian narrative paintings of him, and Before Dinner shows Frith's mastery of the animated group. The picture was bought for £1,200 by Agnew, who promptly sold it to his customer Sam Mendel, a Manchester cotton and shipping magnate. The ever commercially-aware Frith gleefully recorded that at the sale of Mendel's collection following his death the picture was sold at Christies for £4,567.10.0, "the largest price that had been paid for the work of a living artist at that time."11 Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Siddons is more of a cameo piece, with just the two figures, held together by something of pathos in the contrast between the elegant young actress and the bulky but stooped and fading scholar. Frith then brings out the humour of Johnson's lack of self- consciousness in Dr. Johnson's Tardy Gallantry, where his awkward courtesy to Mme. de Boufflers is acted out in front of an amused and varied crowd. There was a much earlier image based on the same anecdote, though there is no reason to believe that Frith was aware of it. A copper engraving by Cruikshank after Barlow, showing Johnson handing Mme. de Boufflers into her coach outside the gate to the Temple (seen on the right in Frith's painting) had been published in 1795 in The Bon Ton Magazine; or, the Microscope of Fashion and Folly, accompanied by the anecdote from Boswell.12 Johnson is a somewhat surprising figure in that magazine's diet of tales of scandal and images of seduction: the same volume includes such titles as "The Voluptuary" and "Memoirs and Adventures of a Cour­ tesan."

10 Quoted in Christopher Wood, William Powell 12 The Bon Ton Magazine, No. 52 (June 1795), Frith: a Painter and his World (2006), p. 41. facing page 149. 11 Autobiography, 1. 389.

10 Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

Eyre Crowe was never as celebrated a painter as Frith, and in its obituary (13 December 1910) The Times commented that "he had long outlived any artistic celebrity he may once have had." His father was an author and journalist, and the young Crowe trained in Paris at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, with whom he travelled to Rome in 1843. Some ten years later he accompanied Thackeray, a close family friend, on his lecture tour of America; this trip resulted in Crowe's influential painting of Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (1861), and he also painted well-regarded images of labor, such as the foundrymen in The Shinglers (1869). But much of his work consisted of period narrative pieces. He spe­ cialized in subjects drawn from eighteenth-century literature, such as Defoe in the Pillory (1862), and Pope's Introduction to Dryden (1858), the latter set in Will's Coffee House with Dryden, sur­ rounded by the wits of the day, placing his hand on the young Pope's shoulder to mark the poetic apostolic succession. Of the three images by Crowe here reproduced, the first two are known only by their engravings. In a survey of Crowe's work The Art Journal noted that A Scene at the Mitre with Johnson, Boswell, and Goldsmith (1857), "a small but valuable picture if regarded only as a portrait-group of this celebrated literary triumvirate," was bought by Agnew for the purpose of engraving, while it con­ firmed that the second image, Boswell's Introduction to The Club, had been "well engraved, in mezzo-tinto, by Mr. W H. Simmons."13 The third and concluding image, his painting of The Penance of Dr. Johnson at Uttoxeter (1869) survives (along with Frith's Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Siddons) at Johnson's House at Gough Square. These six pictures are merely a sample, but they are consistent in the Johnsonian qualities that appealed to the Victorian buyer of paintings and, more especially, of prints. Johnson is depicted for his virtues, for sturdy independence, for integrity, for charity and pen­ itence: but above all it is the social Johnson and Johnson the con­ versationalist that most of these paintings celebrate. Familiarity with Boswell, from whose anecdotes so many of these images are drawn, clearly helped in appreciating the work of the artist. But as Henry Fuseli had noted many years before, narrative paintings from literature turned readers into spectators, and the spectators of these Victorian paintings of Johnson could enjoy the paintings without troubling to read Johnson at all.14

13 James Dafforne, "British Artists: Their Style 14 Eudo C Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli: and Character, with Engraved Illustrations. No. Selections from his Writings (1951), p. 204. 73—Eyre Crowe," The Art Journal (1 July 1864), 205-7.

11 Johnsonian News Letter

William Powell Frith, Before Dinner at Boswell's Lodgings in Bond Street, 1769 (1868). Oil on canvas, 41 x 63 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford WA1937.107

IJohnson] honoured me with his company at dinner on the 16th of October [1769], at my lodgings in Old Bond- street, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Garrick, Dr. Goldsmith, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Bickerstaff, and Mr. Thomas Davies. Garrick played round him with a fond vivacity, taking hold of the breasts of his coat, and, looking up in his face with a lively archness, compli­ mented him on the good health which he seemed then to enjoy; while the sage, shaking his head, beheld him with a gentle complacency. One of the company not being come at the appointed hour, I proposed, as usual upon such occasions, to order dinner to be served; adding, "Ought six people to be kept waiting for one?" "Why, yes, (answered Johnson, with a delicate humanity,) if the one will suffer more by your sitting down, than the six will do by waiting." Goldsmith, to divert the tedious minutes, strutted about, bragging of his dress, and I believe was seriously vain of it, for his

12 Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

mind was wonderfully prone to such impressions. Life, II.82-3

In his Autobiography (1.385), Frith explains that on re-reading Boswell in 1867 he thought that the scene described by Boswell before dinner at his lodgings would be worth painting because it contained so many historical and eminent characters. He was attracted by the image of Garrick "holding the lapels of Johnson's coat, the sage looking down on him with tender interest" (see front cover), and recalled that he went to great trouble to establish and then depict the difference in height of nearly a foot between the two men. Frith introduced a servant girl to announce the late arrival, and as two extrapolations of the text, showed Boswell sitting with his watch and Goldsmith placed before a mirror. He used the Nollekens bust as a model for Johnson but struggled with Garrick's likeness, and was frustrated to find shortly after finishing the picture that his bank manager had met as a customer Garrick's great nephew, who bore a strong family resemblance. The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868, and on 2 May The Times welcomed the picture as showing "a group of old friends, of whom we are never likely to weary," but complained that "Mr. Frith has taken too much of the uncouthness, ruggedness, and rustiness out of the Doctor's face, figure, and dress, smoothed the irregularities of Goldsmith's Irish physiognomy, and been content to give us only so much of Garrick's flashing eyes and flexible face as can be seen in profile." Had Frith's bank manager met his customer slightly earlier, perhaps more of Garrick's face would have been shown.

13 Johnsonian News Letter

William Powell Frith, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Siddons (1884). Oil on canvas, 77.7 x 60.5 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of Dr. Johnson's House

I do not exactly remember the time... that I was favoured with an invitation from Dr. Johnson, but I think it was during the first year of my celebrity [actually c. October 1783]. The Doctor was then a wretched invalid, and had requested my friend, Mr. Windham, to persuade me to favour him by drinking tea with him, in Bolt Court... Some weeks before he died I made him some morning visits. He was extremely, though formally polite; always apologised for being unable to attend me to my carriage; con­ ducted me to the head of the stairs, kissed my hand, and bowing, said, "Dear Madam, I am your most humble servant"; and these were always repeated without the smallest variation. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834), 1.237-39

14 Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

Frith, always searching for new subjects, was delighted to find in Campbell's Life of Mrs. Siddons the reference to the aged Johnson kissing her hand at the head of the stairs of his house in Bolt Court—"a capital subject" which was a success when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. He derived the likeness of Johnson again from the Nollekens bust, and from the Reynolds portraits. Through the open door there is a glimpse of Johnson's book-lined study, desk and chair and quill pen at the ready, and Frith makes great play with the contrast between the bulk of the ailing Johnson in his plain brown coat, and the elegant figure of the young Siddons, with a splash of white undercoat, and dashes of purple in her muff and hat and at her collar. Frith would often make copies or variants of his paintings, and this picture is an example of that practice. The original as exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884 is in the Schorr Collection, currently displayed at the Savile Club, London. It is larger (98 x 77 cm.) and differs from the Johnson's House version in a number of small details: the angle of the subjects' heads, the arrangement of Siddons's muff and her feet, the details of her dress, and the position of their hands.15

William Powell Frith, Dr. Johnson's Tardy Gallantry (Johnson and Mme. De Boufflers) (1886), oil on canvas, 118 x 101.5 cm. The Knohl Collection, Anaheim, California 15 The Schorr Collection of Old Master and Wright (2014), Cat. No. 122, 1.99-100, and Nineteenth-Century Paintings, ed. Christopher 2.429. Johnsonian News Letter

"When Madame de Boufflers was first in England [in the summer of 1763], (said Beauclerk,) she was desirous to see Johnson. I accordingly went with her to his chambers in the Temple, where she was enter­ tained with his conversation for some time. When our visit was over, she and I left him, and were got into Inner Temple-lane, when all at once I heard a noise like thunder. This was occasioned by Johnson, who it seems, upon a little recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality, and eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down the stair-case in violent agitation. He overtook us before we reached the Temple-gate, and brushing in between me and Madame de Boufflers, seized her hand, and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little shrivelled wig sitting on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. A considerable crowd of people gathered round, and were not a little struck by this singular appearance."

Life, II.405-6

Two years after the Siddons picture, Frith returned to Johnson and ungainly gallantry in his picture of him with Mme. de Bouf­ flers. Beauclerk's anecdote was ideal, providing a heightened example of the social exchange between awkward scholar and accomplished lady of fashion, brimming with lively detail, and even prescribing part of the artist's palette. It is the Siddons painting transformed to street theatre. Frith is sometimes criticised for becoming more mechanical in his later years, but this painting has all the sparkling finish and cleverness for which he was celebrated. There are the typical anecdotal touches—the poor barefoot girl selling matches imme­ diately facing but unnoticed by Mme. de Boufflers in her finery, the pet dog waiting for his lady in the coach, and also the shadows on the pavement at the base of the picture, suggesting that the viewer is just one of a group of people watching the incident from the front. Johnson is suitably ungainly and con­ trasted with the elegant figure of Beauclerk, standing erect and holding his cane.

16 Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

Robert Bowyer Parkes after Eyre Crowe, A Scene at the Mitre with Johnson, Boswell, and Goldsmith, published by Henry Graves & Co. (1860). Mixed method on chine colle, 56.5 x 65.5 cm. Trustees of the British Museum

My next meeting with Johnson was on Friday the 1st of July [1763], when he and I and Dr. Goldsmith supped together at the Mitre. I was before this time pretty well acquainted with Goldsmith, who was one of the brightest ornaments of the Johnsonian school. Goldsmith's respectful attachment to Johnson was then at its height; for his own literary reputation had not yet distinguished him so much as to excite a vain desire of competition with his great Master. Life, 1.417

Boswell's account of the evening spent in 1763 at the Mitre goes on to record the conversation as covering the possible disadvan­ tages of knowledge, the Scots writer Dr. John Campbell, and Charles Churchill's poetry. So far as can be judged from the print taken from it, Eyre Crowe's first essay in Johnsonian portraiture was not his finest. The setting looks somewhat staged, and the panelled tavern room contrives to look as much nineteenth century as eighteenth century. The imagery is perhaps rather obvious, with the animated Johnsonian News Letter

Johnson absent-mindedly dangling the paper in his left hand close to the fire, while a manuscript page lies on the floor balanced to the right by the books by Johnson's left foot. Boswell is shown as engrossed by Johnson's exposition, while Goldsmith, to whom it is directed, listens intently. Inevitably, Johnson is in his plain coat, contrasted with Goldsmith's showy splendour—note the dress sword hung up behind Goldsmith's seat. But perhaps the most curious aspect of this picture is the way in which the facial portraits seem slightly disembodied from the figures to which they are attached, as if Crowe concentrated on his sources—Reynolds in all three cases, with a touch of Bunbury for Goldsmith's face and of Barry for Johnson's—and then painted the costumed bodies to which the heads were attached. There is much careful detail, as in the serving girl's dress, and Crowe manages to produce an intimate, enclosed interior in which Johnson could hold forth, but the image—Crowe's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857—is trapped in its own time.

