Reading Dr. Johnson: Reception and Representation (1750–1960)
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READING DR. JOHNSON: RECEPTION AND REPRESENTATION (1750–1960) By PHILIP WARD JONES A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham August 2019 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The thesis examines the response of imaginative writers to Samuel Johnson; arguing that these authors’ refashioning of Johnson involved a profoundly creative process. Chapter 1 examines Johnson’s own self-accounting, revealing an instability of self-imaging, linked to the different textual forms employed by Johnson. Chapter 2 argues that James Boswell’s biography theatricalised the representation of Johnson, introducing Boswell into the drama of Johnson’s self-reflexivity. Chapter 3 focuses on the Romantics, arguing that William Hazlitt misread Johnson’s criticism as mechanical, while Lord Byron drew upon Johnson’s authority to challenge Romantic orthodoxies. Chapter 4 focuses on the Victorians, arguing that Thomas Carlyle focused on Johnson’s powers of self-creation, epitomised in action; while Matthew Arnold’s abridged version of The Lives of the English Poets, helped tutor a new reading public. George Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s biography represented a turn to the encyclopaedic. Chapter 5 explores the Modern response to Johnson. T. S. Eliot’s critical revolution enlisted Johnson to support Eliot’s anti-Romantic animus. Beckett was interested in Johnson’s obsession with madness, death and numbers; themes which dominated his own writing. Jorge Luis Borges admired Rasselas, and was fascinated by Johnson’s friendship with Boswell, which mirrored his own relationship with the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I wish to thank my supervisors, Dr Sebastian Mitchell and Professor Tom Lockwood, for their tremendous encouragement and support throughout the project. I am also grateful to the staff at Pembroke College Oxford, the Bodleian and the University of Reading’s Special Collections Service for their helpful assistance in sourcing the manuscripts which are quoted in the thesis. I am also grateful for the assistance of Dr Sally Baggott, who has copy edited this thesis for conventions of language, spelling and grammar, in compliance with the University’s Statement of editorial help for Postgraduate Research Theses. A Third-Party Editor Declaration Form is appended. Finally, I wish to thank my wife and sons who were tirelessly supportive whilst I carried out this project. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: JOHNSON: ACCOUNTING FOR THE SELF Introduction 17 Johnson and the Life-Writing Tradition 19 Writing the Self: Johnson’s Diaries 25 The Ramblers: Property and the Self 47 CHAPTER TWO: BOSWELL’S ‘LIFE OF JOHNSON’: THEATRE CONVERSATION, VOICE Introduction 71 The Theatre of the Self: Boswell and Johnson’s Differing Responses 73 ‘The Life’ as Theatre: Johnson as ‘Character’ 79 The Role of Conversation in ‘The Life of Johnson’ 87 Speech and Writing in ‘The Life of Johnson’ 99 Voice and Imitation in ‘The Life of Johnson’ 105 CHAPTER THREE: THE ROMANTIC RESPONSE: HAZLITT AND BYRON Introduction 121 The Nature of Romanticism and the General Response to Johnson 123 William Hazlitt and Johnson 128 -Background 128 -Johnson and the problem of style 130 -Hazlitt, Johnson and literary criticism 139 -Hazlitt and Johnson: the question of Shakespeare 146 Byron, Johnson and the Challenge to Romantic Orthodoxy 154 CHAPTER FOUR: JOHNSON AND THE VICTORIANS Introduction 176 Flux and Permanence: Johnson and the Victorian Context 177 Carlyle and Johnson: 182 -Background 182 -Carlyle and Johnson: the writer as protean hero 183 -Johnson: the tragic iconoclast 187 -Johnson and the semiotics of action 192 Arnold and Johnson: The Writer as Pedagogue 201 Birkbeck Hill: The Encyclopaedist Approach 214 -Background 214 -The Context: editing ‘The Life’, Johnson and Englishness 216 -Recreating ‘The Life’: the editor as encylopaedic creator 220 CHAPTER FIVE: JOHNSON AND THE MODERNS Introduction 234 T. S. Eliot: Johnson, Critic and Writer 237 -Background 237 -Johnson the critic 238 -Johnson: poetry and sensibility 248 Samuel Beckett: Johnson and the Void 254 Jorge Luis Borges: Rasselas, Romanticism and Johnson’s Double Act 275 CONCLUSION 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY 301 ILLUSTRATIONS All images comprise photographs taken by the author of this thesis. Figure 1 is reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Library, The University of Oxford. Figures 2–4 are reproductions of Birkbeck Hill’s 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in the author’s possession. Figure 1. Extract from Johnson’s Memorandum Book: 30 September–6 October 1782, Bodleian Library Figure 2. Side-panel scenes beneath statue of Johnson by Richard Cockle Lucas Figure 3. Pages 190–91 of Volume I of the Birkbeck Hill edition of Boswell’s Life Figure 4. A Chart of Johnson’s Contemporaries from Volume VI of the Birkbeck Hill edition NOTE ON CITATIONS References to printed sources give the name(s) of the publisher or publishers, except where the original imprint explicitly names the printer(s) only, in which cases the reference states ‘printed by’ along with the name(s) and other publication details in parentheses. The bibliography lists primary and secondary sources together. