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.