W. H. Simmons after Eyre Crowe, Boswell's Introduction to Dr. Johnson [Boswell's Introduction to The Club], published by Moore McQueen & Co.: Paris, Chez Francois Delarue (1862). Mixed method on chine colle, 62.5 x 80 cm. Trustees of the British Museum Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting

The gentlemen went away to their club, and I was left at Beauclerk's till the fate of my election should be announced to me. I sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate. In a short time I received the agreeable intelligence that I was chosen. I hastened to the place of meeting, and was introduced to such a society as can seldom be found. Mr. Edmund Burke, whom I then saw for the first time, and whose splendid talents had long made me ardently wish for his acquaintance; Dr. Nugent, Mr. Garrick, Dr. Goldsmith, Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Jones, and the company with whom I had dined [including Johnson, Topham Beauclerk, Lord Charlemont, and Sir Joshua Reynolds]. Upon my entrance, Johnson placed himself behind a chair, on which he leaned as on a desk or pulpit, and with humorous formality gave me a Charge, pointing out the conduct expected from me as a good member of this club. Life, 11.239-40

There is an inconsistency here between the subject of the painting and the title of the engraving taken from it. The engrav­ ing is entitled Boswell's Introduction to Dr. Johnson, as if it depicted that first meeting in the back room of Tom Davies's shop. But the group shown are members of The Club, to which Boswell was elected on 30 April 1773; Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick and Reynolds are immediately recognisable. The passage from which Crowe has taken the picture is Boswell's account of his introduction to The Club, and Crowe has faithfully recorded Johnson's pose, leaning on the back of a chair while addressing Boswell. This is the social Johnson, holding court, while Boswell leans forward, bowing with the exaggerated pose of an actor. Boswell's profile owes something to Sir Thomas Lawrence's pen and ink sketch of him drawn from memory (now Tate Britain), but without the double chin of later life, while Reynolds is recognisable from his ear trumpet rather than any particular fidelity of portraiture. Goldsmith's coat stands out as lighter than that of the other members, but only sight of the original painting, whose current whereabouts are unknown, would reveal whether this was the bloom-coloured coat of which he boasted before dinner at Boswell's Lodgings, as depicted in Frith's first painting.

19 Johnsonian News Letter

Eyre Crowe, The Penance of Dr. Johnson at Uttoxeter (1869). Oil on canvas, 182 x 184 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of Dr. Johnson's House

To Mr. Henry White, a young clergyman, with whom he now formed an intimacy, so as to talk to him with great freedom, he mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of having been an undutiful son. "Once, indeed, (said he,) I was disobedient; I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter-market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago, I desired to atone for this fault; I went to Uttoxeter in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable time bareheaded in the rain, on the spot where my father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expia­ tory." Life, IV.372-73

Of the six pictures here illustrated, Johnson's Penance best illus­ trates the moralizing strain of Victorian narrative painting. Here is Johnson, head bowed in remembrance of his youthful disobedience, his expiation played out in the varying reactions of the surround­ ing crowd. At the top left, on the Market Cross, are a pair of urchins representing Johnson's truancy; beneath them is a bookseller at his

20

. Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting stall with his arm round his attentive son—an image showing how Johnson should have attended his father. To the right are market traders quizzical, disdainful, or curious, and at the far right are the stocks, a reminder of where disobedience and truancy can lead. In the centre is Johnson, still and oblivious under a stormy sky. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869, and The Times reported on 16 June that "the absorbed look of the brave doctor as, true to his purpose and nerved by the feeling that prompted it, he allows the taunts and jeers of the market boors to go by him, and the touch of sympathy in the look of the country girls, are well conceived. The colour is not so agreeable." The image is transparently didactic in its themes of filial obedience, contri­ tion, and humility, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that while the figure of Johnson is in shade, the splash of light in the picture is centered on the white blouses and coat and apron that can be seen on the two country girls noted by The Times for their looks of sympathy. The likeness of the older Johnson is well drawn; he is as instantly recognisable as is the moral that the Victorian viewer was meant to take home with him to his family hearth. —STEPHEN CLARICE I would like to thank Celine Luppo McDaid and Sheila O'Connell for their help in the production of this article. Thanks also to the Ashmolean Museum, the Knohl Collection, the Trustees of the British Museum, and the Trustees of Dr. Johnson's House for per­ mission to reproduce images. References in the text to Life are to George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, eds., Boswell's Life of Johnson (193*4-50).

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21 Johnsoniana

Nel Gusto del Doctor Johnson

rom The Skin by Curzio Malaparte, trans. David Moore (The Marlboro Press, Marlboro, Vermont, 1988), p. 13:

I remember Jack's telling me that the gloomy, funereal, mysterious imagery of ancient Greece, so raw and barbaric, or, as he put it, Gothic, appealed to him less than the joyful, harmonious, clear imagery of Hellenistic Greece, which was so young, vivacious and modern, and which he described as a French Greece, a Greece of the eighteenth century. And when I asked him what, in his opinion was the American Greece, he replied with a laugh: "The Greece of Xenophon"; and still laughing, began to paint a remarkable and witty picture of Xenophon—"a Virginia gentleman"—which was a dis­ guised satire, in the style of Dr. Johnson, of certain Hel­ lenists of the Boston school. I note that some readable Italian translations of Johnson's output must have been available for Malaparte to assume they were familiar to his mid-20th century Italian audience. In Italian, from La Pelle (1949): Ricordo che Jack ebbe a dirmi che alle cupe, funeree, mis- teriose immagini della Grecia arcaica, rozza e barberica, o, com'egli diceva, gotica, egli preferiva le liete, armoniche, chiare immagini della Grecia ellenistica, giovane, spiritosa, moderna, che egli definiva una Grecia francese, una Grecia del diciottesimo secolo. E avendogli io domandato quale fosse, a suo giudizio, la Grecia Amer­ icana, mi rispose ridendo, "la Grecia di Senofontes": e ridendo si mise a disegnare un singolare e arguto ritratto di Senofonte "gentiluomo della Virginia," che era una larvata satira, nel gusto del Dottor Johnson, di certi ellenisti della scuola di Boston.

—SUBMITTED BY BRIAN GRIMES

22 Johnsoniana

Dull as a Torpedo

From William Germano in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The ongoing White House v. Congress struggle has recently involved the charge that one side wants to torpedo the other's plan. That sounds violent, even metaphorically speaking, but torpedo has a more compli­ cated usage history. In his account of Dr. Johnson's life, James Boswell reports the Great Cham's remarking that "Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs his faculties." The passage occurs in Boswell's report of events circa 1743, though the Life of Johnson doesn't get published until 1791. In the Oxford English Dictionary steeplechase, Boswell is pipped to the post by an almost identical turn of phrase from Gold­ smith's Life of Richard Nash, published 1762. Why "benumbed" by a torpedo? We don't think of torpedoes as sluggish, much less dim-witted. No sooner had I put down my copy of the Life (stock­ piled for summer reading) than I looked up the OED entry for torpedo. First, the torpedo is the electric ray, a flatfish with the capacity to deliver an electric charge (so not an eel), and to numb the hands (and presumably other anatomic localities) of the unwary. Our sense of the word torpedo turns on two seemingly antithetical objec­ tives: a) to blow up, and b) to render numb. Its root, however, is in the Latin torpere, to make dull, from which we get the English word torpor, meaning inertia or lethargy. Torpedo in the incendiary sense has been used at least since the 18th century to describe all sorts of things that go bang, including nonaquatic entertain­ ments like the exploding caps one might throw at the floor. So the OED's various citations map out a range of senses, from mines and bombs to smaller bits of devilry once common on playgrounds in a simpler age. Torpedo in the druggy sense dates at least to 1940. The OED cites Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely and the usage "yellow torpedoes," referring to a particular form of narcotic. More recently, Urban Dictionary points to torpedo as a joint "laced with pep." (By the way, one sense of torpedo missing from the OED is the torpedo sandwich,

23 Johnsonian News Letter also known as the sub or submarine. Made on a long roll, this torpedo is honor-bound to be overstuffed with comestibles, its objective only to satisfy, and maybe to render blissfully dull, too). So is the drug torpedo a means to be dulled or exploded? Or do the two senses converge? The electrify­ ing, stupefying touch—the contact that plugs in and unplugs at the same time—is the idea bridging the gap between flatfish, military weapon, and seriously bad weed. Whether the first writer who thought his brain was benumbed by his quill pen was Tom Birch or Richard Nash or someone else entirely (Aphra Behn?), one might find some small comfort in knowing that there is a long and not-so-secret history of writers paralyzed by the tools of their craft. You probably don't write with a quill, but you might now find yourself regarding your torpedo-shaped, click- top ballpoint pen as more nearly resembling the antago­ nist you always suspected it to be—equally ready to explode or to turn your brain to mush. Despite my title today, I don't think anyone really believes torpedoes are themselves dull things. And I'm pretty sure nobody has ever said, "Damn the flatfish, full speed ahead." Except maybe on drugs.

—SUBMITTED BY MATT DAVIS

Message with a Flyer for a Play by James Runcie

I have written a play about Dr. Johnson's Dictionary— A Word with Dr. Johnson which will run at lunchtimes, at Oran Mor in Glasgow from October 19-24 and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh from October 27-31. . . . If you could come that would be great. It lasts an hour and has jokes. Please do tell your friends to come too. Warning: future friendship may be conditional upon attendance.... As ever, James

—SUBMITTED BY GORDON TURNBULL

24 Reports

Johnson and Shakespeare

at Pembroke College

o talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar—Samuel Johnson.

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare, the 2015 Johnson & Shakespeare Conference was a splendidly convivial reflection of Johnson's own idea of scholarly business. Held in August at Pembroke College, Oxford, and organised by a committee that included Lynda Mug­ glestone, Tiffany Stern, Jim McLaverty, Robert DeMaria, Jr., Michael Bundock, and John Church, this was a memorable weekend of good scholarship, good company, and good food. A leisurely first morning allowed ample opportunity for dele­ gates to meet and exchange ideas, for the renewing of old friend­ ships and the forming of new ones. The business of the conference then began with an engaging panel exploring both Johnson's edition of Shakespeare and more general representations of Shake­ speare in the eighteenth century. Highlights of the day included a lively paper from Peter Sabor that explored William Kenrick's vit­ riolic commentary on Johnson's Shakespeare, and a richly illus­ trated discussion of visual depictions of Shakespeare as a nature poet by Fiona Ritchie. Following a delicious fish-and-chip lunch, Pembroke College's own Lynda Mugglestone commenced the after­ noon panel with a stimulating examination of lexigraphic and lin­ guistic elements of Johnson's Shakespeare. In a simultaneous panel John Dussinger and Ivan Lupic discussed the editorial method used in Johnson's Shakespeare, together with Johnson's textual relationship to other editors of Shakesepeare. Marcus Walsh then delivered a profoundly absorbing paper that proffered the mimetic quality of Johnson's footnotes as a foundation of essential theory and practice for later variorum editors.