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) refer to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). In Chapter 4, alone, all references to Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), refer to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887). INTRODUCTION READING DR. JOHNSON: RECEPTION AND REPRESENTATION (1750–1960) John Ruskin recounts in Praeterita (1885) that he read Johnson’s essays when travelling abroad as a young man. He recalls that ‘the turns and returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind; nor was it possible for me, till long afterwards, to quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sentences’.1 Johnson, according to Ruskin, ‘was the one author accessible to me […] He taught me carefully to measure life’.2 Ruskin was not alone in noting how Johnson delighted in taking the measure of things, often quite literally. A number of writers explored in this thesis were also fascinated by Johnson’s obsession with counting and computing the world. Although Ruskin admired Johnson, his response betrayed an anxiety of influence. Other authors discussed here reacted to Johnson wholly differently. I argue, nonetheless, that reading Johnson preoccupied a range of imaginative writers in successive generations. While Johnson’s stock changed over time, he continued to attract attention from a remarkably diverse group of authors from James Boswell to Jorge Luis Borges. Sometimes seen as a conventional and limited writer, Johnson nonetheless commanded the attention of iconoclastic Modernists, such as Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot. Not all of the writers considered here were admirers, notably William Hazlitt, but each took from Johnson what best met their own purposes; each conceiving a Johnson, to a degree, if not in their own likeness, at least in accordance with their own predilections. Their refashioning of Johnson became a profoundly creative process. 1 John Ruskin, Praeterita and Dilecta (New York, London, and Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2005), p. 198. 2 Ruskin, Praeterita and Dilecta, p. 199. 1 Johnson was, furthermore, a self-reader and this thesis will also explore his own self-imaging and examine how later writers responded not only to Johnson, man and writer, but also how they over-wrote, ignored or took on board ideas developed through Johnson’s own self- reflection. What drew these writers to Johnson? Something about Johnson’s striking literary character continued, over time, to attract a notably heterogeneous cast of literary readers, who might otherwise be considered to have little in common with Johnson or, indeed, each other. This may be because Johnson was a liminal figure, looking backwards to Milton, Shakespeare and the classics, but whose literary career also reached its apogee as the Romantic era and, later, the Modern age were set to subsume his world and its values. There was an obdurate solidity about Johnson’s presence as the world became more complicated and less easy to digest. Arguably, the first imaginative writer to define authoritatively his own version of the literary canon, Johnson was a figure who was hard to evade. A man who worked by instinct, rather than theory, he impressed his own age by the power of his rhetorical and verbal performance, as Boswell attested. Although Romanticism, later, constituted a break in literary history, presaging the Modern age, it was also the era most critical of Johnson.3 After the Romantics, however, the Victorians found Johnson heroic and the Modern age regarded him as strangely modern. Both the late Victorians and Modernist writers, including both Matthew Arnold and Eliot, saw him as upholder of classical values and an ally in their battle against Romantic excess. They believed that Johnson demonstrated a stubborn authenticity which went beyond the Romantic deification of the self. Unremittingly and self-critically committed to truthfulness, as his diaries showed, Johnson was a writer with uniquely hard edges. His odd 3 The Modern age is intended to denote the literary era which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950.