25 Johnsonian News Letter

Delegates regrouped for the first plenary lecture, a discussion of Shakespeare's moral purpose investigated via Johnson's often con­ tradictory commentary, delivered by Joseph Roach in a delightfully dramatic five-act format. The doors were then opened upon a beau­ tiful and fascinating exhibition of exquisite Johnsoniana, most sig­ nificantly Johnson's own annotated copy of William Warbuton's 1747 edition of Shakespeare's Works (kindly on loan from the Hugh Owen Library at the University of Aberystwyth). Other exhibits included records of Johnson's time as an undergraduate at Pembroke College in 1728-9, and the manuscript notebooks in which Johnson kept the diaries and reflections from which his "Prayers and Meditations" were compiled. The afternoon continued with the launch of Lynda Mugglestone's splendid new work Samuel Johnson & the Journey into Words, an event sponsored by Oxford University Press and sparkling with champagne and the scent of crisp new paper. Following a scrump­ tious dinner, the remainder of the evening was enlivened by "Shakespeare's Garland," a hugely enjoyable concert of an assort­ ment of both well-known and rare Shakespearean musical settings, performed by the very talented Guy Newberry & Nicola Harrison. Shared with an audience that included members of the public as well as conference delegates, this was a pleasantly relaxed affair that formed the perfect end to a day of intellectual delights. Amongst the very many highlights of the second day was a paper by David Francis Taylor examining Johnson's literary response to the physical terrain of Macbeth, recorded in Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. On the same panel, Ella Elhoudiri delivered a powerful exploration of racial prejudice in Othello, and the effect of this Shakespearean influence upon Johnson's own perception of Eastern cultures. Equally engaging was the succeeding panel that focused upon print culture, and which incorporated a fascinating discussion of Johnsonian paratext by Paul Tankard. This was followed by a detailed delineation of the production of Johnson's Works of Shakespeare provided by Joseph Hone and Jim McLaverty, who also curated a complementary exhibition at the Bodleian Library that included textual material relating to both the publication of Johnson's Shakespeare and David Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee. During the afternoon, the Jubilee was further examined by Tiffany Stern, who delivered a memorable, and exquisitely illustrated, paper discussing the multifarious ephemera surrounding the event. Garrick's relationship with Johnson, and their mutual involvement with Shakespeare, was also excellently explored by Wendy Jones Nakanishi on the same panel. In the day's concluding plenary lecture, Jenny Davidson provided an in-depth

26 Johnson and Shakespeare at Pembroke College

examination of the variorum page in editions of Johnson's Shake­ speare, scrutinising both eighteenth century Scriblerian and schol­ arly contexts. Pre-dinner drinks were held in the mellow sunshine of Pembroke quad; the dinner that followed was a splendid three- course affair, served in the College's beautiful gothic hall. Philip Smallwood began the third day with a return to the idea of Shakespeare as a "poet of nature" in an excellent paper that examined Johnson in conjunction with Montaigne's philosophy. In a simultaneous panel, James Harriman-Smith delivered a fasci­ nating analysis of Elizabeth Montagu's critique of Johnson's Shake­ speare, and of the importance of Montagu's commentary within the broader context of Shakespearean studies. The business of the day concluded when the final plenary speaker, Henry Woudhuysen, delivered the Fleeman Memorial Lecture, presenting a highly evi­ denced demonstration of the narrowness of the range of texts which Johnson referenced in the production of his Dictionary. The afternoon took a more leisurely approach, with tours depart­ ing to Oxford's Painted Room (where Shakespeare is believed to have stayed whilst in Oxford), and to Johnson's undergraduate room at Pembroke College, recently renovated thanks to a generous donation from Mrs. Judith Scheide; later on there was also an enor­ mously popular guided visit to the College Wine Cellar. Still more memorable was a dramatic reading of some sections of Johnson's play Irene, directed and introduced by Fiona Ritchie, and featuring sterling performances by a host of delegates, including Peter Sabor and Wendy Jones Nakanishi. Yet perhaps it was the final event of the day which Dr. Johnson himself would have most relished: a delicious afternoon tea, with no limitations on the quantity of helpings! Full details of the speakers, abstracts, and other events can still be found on the conference website: https://johnsonandshake- speare2015.wordpress.com —CORINNA READIOFF o

The Johnsonians Dinner (USA), 2015

he Johnsonians celebrated the 306th birthday with their annual black tie dinner, held on 18 September 2015 in Providence, Rhode Island at the stately and comfortable Hope Club. The evening, hosted by John Scanlan, started with cocktails at 6 pm, moved to dinner at 7 pm and

27 Johnsonian News Letter finished with after-dinner drinks that lasted until 10 pm. The customary toasts punctuated the dinner, which was also enlivened by greetings from Johnsonian clubs from around the world, and officers of the Johnsonians gave their minutes (none in more deadpan style than our Treasurer, Todd Gilman). A moving part of the evening were the tributes to Johnsonians whom we had lost in the past year. This year there were three: Martin Battestin, John Mahoney, and Albrecht Strauss. The evening's after dinner speaker was Robert Folkenflik. In his talk, entitled "Johnson's Praise of Poetry," Professor Folkenflik proposed and contemplated a hypothetical anthology of Johnson's favorite poetry (not poems, for, as Folkenflik observed, Johnson "praises passages highly in many poems that he does not like as a whole"). We learned of Johnson's singular taste in poetry, where Johnson often went against the grain, but where he consistently praised poetry that cast a new light on familiar things, as seen in his high praise of a passage from Congreve's The Mourning Bride, where a woman's late night fear is compared to an ominous building: "he who reads those lines ... recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty." In his talk, Folkenflik gave us a (literally) striking image of Johnson that can be profitably applied to much of our hero's thinking and behavior; he called Johnson a "counterpuncher ... he might delight to concur with the common reader, but he certainly liked to take issue with unreflec- tive views, cliches and cant ..." as seen in Johnson's satire of the unoriginal critic Dick Minim, in Idler 60. The dinner's keepsake was a handsomely designed and produced pamphlet entitled "The Migration of the Round Robin, 1776)— 1887," written and guided through the press by James Caudle. It tells the story of a letter that Johnson's friends wrote to Johnson, urging him to rewrite his epitaph on Goldsmith. His friends felt that the epitaph, which was composed for the Poets' Corner of West­ minster Abbey, did not properly convey Goldsmith's poetic achieve­ ment; they also thought that it should have been written in English, not Latin. They signed the letter in a circle so that no man would appear as the primary signer. Johnsonians and guests totaled about 55 to 60. Many of us pro­ longed the evening's pleasures by walking a handful of blocks (and enjoying a lovely late summer evening) to a dimly lit and rather sticky bar where good Johnsonian talk lasted until well past midnight.

—PETER KANTER

28 Yale Boswell Editions Notes

Yale Boswell Editions Notes

ovelist, journalist, critic, prolific correspondent, Book- of-the-Month Club judge, and all-round remarkable woman of American letters Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958), took her bachelor's degree from the Ohio State Uni­ versity (in languages and literature, mainly French) and her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1904 with a dissertation on Corneille and Racine. She married, declined the offer of a faculty position at Case Western Reserve University, settled with her husband in Arlington, Vermont (where she had inherited an ancestral farm), raised two children, and published in all twenty works of fiction (under the name Dorothy Canfield) and eighteen works of non-fiction. Those totals represent a mere fraction of her literary output, and of her life's achievements. She introduced the child-rearing methods of Maria Montessori to the USA (A Montessori Mother, 1912), was a pioneering advocate of adult education (Why Stop Learning? 1927), spoke five languages, founded a Braille press and a children's hospital in France during the Great War, wrote several works of children's literature, and organized the Children's Crusade for Children during World War Two. A children's book award still bears her name. Eleanor Roosevelt, shortly before Fisher's death, referred to her as one of the ten most influential women in America. A selection of her letters was published as Keeping the Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, ed. with an Introduction by Mark J. Madigan, Foreword by Clifton Fadiman (1993). From this edition we learn that another of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's most notable characteristics was a res­ olutely low opinion of the worth of the writings of James Boswell. Fisher served conscientiously on the Book-of-the-Month Club's Selection Committee from the Club's beginnings in 1926 until 1951 (Madigan, Introduction, p. 5.) In 1950, when the recovery of Boswell's papers, and the imminent publication by Frederick A. Pottle of Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, were matters of intense excitement in the world's press, Dorothy Canfield Fisher remained unimpressed, as she wrote in a letter to Harry Scherman (one of the original founders of the BOMC). Dated 13 July 1950, from Arlington, the letter (#167, pp. 290-92) opens by asking Harry if he has seen the newspaper article she has enclosed. The article (reproduced by Madigan at p. 292, n. 1) is as follows:

There have been many lists of the best books—the ten best, the 100 best. etc. What about a list of the ten most

29 Johnsonian News Letter

boring? Editor Fon W. Boardman, Jr., of Pleasures of Publishing, a Columbia University Press trade letter, thought it might be fun to make one. He polled several hundred U.S. librarians, editors, authors, reviewers, and school-teachers, asking them to send him a list of the ten classics that have bored most people most. Last week Boardman announced the results. The ten that led all the rest: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Melville's Moby Dick, Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queen, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Richardson's Pamela, Eliot's Silas Marner, Scott's Ivanhoe, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust. Fisher, ignoring the other nine titles in this list, uses it to launch into an assault on Boswell's works—one which will gladden the hearts of the Boswellophobic school of Johnsonian studies. It is the lead-in to the main purpose of her letter, a campaign to dissuade the BOMC from choosing the soon-to-appear Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 as a selection. (But before any JNL readers with such hearts get too deeply gladdened, be warned that Fisher is here only warming up, and her denunciations eventually cast a very wide net; more on which below). Fisher offers this amusing list of the Ten Most Boring of canonical literary works as proof of what I have felt all my life, that Boswell's Life of Johnson is enormously over-estimated by professors of English Literature, and really is a bore to most people (as it certainly was to me). I send it [i.e. the newspaper article] along to you before the next meeting. I'll hardly venture there, for fear of tram­ pling too viciously on Henry's and Chris' toes, to say what I really think about this newly discovered Boswell's Journal. "Henry" and "Chris," whose enthusiasm for Boswell Fisher did not wish to disconcert at the next BOMC Selection Committee meeting, are Henry Seidel Canby (1878-1961) and Christopher Morley (1890-1957). Canby, born in Wilmington, Delaware, entered Yale in 1896, graduated with a degree in mining engineering, but switched his interests to English literature (thus, we might observe, traveling in the reverse of the direction that now domi­ nates current higher educational thinking). He took his Ph.D. in 1905, and thereafter taught in the Yale English Department, where he was its first specialized Americanist. In the early 1920s he turned more fully to literary journalism, editing the Literary

30 Yale Boswell Editions Notes

Review of the New York Evening Post, then with Morley and others established the Saturday Review of Literature, later called the Saturday Review, of which he was the inaugural editor. Morley, born in Haverford PA, was the son of English immigrant parents. He graduated from Haverford, valedictorian, then studied for three years at New College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship. In his prolific career as essayist, poet, journalist, editor, and novelist, he published over a hundred books. His 1939 bestseller novel Kitty Foyle was adapted as a movie the next year, and won Ginger Rogers, in the title role, the Academy Award for Best Actress. Morley in fact would go on to contribute a "Preface" to Pottle's edition as published by McGraw-Hill, described later by Pottle as "highly readable but in various respects inaccurate" {Pride and Negligence, p. 205). Fisher gives Scherman her reasons for not sharing the passion­ ate enthusiasm of Henry and Chris for Boswell's 1762-63 journal: I don't think it any more ostensibly outspoken about sex than many other books we have all read, both for the Book-of-the-Month Club and just in general, in 18th century and in 20th century English. Certainly it is not any more clinical-frank about sex than many other English books of its time—Tristram Shandy for instance. Tristram Shandy is really often very funny, and penetrating, while the Boswell is just dismally mediocre (seems to me). What Fisher says here (misusing the word "ostensibly") about sex in Boswell's 1762-63 journal is, in spite of the reputation the journal continues to have in the public imagination, actually per­ fectly accurate. But, sexy or not, I think it terribly dull. The last 30 pages after Dr. Johnson comes in are the only ones in all that pile which have anything to say—and we have already had a good deal of that in the original Boswell's Johnson. Fisher then discharges volleys at the entire British eighteenth century: I have read Chris's introduction [i.e. the "Preface" by Morley, just mentioned] with its whoop-it-up, unques­ tioning acceptance of the tradition that what happened in that special circle in London and England at that time, is somehow, of importance to history, to literature, to the understanding of human nature. And

31 Johnsonian News Letter

I feel just like the child in the Hans Christian Anderson story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" listen­ ing with open-mouthed astonishment to the people praising to the sky something which his own eyes tell him is not there at all.

In that period of history, England seems to me (and to everybody else I ever heard of except some English people and American professors in college English Departments) at the lowest ebb—unimaginably corrupt, financially and politically (a good thing for us Americans or we never would have staggered through to a victorious end of our Revolution). It was in the trough of the wave as to literature with a mighty period before it and coming after it, and really just about bankrupt as to creative thought, scholarship, and art. This is at a time when France and Germany were rich with real, sure-enough giants of the intellect, real master artists, whose thought and work had a lasting influence on the development of the human spirit.

About the years of this ebb-tide of civilization in England, we already know all we need to know, through lots of writers—Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith (minor) and Fielding! (major). They knew how to write, although none of them except Fielding was of first-rate ability. They are still readable today. They have wit, taste, zest. They give a complete picture of the times to the last button. Boswell's Life of Johnson adds something to this, gives a picture of a British oddity (Was Dr. Johnson anything more than this?) but half of it would do as well as the whole bulk.

To add to that, more Boswell saying tiresomely over and over what has already been told to us in other books, about a period of no importance anyhow, and about a shallow-natured, trivial-minded man— Fisher, having wrought herself up to this pitch, leaves the author of these Notes a bit uncertain about whether the "shallow-natured, trivial-minded man" is Boswell or Johnson. (It seems to be Johnson, meaning that Fisher cannot have read any of his actual writings.) She breaks her paragraph with a Shandy-esque piece of

32 Yale Boswell Editions Notes punctuation, a dash, the mark of both interruption and continuity, pauses for breath, then returns to her immediate purpose (of asking Harry to speak for her at the BOMC meeting and, for all the reasons just given, dissuade Henry, Chris, and the others from choosing Pottle's edition of Boswell's journal as a selection). Con­ tinuing with her flashes of postwar American pride, she skewers what she sees as the residual early twentieth-century tweedy academic and middlebrow Anglophilia of the men of the committee: Well, I didn't mean to go on quite so energetically. But I'll send it to you anyhow because I don't want to say anything like this at the meeting. It really wouldn't be decently courteous to do so, to an ex-professor of English like Henry, and somebody like Chris who has a strong and perfectly natural family tradition (the old colonial tradition) that whatever is British, is by defi­ nition, of importance to Americans, although we stopped being British colonials some 170 years ago.

What I hope is that the others will just decide early in the discussion that the Boswell Journal will not do, for one and another reason. Then I won't have to say a word of my feeling that any more Boswell than the world already has can't possibly interest anybody but History-of-English Literature fans like Chris or pro­ fessors of English like Henry. Except for the mystery- story quirk of the way it has been hidden all these years and just come to light. A very mildly interesting item it seems to me. Pottle's edition was published in New York by McGraw-Hill on 6 November 1950 (slightly later by Heinemann in the U.K.). Fisher's hopes, in the event, were partly gratified, and partly not. The BOMC Selection Committee met, and chose Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 as a "Dividend" book—that is, a free book for BOMC members. As is now well-known, her main expectation was thoroughly defeated: Pottle's edition shot into bestseller lists around the world, was translated into several languages, and McGraw-Hill recouped, with the sales of this first in what would become the thirteen-volume Yale trade edition of Boswell's journals, all the money it had spent (supplementing the generous grant to Yale by Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation) for purchase of the Boswell papers. JNL readers may already have encountered this letter (and if so, it is offered here in the belief that men, by whom Johnson meant

33 Notes and Queries

Who Annotated My Copy of Boswell's Life

of Johnson?

ong after my father's only sibling, Aunt Mary, had died and her property disposed of in an auction and house sale, a banker box arrived at my parents' house, marked "Savage." In it were memorabilia and artifacts of my family collected by my aunt over the years, mostly consisting of photo­ graphs. But also in this box was a large book slipcase, containing two small (much smaller than the slipcase warranted) and dilapi­ dated books. The paper was old, the s's long, but one book still had its half-title page: "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D." Cracked leather spines remaining on these books indicated they were volumes 2 and 3. No sign of a volume 1.1 know why the photos of my family were returned, but why these old books? All I could figure was the sellers of the house and contents couldn't sell them, and/or when they ran across the name "Savage" printed in them (poet Richard Savage) they decided to ship them to me, Tim Savage. A few years later I looked more carefully at the books, and not only figured out they were from a three-volume set (volume 3 wrapped up the Life), but also discovered they had an extensive number of marginal notes written throughout them. Looking at them again more recently (after reading a "Masterpiece" article, "'Life of Johnson' (1791) by James Boswell," in the 9/12/15 Wall Street Journal), I realized the comments weren't only the reader's critiques of what was printed in the books, but also contained insightful, and what appeared to be confidential (or at least somewhat privileged), information. This raised two questions: how did my aunt come by these books? and who wrote these marginal comments? My grandmother (mother of my father and aunt Mary) was an avid reader and book collector. During the depression her family had money (from lumber), and collecting was certainly a buyer's market. Mable Savage pored over catalogues from the likes of book­ sellers James F. Drake and Philip C. Duschenes in New York. (I have held on to three of her Drake catalogues from 1931-34.) When my grandfather died nine years after my grandmother, her book collection was divided, seemingly willy-nilly, between my Notes and Queries father and his sister. A number of sets got split up. Some of grand­ mother's books that ended up in my possession include Victorian- era authors (Dickens, Barrie, Carroll, etc.), and from the Johnson era: Butler's Hudibras (1710, two small volumes); Addison's Works (1721, four volumes); Potter's Aeschylus (1777, 1 big volume); Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1781, four volumes). The only book from my grandmother's collection sold by my family was a very small (116mm x 84mm) "Book of Hours," an illu­ minated manuscript from the northern Netherlands (c. 1430). I don't know how much my grandmother paid for it (she had a secret code penciled in the back of her books to keep those specifics from my grandfather), but I do remember that the bookseller's descrip­ tion was only two sentences long. Before her death my aunt gave this little book to my father to figure out what to do with it, her thought probably being this historical little missal might better belong someplace other than her bookshelf or a safe deposit box (where it was kept). Sotheby's, in their 1996 auction description for this book stated that my collector grandmother had "probably" pur­ chased it "from A.S.W Rosenbach in the early 20s...." And as I recall, it did end up in a museum.

Due to her collecting prowess, I'm of the opinion that my grandmother probably knew or suspected the provenance of these two small, coverless volumes of Boswell's Life. For everyday reading, she also had a large, three-volume edition of the Life from 1901 edited by Arnold Glover (J.M. Dent & Co. / McClure, Phillips & Co.). A recent Internet search for three-volume editions of the Life turned up one printed in Ireland (R. Cross, Dublin, 1792, avail­ able from a seller for $675). Why reprint these books in Ireland, I wondered, only a year after the originals came out? I posed this question in an e-mail to Gordon Turnbull and James Caudle of Yale University's Boswell editions.

On Sep 17, 2015 James Caudle kindly replied:

Since Ireland was not part of a United Kingdom with Great Britain in 1792, the Kingdom of Ireland was exempted from the copyright law that governed England and Scotland from 1707. That meant that Irish publish­ ers could reprint books from Britain without violating British copyright law, as long as they kept the books in Ireland. Now, as happens, some of these books came across either as smugglers' cargo (to be sold in Britain 37 Johnsonian News Letter

illegally) or in house-moves. But it might suggest the owner lived in Ireland.

My volumes 2 and 3 are definitely from a "bootleg" Irish edition, as the "Marginalist" says so. In volume 2 on page 79 (1773 ^Etat. 64) he (or she) corrected the misspelled "vale pye" to "veal pye" and made this comment: "NB. This is an Irish edition—they pronounce Veal—vale!—" Funny — but of course it doesn't mean the marginalia writer was Irish; an Irish person likely would have referred to themselves as "we" instead of "they." And backing up this supposition is another marginal reference. Vol. 2, p. 210 (1775/66) contains the text, "BEAUCLERK: 'The ballad of Lullabalero was once in the mouths of all the people of this country.'" The marginal comment reads, "Irish? Think it is an Irish Ballad." The marginalist thought right. According to The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time by W. Chappell (1855), "Lilliburlero and Bullen-a-lah are said to have been the words of distinction used among the Irish Papists in their massacre of Protestants, in 1641." The Irish connection and clear indication that the marginalist shared a birthday with Thomas Percy (see note on vol. 2, p. 81 below), the English bishop of Dromore in County Down, led Bob DeMaria to suggest he was Percy. Unfortunately, the marginalist also indicates that he was born 23 years after Percy by marking his birthday, 13 April 1773, in the text and indicating that he was then 20 and starting his 21st year. me **' c my Lire." He mentioned to iy circum/f m-c-, whli mt h rt "• April i .•,* he an.I I): ied at General Ogletborpe't. m the col­ our people was nine to In- VSON; Place, I doubt the f.ic! | 8 m,,nyial| mcninK.n.],nJ were. TTTK, I .,.,. X t our people to be climiniH,. 'K'oJi^iiry; for. Sir, con. >a« a proportion of oui £•.. OBI foldiery, foC ho live on fi-^p wll apply tolfc to "»*.ply them,

38 Notes and Queries

In addition, in volume 3 he makes comments on Percy, and the identity of the marginalist remains a mystery.

From the marginal comments in these two books I've selected some and arranged them below in the following loose order accord­ ing to what they reveal about the writer.

1. Wasn't a Contemporary 2. Knew Possibly Well-known Rumors / Hearsay 3. Knew Possibly Not Well-known Rumors / Hearsay 4. Knew Possibly Insider Information 5. The Marginalist's Learning

The first section includes marginal comments that indicate the age and possible general location of the commentator as well as comments that indicate the margin writer wasn't a contemporary of Johnson and his "rat pack." The second section includes comments that many people may have been familiar with in the time period of the comment writer: 1802-1811 (most seem to have been written in 1806). The third section's comments correct or refute Johnson's opinion of people, places, and things; here the comment writer would seem to be describing people and events based on first-hand knowledge. The fourth section includes comments about money—pensions, inheritances, estate values, etc. Here the comment writer seems to know quite a few financial facts that probably were not readily available to the general populace. The fifth section comprises comments that reveal that writer's literary taste or learning. It should be noted that a great number of the marginal comments are merely little outbursts—a simple "ha ha," "nee hee," or "humph." Also included were a number of "pasha" or "p'sha" expletives. There are also many instances of "fiddle cum faddle," "tiddly dum," or just a simple "fiddle!" It's also noteworthy that almost 25 percent of volume 2's 605 pages (pp. 7-157 (1771-75) have minimal marginalia; a few "ha ha" and "humph" comments, not much else. In later pages Boswell's name came under diminutive abuse with the use of "Poor Bozzy!", "Oh Bozzy!", etc. For example the text on 3.55 (1778/69) reads, "[Boswell] But surely, a moderate use of wine gives a gaiety of spirits which water-drinkers know not." The comment is "Right, Bozzy!"

39 Johnsonian News Letter

Johnson himself came under extreme marginal fire with numerous sharp epithets of "sour crout," and "the bear!" Other comments consist of small icons ("emoticons," in today's parlance) such as an angry or frowning eye, or sometimes a fancy, ruffle- cuffed hand pointing at a selected passage.

1, Wasn't a Contemporary When the old radio show's Baron Munchausen was questioned about the veracity of one of his outrageous stories, his tag-line response was always, "Was you there, Charlie?" As the birthday marginalia cited above show, the writer was thirty or so years too late to be present at the height of Johnson's tenure in English society. And, in addition, the following marginalia show that this person had never heard Johnson speak.

2.192 (1775) Text: Johnson's conversion... keep in mind his deliberate and strong utterance. Comment: I, that never heard him, cannot "keep in mind" anything of his peculiarities, but his "No Sir."

2.81 (1773) Text: On Tuesday, April 13, he and Dr. Goldsmith and I dined at General Oglethorpe's. Comment: [see plate 1 above] . . . my birth-day. Ah, sweet 21! How easy! How careless! How... ignorant!! of the future!

The marginalist apparently would have been 50 years old in 1802, when marginalia was first penned in these books (as another note indicates).

2. Knew Possibly Well-known Rumors / Hearsay Boswell edited, expanded, and corrected two subsequent editions of his Life, the second one being published in 1799. Much of the fol­ lowing information about the characters in the Life, if not known when the volumes were originally published, no doubt had become common knowledge by the time this marginalia was written in the early nineteenth century (1802-11). For instance, apparently many people knew which British lady modeled her life on Messalina, the morally-questionable wife of Roman Emperor Claudius:

2.480 (1777) Text: Countess of Harrington... Comment: called, the "Stable Yard Messalina." Notes and Queries

2.83 (1773) Text: and sat with me, drinking tea a second time, till a late hour. Comment: I wonder, he was never dropsical. Later comment: Error (1808), he was, late in life!

2.181 (1775) Text: ... the Americans were incited to resistance by European intelligence... On the original contrivers of mischief, rather than on those whom they have deluded, let an insulted nation pour out its vengeance. Comment: His friend Burke.

2.182 (1775) Text: ... but, by Dr. Franklin's rule of progression, they will, in a century and a quarter, be more than equal to the inhabitants of Europe. Comment: Now 1806. They have, so far "progressed." Text:"... but what can be the hope of quiet, when factions hostile to the legislature can be openly formed and openly avowed?" Comment: the factious Lords Chatham Camden & Duke of Richmond! etc etc etc.—

2.191 (1775) Text: At Mr. Beauclerk's, where I supped, was Mr. Garrick... "the Adams are as liberal-minded men as any in the world: but I don't know how it is, all their workmen are Scotch." Comment: He had employed the "Adams"—as architects—on his buildings in the Adelphi etc.. [Adam brothers John, Robert, James, and William] 2.193 (1775) Text: Mrs. Thrale was all for mildness and forgiveness, and, according to the vulgar phase, making the best of a bad bargain. Comment: "The Lady," chose to take that side of the question — she afterwards married her daughter's music master, Signor Piozzi.

2.229 (1775) Text: We talked of a young gentleman's marriage with an eminent singer, and his determination that she should no longer sing in public... Comment: Sherridan [sic] Married Miss Linley.

2. 230 (1775) Text: It was questioned whether the young gentleman, who had

41 Johnsonian News Letter not a shilling in the world, but was blessed with uncommon talents... Comment: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

2.314 (1776) Text: Burke is an extraordinary man. Comment: Burke was a "scoundrel," i.e., a Whig! Text: Now we who know Burke, know, that he will be one of the first men in this country. Comment: Not in your time & not till he became an apostate & pensioner.

2.358 (1776) Text: "My knowledge of physic, (he added,) I learnt from Dr. James, whom I helped in writing the proposals for his Diction­ ary..." Comment: A quack doctor! vide "James's Powder."

2.377 (1776) Text: I know not with what truth, that a certain female political writer, whose doctrines he disliked, had of late become very fond of dress, sat hours together at her toledo, and even put on rouge... Comment: Mrs. Macauly [sic]— soon after married to Graham, a lusty young Scotchman!

2. 551 (1777) Text: Mr. [Henry] Dundas's Scottish accent, which has so often in vain been obtruded as an objection to his powerful abilities in parliament. .. Comment: Now (1806) Lord Melville — the famous "wha wants me."

3. 24 (1778) Text: Talking of Miss X, a literary lady, he said, "I was obliged to speak to Miss Reynolds, to let her know that I desire she would not flatter me so much." Comment: Hannah Moore

3.43 (1778) Text: Talking of a recent seditious delinquent, he said, "they should set him in the pillory..." Comment: Probably Home Tooke. Text: And I mentioned an instance of a gentleman who I thought was not dishonored by it [the pillory]. Notes and Queries

Comment: Probably Bingley the printer, or Dr. Shebbaire [sic].

3.47 (1778) Text: JOHNSON. "A few sheets of poetry unbound are a pamphlet, as much as a few sheets of prose." MUSGRAVE. "A pamphlet may be understood to mean a poetical piece in Westminster-Hall, that is, in formal language." Comment: Dr. Musgrave had written a pamphlet accusing the Duke of Bedford of being paid by France, in making the peace of 1763.

3.79 (1778) Text: JOHNSON. "A man is chosen because of the shire, not the less for having debauched ladies." Comment: M. W Ridley Text: BOSWELL. "What, Sir, if he debauched the ladies of gentle­ men in the county will not there be a general resentment against him?" Comment: Sir Thomas Turton

3.98 (1778) Text: "You see that Dr. Percy is now Dean of Carlisle; about five hundred a year, with a power of presenting himself to some good living. He is provided for." Comment: Aye aye! "The old House" of Northumberland for that!

3. Knew Possibly Not Well-known Rumors / Hearsay Certain comments about people, however, seem to come from first-person familiarity, and not third-person sources.

2.92 (1773) Text: [concerning a suicide] JOHNSON. "It was owing to imaginary difficulties in his affairs...." Comment: Poor Dan Lestingwell! now 24 Jun 1806

2.159(1775) Text: Langton is here... a worthy fellow, without malice, though not without resentment. Comment: & often roused.

2.179 (1775) Text: "though Mr. Beauclerk was in great pain, it was hoped he was not in danger." Comment: a profligate, contemptuous fellow! Un-pitied by any.

43 Johnsonian News Letter

2. 200 (1775) Text: ... he heard he was the greatest man in England,—next to Lord Mansfield. Comment: I sincerely believe Mansfield to be a more just, un- prejudicial man than Johnson.

2.208 (1775) Text: Beauclerk... said, that "he could not conceive a more humiliating situation than to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies." Comment: Excessive vanity amidst good Humour. "Tom" was in a dependant state, which is the only circumstance in his character that could make his applause "humiliating" to a self important being. A learned and sensible man; remarkably friendly, good humored, and unassuming. Beauclerk himself was a man of the most contemptible character—for Debauchery, and died a wretched death.

2. 271 (1775) Text: How does the young Laird of Auchinleck? I suppose Miss Veronica is grown a reader and discourser. Comment: Poor girl! She is dead & gone (1806).

2.343(1776) Text: Talking of melancholy... Sir Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round. Comment: It was just he died very unhappy!

3.113 (1779) Text: There are, indeed, few who are able to drink brandy. Comment: Sir Ashton Lever drank brandy like wine, in a pint decanter.

4. Knew Possibly Insider Information

Upon reading one of this margin writer's comments that included how big someone's pension was, on 17 September 2015 Gordon Turnbull of Yale e-mailed: "As you suggest, the marginal annotator seems indeed to have been a contemporary, with a pretty detailed knowledge of some of those named, and a particular famil­ iarity, it seems, with money and personal finances." I can't imagine such "inside information" being common knowledge, even years after many of the key players were in their "long boxes." The fol­ lowing is a listing of marginalia invoking hard currency (pounds and pence).

44 Notes and Queries

2.181 (1775) Text: But should it be so when the architect gives his skill and labour gratis? Comment: i.e. £300. p. annum.

2.185 (1775) Text: He [Johnson] had been applied by administration to write political pamphlets, and he was even so much irritated, that he declared his resolution to resign his pension. Comment: A paltry 300 pounds!

2.217 (1775) Text: "[Lord Bute] turned out Dr. Nichols ... to make room for one of his countryman .... He had * * * and * * * to go on errands for him. Comment: Wedderburne and Dyson

2.352 (1776) Text: ...it is much better that the law does not restrain writing freely concerning the character of the dead. Comment: The relatives of Earl Cowper recovered dam[ages] (I think 1000 pounds) of Topham, the editor of "this World," a London newspaper for defamation of the deceased's character—charging him with Sodomy.

2.355 (1776) Text: Mr. Thrale is to go, by my advice, to Mr. Jackson, (the all- knowing,) and get from him a plan... Comment: Familiarly termed "omniscient Jackson,"! he died rich, worth £200,000.

2.411 (1776) Text: After dinner we had an accession of Mrs. Knowles, the Quaker lady, well known for her various talents... Comment: Animal magnetism, among em.

2.412 (1776) Text: Johnson shewed visible signs of a fervent admiration of the corresponding charms of the fair Quaker. Comment: Her husband, the "Doctor," was a rough beast.

2.413 (1776) Text: This evening he exclaimed, "I envy him his acquaintance with Mrs. Rudd."

45 Johnsonian News Letter

Comment: An artful little witch who led two simple men to the gallows.

2.500-501 (1777) Text: The day was fine, and we resolved to go by Keddlestone, the seat of Lord Scarsdale, that I might see his Lordship's fine house "One should think (said I) that the proprietor of this must be happy."—"Nay, Sir, (said Johnson) all this excludes but one evil— poverty." Comment: and not that, for Lord S. was deeply involved by building this House.—his patrimony was moderate: £9,000 p. annum. His steward (an attorney), was said to have acquired an estate of £3,000 p. annum!!! out of his stewardship.

2.505 (1777) Text: "... when Goldsmith was dying, Dr. Turton said to him "... is your mind at ease?" Goldsmith answered it was not. Comment: He died £2,000 in debt! Text: Mrs. Butter went with me to see the silk-mill which Sir Thomas Lombe had had a patent for, having brought away the con­ trivance from Italy. Comment: He stole it.

2.600 (1778) Text: Lord Shelburne told me, that a man of high rank, who looks into his own affairs, may have all that he ought to have... Comment: Lord S. himself, though he had 30,000 pounds per annum, anticipated his income.

3.155 (1780) Text: Yesterday's evening was passed at Mrs. Montague's.. . . Comment: Property'd of an estate of £8,000 p. annum.

3.164 (1780) Text: To this proposal they agreed; upon which Mr. Akerman, having first made them fall back from the gate, went in.... Comment: Akerman was a man of taste & of abilities, superior to the generality of jailers—but after his death, his son (doubtless through the prevalence of example ... of thieves, who he was born amidst)—was detected in picking a pocket—and transported to Botany Bay. The old man died rich and respected. Notes and Queries

3.253 (1781) Text: "We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dream of avarice." Comment: Sr. Richard Arkright slaved for a penny till he was 40 years old, yet died at 63 worth half a million! Thrale with a great and prosperous business all his life—did not leave 200,000 pounds.

5. The Marginalist's Learning Our margin writer seems to have been educated and fairly well read. A number of comments were about the role of religion in society. He or she also included part of a poem by Edward Young, as well as Shakespeare. But it's interesting to note that the poem is misquoted, and the line from Shakespeare, although popular at the time, wasn't actually written by the Bard.

2.53 (1772) Text: JOHNSON. . . .Where is religion to be learnt but at an Uni­ versity? Comment: Then religion is a science, only to be understood & subsequently practiced by literary men.

2.79 (1773) Text: "Campbell is radically right; and we may hope that in time there will be good practice." Comment: "at 40, man chides the infamous delay, at 50, resolves & re-resolves and dies the same." Young's NT's

2. 406 (1776) Text: "Off with his head! So much for Alyesbury." Comment: "Off with his head, so much for Buckingham!"— Shakespr. Aylesbury is in Buckinghamshire. [The line is from Cibber's adaptation of Richard III.]

Will the identity of the writer of all this marginalia ever be known? Perhaps not. But the fact that this person kept pouring through these books—in 1802, 1806, and again in 1809 and 1811— certainly indicates the strong hold these words and the people they describe have held on so many people for so long.

—TIM SAVAGE

47 Johnsonian News Letter

a^^eo

Johnson and Procopius

n the last JNL ("Johnson's Anec-dotage," pp. 43-44), Barry Baldwin wondered "if Johnson was in fact the author of the paraphrase 'Account of the Plague by Pro­ copius,'" which appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1743 (pp. 425-27). He added that I had accepted the attribution in my book on Johnson's early career. I'm sorry to say that Prof. Baldwin has mistaken my meaning, for I merely intended to suggest that Johnson, acting as editor, probably added the headnote introducing the "Account." At the time, in addition to writing the Parliamentary Debates for the magazine, Johnson was providing Edward Cave with editorial assistance, which included, among other things, proposing material for publication and writing brief introductions (see The Early Career of Samuel Johnson [1987], pp. 144-71). We can in fact be certain that Johnson did not write the paraphrase, for the headnote itself identifies the source: a Dr. Howell, whose account of the plague had been quoted at length by John Freind in his History ofPhysick (1725), pp. 143-51. The GM version was taken from Freind. I have traced the original to William Howell's Institution of General History, vol. 2 (1685), "The Third Part," pp. 109-10. I have two reasons for believing that Johnson both selected the "Account" for inclusion and then wrote the headnote. The first is stylistic: although a bit clumsy in places, the headnote has a Johnsonian ring to it. The second is circumstantial. Around this time Johnson was helping Robert James with aspects of his Medicinal Dictionary, the first volume of which appeared in 1743. Johnson's contributions to the MD included the lives of several early physicians, some of which were para­ phrased from Freind's History. (See my article, co-authored with O M Brack, Jr., "Johnson, James, and the Medicinal Dic­ tionary ," Modern Philology 81 [1984]: 378-400, esp. pp. 387-89.) Since we know that Johnson at this time was reading Freind, it seems only reasonable to infer that he both suggested printing the excerpt and then wrote the headnote. For those (like me) who are cautious when it comes to stylistic attributions, I append the headnote and invite readers to judge for themselves.

48 Notes and Queries

Account of the Plague by Procopius:

At this time, when the visitation of heaven upon the island of Sicily has spread such general apprehensions, and mankind are inquisitive about former pestilential contagions, it may not be amiss to give our readers a passage from Procopius, as related by Dr. Howell, and quoted by Dr. Friend [sic] in his History of Physic. The plague he speaks of began in Procopius's own time, in the reign of Justinian; continued after his death, in all 52 years; travell'd all over the globe, and almost unpeopled the whole face of it. That of Athens, described by Thucyd- ides, seems to have been less terrible. The curious may consult Dr. Friend's [sic] remarks on it.

All of the information about the plague in the headnote—its beginning in the reign of Justinian, its duration and ferocity, the comparison to the plague at Athens—has been gleaned from Howell by way of Freind. Howell, for instance, had written that the plague "had lasted two and fifty years, prevailing so much, that it destroyed in a manner the whole world" (quoted in Freind, p. 151). It was typical of Johnson in his editorial work to rewrite his source in this manner. —THOMAS KAMINSKI

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49 Puzzle

C^GQ^c

The Samuel Johnson Dictionary Puzzle No. 7

3 4 5 6 II 7 H C 9 10 II 11 12 13

14 15

II 1 II 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 I

24 II 25

26 27 _

ACROSS Any thing insatiable, as 2. n.s. 1. Such a small particle the mouth or stomach. (4) as cannot be physically 7. n.s. The first letter in the divided: and these are the Greek alphabet, answer­ first rudiments, or the com­ ing to our A; therefore ponent parts, of all bodies. used to signify the first. Quincy. 2. Any thing (5) extremely small. (4) 8. n.s. Concealment by 5. n.s. 1. A bay, an opening into silence. (9) land. 2. An abyss; an unmea- 11. adv Faulty; criminal. 2. sureable depth. 3. A Faultily; criminally. 3. In whirlpool, a sucking eddy. 4. an ill sense. 4. Wrong; Puzzle

improper; unfit. 5. Wrong; DOWN not according to the perfec­ 1. n.s. Food of raw herbs. (5) tion of the thing, whatever 2. n.s. The fourth month of it be.... (5) the year, January counted 13. n.s. 1. A father. Used in first. (5) poetry. 2. It is used in 3. Pronoun, the plural of this. common speech of beasts: 1. Opposed to those, or to as, the horse had a good —, some others. 2. — relates to but a bad dam.... (4) the persons or things last 14. n.s. A low place between mentioned; and those to the hills.... (4) first. (5) 15. n.s. A courier; one that 4. n.s. A grain, which in travels hastily. (6) England, is generally given 16. v.a. To do beyond. (6) to horses, but in Scotland 19. n.s. 1. The fondling name of supports the people. (4) a cat. 2. The sportsman's 5. v.a. 1. To conjecture; to term for a hare. (4) judge without any certain 22. v.a. To lash; to whip; to principles of judgment. 2. chastise. (4) To conjecture rightly, or 23. n.s. Cloth made of hemp or upon some just reason. (5) flax. (5) 6. v.n. To mock; to gibe; to 24. n.s. An insect whose bite is jest with insolence and con­ cured only by musick. (9) tempt. 2. To leer; to grin 25. n.s. Lukewarmness; gentle with an air of civility. (5) heat. (5) 9. n.s. The egg of a louse, or 26. adj. 1. Accurate in judg­ small animal. (3) ment to minute exactness; 10. n.s. A mark made by dou­ superfluously exact. It is bling any thing, v.a. [from often used to express a cul­ the noun.] To mark any pable delicacy. 2. Delicate; thing by doubling it, so as scrupulously and minutely to leave the impression. (6) cautious. 3 Fastidious; 12. n.s. [Latin.] 1. A spot. 2. squeamish. 4. Easily [In physick.] Any spots injured; delicate.... (4) upon the skin, whether 27. adj. 1. Lively; brisk; smart. those in fevers or 2. Saucy; petulant; with scorbutick habits. (6) bold and garrulous 15. adj. Fit; convenient; exactly loquacity. (4) suitable as to either time or place. This is a low

51 Johnsonian News Letter

word, and should not be propense. 3. Unfit; not used but in burlesque writ­ qualified: with to before a ings. (3) verb, for before a noun. 4. 16. adv. ... frequently; many Improper; unfit; unsuit­ times; not seldom. (5) able. (5) 17. n.s. 1. A tower; a turret. 2. 21. v.n. To breathe hard A high pointed rock or hill, through the nose, as men whence— in the initial syl­ in sleep, n.s. [from the lable of some local names. verb.] Audible respiration (3) of sleepers through the 18. adv. Staring with eager­ nose. (5) ness.... (5) 23. n.s. 1. A stringed instru­ 19. n.s. He who accumulates. ment of musick.... (4) (5) 20. adj. 1. Dull; not apprehen­ sive. 2. Not ready; not

Solution is on page 62. Book Reviews

Jonathan Israel: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750; Enlightenment Contested: Phi­ losophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752; Democratic Enlighten­ ment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790

Oxford University Press, 2001, 2006, 2012. 2859 pp.

srael's three massive volumes on the Enlightenment can I think be helpful to students of English literature. They cover more ground than any previous survey, and they make claims that cannot be ignored. He sees the Enlighten­ ment as an "unprecedented ... intellectual and spiritual upheaval," changing fundamentally a civilization that before about 1650 had been "based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition, and author­ ity" (2001:1). The Enlightenment, according to Israel, is "the single most important topic, internationally, in modern historical studies" (2012: 1), compared to which the Renaissance and the Reformation were only "adjustments" to a theological culture (2001: vi). In effect, it was the Enlightenment that produced the secular, democratic, and science-based modern world. He has earned the right to such sweeping generalizations by the breadth and depth of his research—and, I think, by an astute re-analysis and re-ordering of the complex of ideas and events we call the Enlightenment. His approach accounts for the great variety of ways the Enlightenment manifested itself— and for the violent revolutions it led up to in six different nations between 1776 and 1810. The sheer bulk of the trilogy is daunting, but there is almost no overlap among the three volumes, no unnecessary verbiage, and it is worthwhile sifting through to find what relates to your interests. Traditionally, scholars have located the Enlightenment mostly in France, Germany, and England and the United States. Israel pays ample attention to these, but looks also at Holland, Italy, Spain,

53 Johnsonian News Letter

Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia, Russia, Peru and Bolivia, colonial America, China, Japan, Islam, and Indonesia. He cites familiar sources in English, French, German, and Italian, but also far less familiar sources in Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Por­ tuguese, Latin, and Greek. He has visited I would guess at least a hundred libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, and quotes from manuscripts, documents, pamphlets, and rare books. One example among many of Israel's range is Table 2 (2001: 690) which lists the twenty-two "Major Clandestine Philosophical Manuscripts of the Early Enlightenment." No other study of the Enlightenment to my knowledge comes close to covering so many texts in so many dif­ ferent languages from so many different countries. Israel clearly distinguishes his own argument from others'— from the Enlightenment of those who concentrate on the philosophes, or on Newton and Locke, or on a family of different Enlightenments in different communities (see 2001: preface; 2006: chapter 34; and 2012: chapter 1). Israel's Enlightenment is "a single highly integrated intellectual and cultural movement" with demon­ strable consequences throughout Europe and the Americas—he concentrates on philosophical and political consequences, not social. He argues that although socio-economic forces played an indispensable role, it was philosophy that made the Enlightenment the unique phenomenon it turned out to be. Ideas fueled this "uni­ versal revolution," as Leibniz described it in 1704 (2006: 9). This in itself is not wholly new, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you follow his argument through all those countries and all the hundreds of philosophers he deals with, your ideas on the Enlight­ enment will have expanded and (probably) cohered. Essential to Israel's trilogy is a distinction between "Radical" and "Moderate" Enlightenments. Most of the Moderate philosophers managed one way or another to gain the sponsorship of established authorities, and they number most of the great thinkers of the age: Locke, Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Burke, and Kant. Most of them stood for reform, modernity, reason, science, natural religion or a Christianized version thereof, a Carte­ sian ontology that allowed for spiritual beings of various sorts, various degrees of tolerance, and liberation from the heavy weight of archaic institutions, feudalisms, Scholasticisms, and ecclesiasti­ cal authority. None of them supported genuine democracy or the abolition of traditional hierarchies of privilege. The Radical Enlightenment comprised a tiny group of daring subversives: Spinoza first and foremost, Bayle, Diderot, d'Holbach, Mirabeau, perhaps La Mettrie and Tom Paine. They denied the reality of all supernatural beings, including angels, devils, God, Book Reviews magic, sacraments, and Providence. They wanted an end to hierar­ chies of privilege; they endorsed the universal equality of mankind, giving equal status and dignity to blacks, browns, serfs, slaves, and women. They repudiated inherited authority, whether monarchical, ecclesiastical, or aristocratic. And their ideas of freedom extended to all forms of religion, thought, and expression. The few promoters of these radical ideas before about 1750 were subject not just to censorship and exile but in many cases to imprisonment or execu­ tion under civic and ecclesiastical law. But they figured heavily in the ideologies of the revolutions of 1776-1809, not just in America and France but also in Holland, Geneva, the Austrian Netherlands, and Spanish America. "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite"—whatever these words may have meant in 1650 or 1720, they meant violent revolution in 1789, the abolition of aristocracy and monarchy and priestcraft, the universal fellowship of humankind. The trilogy is organized in part chronologically, in part topically. All three volumes deal with writings published (or circulated) between 1650 and the 1790s; all three visit and re-visit major thinkers (Spinoza, Bayle, Locke, Diderot) as these men's ideas illu­ minate different trends and controversies. Radical Enlightenment (2001) concentrates on the Radical basis for enlightened thought laid down in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Enlightenment Con­ tested (2006) follows the spread of Radical thought and Newtonian physico-theology throughout Europe, focusing mostly on the first half of the 18th century. Democratic Enlightenment (2012) begins roughly 1750 with Voltaire and the Encyclopedic, moves to Hume, the Scots, and the counter-enlightenment, including Italy and Spain, swoops over to Spanish America and the far east for the role of colonialism, and comes to rest in the revitalized Radicalism of d'Holbach and Diderot as they fed revolution. An important fact: the German-speaking countries of central Europe had twenty-eight universities. England had two. So the number of philosophical trea­ tises in German greatly exceeds that number in English, and many of the central European philosophical disputes covered by Israel are not really relevant to the British Enlightenment. Part I (chapters 1-7) of 2001 is called "The 'Radical Enlighten­ ment,'" but it is really about contexts; we don't encounter the blood and bones of real Radicalism until Part II. Chapter 1 claims that philosophy "burst upon the European scene in the late seventeenth century with terrifying force" (1), as Cartesianism and "mechani­ cal" ontologies competed with Scholasticism. Acceptance of the "new philosophy" was uneven at best: Louis XIV founded an Academy of Science in 1665 but forbad the teaching of Descartes in 1671. In chapters 1 and 2 Descartes's unique blend of mathematics Johnsonian News Letter and philosophy gradually spread through Europe, starting in Holland but reaching Italy and Spain in the early 18th century. In effect, "dissent ceased to be theological and became philosophical" (8), a major change even if it was less true of Britain than of Europe. The Moderates and many of the ruling powers welcomed new ideas on medicine, law, education, and technology, while remaining aghast at what the Radicals were proposing (9). The opening of chapter 3 pays tribute to some of the non-philo­ sophical forms of (or contexts for) Enlightenment: urbanization, the new public sphere, new forms of sociability. If these pages seem cursory, the ensuing discussion of 17th-century revolutions and of Shaftesbury and three of his French contemporaries is useful. Chapter 4, on the emancipation of women and sexuality, reaches deep into the 18th century (in order to find genuinely emancipated women) and fails to convince; that is, Israel is far more optimistic about "emancipation" than feminist historians are. Chapters 5-7 are extraordinarily interesting. I did not know how heavy the burden of censorship was in Europe, how dangerous it was to question the monarchical/ecclesiastical establishment (chapter 5). Nor did I know how the evolution of libraries 1650-1730 promoted Enlightenment (chapter 6), for example via the first library cata­ logues. Libraries before 1650 were small and devoted almost exclu­ sively to the classics and to the theology of whatever religion was official in that town or court. But by 1738 the Hofbibliothek in Vienna had 200,000 books (119-26). Chapter 7 gives evidence that learned journals were even more powerful than dictionaries and encyclopedias in "undermining traditional structures of authority, knowledge, and doctrine" (142). England, Italy, and Spain played only a subordinate part in this. Chapters 8-15 explain why Israel places Spinoza at the very center of the Enlightenment. If one assumes, as Israel does, that the various revolutions of 1776-1810 were an integral, inevitable part of Enlightenment, then something like Spinoza's premises are necessary: if there is only one "substance," which is the universe, which is nature, which is God, and if the differences between animals and people and stones are therefore just differences in the amounts of motion and rest in this universal substance, then the "supernatural" in all its forms disappears, and all humankind are equal, and there is no justification for kings or priests, and morality boils down to justice and charity, and politics is (should be) devoted to serving the welfare of the people. (Aren't these premises fairly compatible with 21st-century physics?) Spinoza had teachers and colleagues and disciples (chapters 9-12). But very few philosophers dared to preach even the elements of Spinozism openly, however Book Reviews influential his logic and consistency turned out to be. Chapters 18-23 cover European intellectual controversies 1680- 1720 as they relate to the evolving Enlightenment. Pierre Bayle figures heavily here, and a few French writers (e.g., Fontenelle). The controversial topics are fascinating (whether an atheist can have genuine virtue; the nature of the oracles of antiquity; the "death of the devil"), but most of the philosophers covered are a bit remote from English literature: Bredenburg, Van Dale, Bekker, Leenhof, Witticius, and many more. Part IV, chapters 24-29, is concerned with "The Intellectual Counter-Offensive," featuring physico-theology, Locke, Leibniz, Newton, Wolff, and German Deism. It is interesting that for Israel the "counter-offensive" here is mounted by Moderates against Spin­ ozism and the Radicals, who have by now come to occupy the default position on Enlightenment. That is, these great names are seen as in some ways struggling against true Enlightenment, not for it. It is Spinoza's wholly secular Biblical criticism that Richard Simon is reacting against, and that Dryden rejects in Religio Laid. At the end of these three volumes one begins to see Voltaire and Hume as a little timid, unwilling to face the full consequences of their own reasoning. The "argument from design," however, was enormously influential, and it enabled open or closet Deists (Ray, Temple, Pope?, Woolston) to consider themselves Christian. Israel points out that it was charac­ teristic of the French Enlightenment to maintain a neutral or con­ formist public self while entertaining Radical principles in private (497)—to what degree was this true of British thinkers as well? These chapters chronicle the triumph of the Moderate Enlighten­ ment Europe-wide. Chapters 30-38 follow Radical strains of thought as they emerge from underground before 1750, in Deists French and English, in the French "Spinozistic Novel," in German philosophers such as Tschirnhous, Lau, and Edelmann, in the suppressed or veiled forms it took in Italy, and in clandestine manuscripts. The last two chapters anticipate the concluding chapters of both 2006 and 2012 by sketching what Diderot and Rousseau made of all this and how it led to the French Revolution. The first Part of Enlightenment Contested (2006)—Preface and pp. 1-60—reads like an answer to criticisms of the 2001 volume. It underlines the connection of Enlightenment and revolution, it defends Israel's mode of intellectual history, in opposition to the Annales school, to Pocock and Skinner and company, and to the German Begriffsgeschichte. "Only philosophy can transform our mental picture of the world and its basic categories"; therefore only philosophy can cause real revolution (13). Part II, "The Crisis of Religious Authority," starts with Bayle and

57 Johnsonian News Letter

"Demolishing Priesthood," explores three theories of toleration (in Locke, Bayle, and Spinoza), follows the evolution of German Enlightenment through Schmidt, Wolff, and natural theology, and puts Newtonianism in a European context. Newtonianism had "a desacralizing, Deistic tendency" (213), Israel observes, but Leibniz accused Newton of reviving "occult qualities" (206)—he was thinking of gravity. A number of the byways that Israel explores are fascinating. The pre-Socratics, Confucianism, and a Chinese philo­ sophical utopia play a role here (179-80 and chapters 17 and 25) and again in Volume III (558-72). Pufendorf had a revival in the early German Enlightenment, when Lutheran universities created fourteen chairs in Natural Law (194). Socinianism and Arminian- ism have a place too, though Israel gives less attention to the rela­ tions between the Reformation and the Enlightenment than he might, I think. Israel is fond of isms: "Illuminism," "expansionism," "Encyclopedism," "Neologists," "monism," "hylozoism," and "Cre- ationalist finalism," for example. Part III ("Political Emancipation") argues that Radical political thinkers owed far less to Hobbes than to the Dutch, the brothers de la Court, van den Enden, and Spinoza, who supported full equality, democratic institutions, and complete tolerance (therefore a weakened church). Hobbes's social contract deprives human beings of most forms of freedom and human rights; he did not recommend equality or tolerance (231-33). Israel counts Mandeville as a Dutchman and links him in interesting ways with the Dutch Radicals (254, 260). In the 18th century, neither Bayle nor Mon­ tesquieu advocated democracy, but both contributed significantly to the Enlightenment as an evolving and multifaceted ideology. Bayle's "subterfuges" and "dissimulation" (265) and powerful skep­ ticism drove the establishments crazy; he opposed "all hierarchical privilege" (275), undermining confidence in the theological state. Montesquieu, who is glimpsed in a social club with Bolingbroke in the 1720s (283), greatly weakened the theological aspects of politi­ cal theory with his sponsorship of mixed monarchy, a balance of king, nobles, and parliament, and with his relativism: different forms of government are called for in different societies depending on climate, history, and custom. A central issue in enlightened politics is the "Right to Revolu­ tion" (chapter 13). The idea of popular sovereignty, which estab­ lishes grounds for armed resistance to "tyrants," was "an extraordinarily difficult notion for the early modern mind to adjust to and accept" (326); as a result there sprang up the "fictions" of 1689 contending that James II abdicated or deserted the throne; hence also the Moderate account of the Glorious Revolution that Book Reviews

focuses on contracts and constitutions (as in Burke) not the right to revolt. It is odd that Israel does not refer here to the closing pages of Locke's 2nd Treatise. By centering on "political emancipation" in Part III, Israel can give thoughtful attention to Montesquieu, to Peter the Great (chapter 12), and to the spread of Newtonianism in Europe 1733-50. I found Part IV, "Intellectual Emancipation," most informative and enlightening [sic]. It circles back to the 17th century to review another essential element in this narrative, the birth of the Ars Critica and of the history of ideas. Spinoza once again is the most creative and critical thinker, starting with his Biblical criticism, which is textual analysis based exclusively on the language of the text itself and on reason, independent of all traditions or authori­ ties. This is not just a new procedure but also a new frame of mind. It is the founding of hermeneutics. It transformed the study of reli­ gions, of Greece and Rome (Bentley contributed here), of Renais­ sance humanism (an especially interesting section, 416-28), of Jewish history and Islam and China, of philosophy itself. The history of philosophy and of I'esprit humaine was passionately pursued in Germany and France, not England (though I think that Chambers's Cyclopaedia [1728] made a modest contribution). Part V explores a number of the major issues and practical con­ troversies generated by the Enlightenment: equality, women's rights, slavery and race, the status/validity of oriental wisdom (Islam, China), and "separating morality from theology." Even English thinkers, who were remarkably isolated from many of the most contentious disputes of the Enlightenment, were concerned with these issues though they failed to lead the way. Part VI guides us through the French Enlightenment before and after Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques (1734) and surveys the first stages of the "Radicalization of the Diderot Circle," which included La Mettrie and the launching of the Encyclopedic Volume III (2012) begins by "Defining the Enlightenment" (chapter 1), which is useful because it means comparing Israel's views with others', e.g., Gay's and Robertson's. Israel dismisses the single-nation historians (Porter) and the "family of approaches" his­ torians (Pocock) and the "sociability" theories ("just a gigantic red herring") and the postmodern revisionists ("difficult to relate coher­ ently to either ideas or events"), but his draft of a final definition is less convincing than the cumulative force of his three volumes. Chapter 2 of 2012 opens with the 1750s "Earthquake Contro­ versy" set off by catastrophes in the Americas and Portugal, raising questions about Providence, nature, and the new science of geology. During the years when the Encyclopedic was being written, edited,

59 and published (c. 1745-65), France experienced military disaster, and Diderot contrived to exclude much of the Moderate Enlighten­ ment point of view from the Encyclopedic: Montesquieu, Locke, and Hume take a back seat; Rousseau and Voltaire are gradually side­ lined. In Germany and the Empire, the Leibniz/Wolff model of Enlightenment seemed to achieve a reconciliation of philosophy with science, though it had to cope not only with religious critics but also with philosophers on the left (Lessing) and right (Kant). Part II (chapters 8-14) expands Israel's survey of the middle- century Enlightenment into England, Scotland, Austria, Italy, and Spain. Chapter 8 notes that during the Enlightenment Hume's bril­ liant philosophical writings were largely ignored, and the burden of his other publications was "conservative" though secular: he refused to deny the possibility of miracles or the usefulness of an aristocracy or the importance of sentiment and custom (vs. reason and innovation)—for him, the Enlightenment had already happened, in 1689. Chapter 9: "ending the Scots nobility's direct control of local politics and the processes of taxation and law" after the Union in 1707 freed a hard-working middle class and, in time, enabled the conservative Enlightenment of Smith, Ferguson, and Karnes: it promoted a commercial society and common sense, refusing to challenge "aristocracy, monarchy, empire, race distinc­ tions, or ecclesiastical authority" (269). Israel points out that in early mid-century Europe "enlightened" despots were on the throne in Russia, Prussia, Austria, many small German states, Spain, Portugal, Denmark/Norway, Sweden/Finland, and parts of Italy (272). Mostly, the common people in these states were ground down, ignorant, impoverished, and passive. However, enlightened despots carried out a certain number of reforms in law, education, and finance; they encouraged the arts (think Haydn, Mozart).

Part III (chapters 15-23) celebrates one book, the Histoire philosophique (1770) as the "most devastating single blow to the existing order" (414); it was a central cause of world-wide move­ ments against colonialism. Assuming as premises the universal equality and brotherhood of man, Diderot, Raynal, and their co­ workers surveyed all the empires, condemning European rapacity, religious fanaticism, cruelty, and injustice. It observed that women were most severely oppressed in the least developed cultures (one in the eye for Rousseau)(418). The Histoire was a best-seller though banned, with 48 French editions by 1795, 20 English editions, and an even more popular condensation that first appeared in 1774. The Histoire's chapter on the thirteen American colonies was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1775 and frequently thereafter. If Diderot's substantial additions to the second edition (1780) are

60 Book Reviews

taken into account, the Histoire adds up to a devastating global attack on the rule of kings, nobles, and churches; it approved of the right to revolt and promoted "the general will" of a whole people as the basis for any humane polity. Chapter 16 puts the American Revolution in the context of (Israel's picture of) the international Enlightenment. This means deciding how Moderate and how Radical the founding fathers were. Adams (at least the early Adams) admired Hume and is painted as very Moderate, even conservative. Paine's fierce denunciation of the British constitution, monarchy, parliament, and empire is "chiefly inspired by the Histoire" (456). Jefferson echoes Cato's Letters, and Common Sense draws from Dragonetti. All this throws into high relief the newborn republic's failure to confront slavery and refusal to let unpropertied people vote. In chapters 17-19 and 21, enlightened values and standards are applied to the treatment of indigenous people in colonies in North and South America, Indonesia, and India. In chapter 22, the Russian enlightenment gets poor grades for invading Greece, partitioning Poland, and rein­ forcing all the old injustices of the noble-serf relation. Part IV begins the countdown towards the French Revolution: two chapters on France (Rousseau vs. Diderot vs. d'Holbach) and three on Germany ("Spinoza Controversies"). In Israel's narrative, it was the 1770s that brought the Radical Enlightenment into the open, with the publication of d'Holbach's Systeme, of the Histoire philosophique in 1770, and of Helvetius's De I'homme in 1773. In the 1770s the American Revolution generated international public­ ity, and the readership of major enlightened authors and publica­ tions such as Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedic went international. It had been noted (2001: 685) that because European censorship weakened in the 1740s, radical texts did not need to circulate in manuscript after about 1750. In the 1780s Spinoza became "a kind of fashion" in Germany (689), praised for logical consistency by Herder and Goethe among others. Part V presents us with rivetting, philosophy-oriented accounts of the French, Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss revolutions. Chapter 35, the last, argues forcefully, perhaps hyperbolically, for the Enlightenment as a "revolution of the mind" with "global" consequences. "Distin­ guishing between 'philosophical' and 'social' interpretations of the Enlightenment is a giant delusion" (937); they are complementary. Unquestionably Israel's trilogy is "the most monumentally com­ prehensive history of the Enlightenment ever written" (The New Republic), and anyone who studies the Enlightenment will want to acknowledge a number of his major arguments. As for Britain: "the triumph of mixed monarchy [in 1689], the

61 Johnsonian News Letter moderate mainstream, and the ideas of Locke and Newton rendered England the anti-absolutist and tolerationist model par excellence" (2006: 244). But the British Enlightenment was a mixed bag, and readers must expect to find glimmers of lumiere and deeply conservative principles side by side in many authors. For example, consider what look like inconsistencies in Swift and Pope; both men seem to have been liberal or enlightened in some ways and very conservative in others. Swift thought of himself as free of "real prejudices" ("Apology" to A Tale of a Tub). "Fair Liberty was all his cry," and he "despised the fools in stars and garters." He wrote respectfully, even admiringly of the Deists Temple and Bolingbroke. His attacks on war, on warrior princes, and on the aristocracy are devastating. "The grateful People stand his Friends"—he took pride in helping the common people of Ireland. These are liberal positions. But in other respects Swift seems very unenlightened, laughing at science, scorning all "New Schemes in Philosophy" and "Innovators in the Empire of Reason," intolerant of any religion except the Church of England. The Moderns get much the worst of it in his Battle of the Books. Another modernity that Swift and Pope both disliked was the growth of print culture, the "swarm of scrib­ blers" that inspired The Dunciad, which was of course a necessary condition for the Enlightenment. Pope agreed with most of Swift's conservative positions—and then declared himself a Deist, more or less, in An Essay on Man and the Universal Prayer. Could one also investigate possible links between Israel's Enlightenment and some of the radicalisms that were important to British Romantics? The "republican spirit" of Wordsworth's (unpub­ lished) "A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff," for example, or atheism and anti-clericalism in Byron and Shelley, or their whole-hearted sympathy with the Greek War of Independence, or the idealisms of Coleridge's and Southey's Pantisocracy. It seems unwise to assume a drastic disconnect between the Romantics and the Age of Reason. —CAREY MCINTOSH s • \ T 0 M G1 U1 L 1 F A rij p 11 A u| |L Solution to puzzle on i • R 1 T I |c K X E A M I S s S 1 l: E page 50. I) A L K P 0 S X K R || A I ''•! 0 U T A C T p u s S F 1. 0 G 1. i x E N T A R A N T V i. \ • E 1 T E pfoJR N P|E R •

62 Remembrance

r3v\cx^?e

In Memory of John L. Mahoney1

n my sophomore year at Boston College, I was cut from a seminar I wanted to take on Homer because someone told the BC football team that the course was a gut, and forty hulking guys showed up, and the bewildered teacher sent away only those of us who could not cause him bodily harm. So I needed another course. A senior friend suggested a seminar on eighteenth-century British writers. "Those boring guys?," I asked, incredulously. "Never mind that," my friend said; "the teacher is great." I went to the first class: fifteen students—me plus fourteen graduate students. The teacher went around the table, asking each of us to say why we were there. The grad students said high- minded, mostly incomprehensible things about the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. I was last to be called on: "And why are you here?," the teacher asked. With the kind of hutzpa only a college sophomore could muster, I said: "To see if I can overcome my complete lack of interest in these writers." "OK," the teacher said with a wry smile, "we'll see." We were to read three writers: Pope, Swift, and Johnson. The first assignment was to read Johnson's Life of Pope. I got the book after class—from the library, not the bookstore—and that evening sat down to read. For a clueless sophomore, that moment proved to be the literary equivalent of St. Paul falling from the horse. So two things happened that day that changed my life: meeting Samuel Johnson, and meeting John Mahoney. John—who became my teacher, honors thesis advisor, and life-long mentor—died on 1 September 2015 at the age of 87. John, and his wonderful wife Ann, were our faithful companions at these dinners for several decades, and became good friends to many in this room.

1 This memorial was delivered at the dinner of the Johnsonians on 18 September 2015.

63 Johnsonian News Letter

You already know that John was a distinguished scholar and a prolific writer. In six books and over a hundred articles, he focused primarily on the long eighteenth century and on the Romantics—a set of interests he had refined and deepened as a doctoral student of Jack Bate's. John was masterful in explaining large historical trends and complicated critical ideas in precise, lucid prose, and in vivifying those ideas with delicate close-readings of particular texts. What you may not know is that John was the most celebrated and influential teacher in the modern history of Boston College. He was, without question, the best teacher I've ever met. There was nothing exotic about the way John taught. It was just that he did traditional things brilliantly: he challenged and affirmed; he listened and led; he helped us to see where we stood, and made us want to reach a farther horizon. In the classroom, he had a remarkable talent for asking questions that appeared to be simple—until you started to try to answer them, and you'd soon realize that they weren't simple at all, but cut to the heart of the issue in a richly complex way. But there was something more going on in John's classroom— something aptly celebrated tonight. He was, to his core, a John­ sonian. There was an ethical dimension to John's teaching. He wasn't preachy or presumptuous, and he always wanted us to encounter works of literature for the aesthetic pleasure they bring. But—like Johnson—he also saw literature as a springboard to understanding what we value and what we believe. John wasn't just teaching us how to read; he was teaching us how to live. He inspired in his students a sense of our own best pos­ sibilities, both as thinkers and as human beings. For John Mahoney—scholar, teacher, and man—the memory and example of Samuel Johnson was indeed immortal.

—STEPHEN FIX

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