Insofar as he is remembered, it is as the great harrumphing voice of political incorrectness, a literary John Bull, whose views would today be considered outré to the point of unacceptability. On a casual reading he seems to be a sexist, xenophobic, monarchy-loving, free-market defender of the inevitability, indeed the desirability, of human inequality. It is hard to see how any modern Fleet Street editor would dare employ him.
He was willing to love all mankind, he declared, except an American. “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Ireland was worth seeing but not worth going to see. The French were dirty, blowing into the spouts of teapots to make them pour properly.
As for the Scots, they were mainly liars who had no cabbage until Cromwell introduced it, and they subsisted on horse food, and the finest sight a Scottish person could see was the high road leading to England. He thought the decline in the use of the cane would harm educational attainment, since what boys gained at one end they lost at the other.
His views on women were so outrageously chauvinist that no one, even on the Sun, even on the Daily Telegraph, would dream of printing them. “Wise women don’t trouble themselves about the infidelity of their husbands,” he decreed, though when he heard that Lady Diana Beauclerk was giving her husband the runaround, he adopted a shameless double standard. “The woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on it.”
It wasn’t just that Samuel Johnson was opposed to women having jobs. He thought it was a bit off for them even to paint or draw. “Public practice of any art, and staring in men’s faces, is very indelicate in a female,” he said; and as for a woman preaching, it “was like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I tried this gag on a fifteen-year-old daughter. She was notably underwhelmed.
And yet Johnson was so venerated in his lifetime that George III paid him a stipend of £300 a year just to exist. Tourists would come in search of a glimpse of his residence at Johnson Court off Fleet Street, like rubbernecking fans amid the mansions of Beverly Hills. When he died, Edmund Burke was among his pallbearers; he was buried at Westminster Abbey, with a cenotaph at St. Paul’s and another memorial at Lichfield Cathedral, and across the land there were assorted sermons on this doleful event in the life of the nation.
His conversational squibs, his sallies, his ruminations were each deemed so individually precious that they were noted by the Scottish lawyer and patron saint of journalism, James Boswell, and consecrated in a 1,400-page biography, which is itself one of the landmarks of our literature.
How did Johnson become so famous that Boswell thought it worth scurrying after him, notebook in hand, to record his slightest grunt? It is a story of struggle, failure, depression and a neurotic compulsion to achieve.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on 18 September 1709, and he sometimes liked to imply that his background was very humble indeed. “I have great merit in being jealous for subordination and for the honour of birth,” he bragged, “for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.”
This was going it a bit. Johnson’s father, Michael, was actually Sheriff of Lichfield, and his mother was dimly connected to various members of the gentry. It was certainly true that Michael, already fifty-two when Samuel was born, was not the most dynamic of booksellers, and all his life Johnson dreaded his father’s ineffectual bumbling and “bustle,” which he defined as “getting on horseback on ship.”
Encouraged by the elderly antiquarian, Johnson the schoolboy showed much verbal promise, punching out poems in Latin and English on subjects ranging from daffodils to the battle between the Pygmies and the Cranes. At the age of nineteen he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, and it was here that he sustained his first major reverse. Johnson the elder fell into debt, and Samuel became so poor that he faced the humiliation of not being able to complete his studies. When a fellow student noticed his toes poking through his shoes and kindly left a new pair outside his room, Johnson threw them away in a rage.
After four terms he was forced to quit Pembroke, leaving his books ignominiously at Oxford, and for years he went into a depression. Teaching jobs came and went until Johnson had reached the age of twenty-five without a single consummated love affair. At which point he married a merchant’s widow named Elizabeth Porter.
The relationship has filled scholars with a prurient psychological rapture. It was one of the accidents of Johnson’s childhood that his mother gave him immediately to a wet nurse, whose milk was sadly infected with the tuberculosis that scarred his face. What did it mean to the young man that his bride was fully twenty years older than he? Was it important that she was described as “very fat with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance”? Why did he call her “Tetty” or “Tetsy”? You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to have a stab at that one.
Johnson and Tetty set up a school together near Birmingham, and among the pupils was the young David Garrick, who would later regale fashionable London dinner parties with affectionate but hilarious through-the-keyhole accounts of their conjugal relations. Despite the loyalty of a small band of pupils, the school eventually began to fail. Johnson was seized with dread that he would not be able to provide for Tetty, to whom he showed a deep devotion both in life and death. In 1737 a poverty-stricken Johnson, together with his brightest pupil, David Garrick, began their famous 120-mile march to London.
In fact, they didn’t walk all the way but rode and tied with a single horse—one of them riding ahead on the horse, and then tying it to a tree or post for the other to pick up. When they came to London, they came to a place of between 650,000 and 700,000 souls and perhaps already the most populous city on Earth. It was a place of shattering poverty and dung in the streets, where the rural poor were being sucked in to feed London’s hunger for labour, where neighbours were already unknown to each other. But it was also a place of exciting disputation, where blasts and counter-blasts were constantly being loaded into the metaphorical blunderbusses of literary men; and Johnson knew that London was the place where at last he could make his name.
“Why, sir,” he later said, “you will find no man at all intellectual who is willing to leave London. No, sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.” Having been pretty apathetic on the subject of God, Johnson was becoming devoutly religious, and all his life his character has a curious self-mortifying quality.
Like many creative people, his temperament involved indolence and footling around, sometimes assisted by alcohol, followed by a crescendo of guilt, followed by a frenzy of productivity. London provided all a man could need to spur him to action. There was the simple need for money and to keep his wife; and as he pointed out with his characteristic bluff Johnsonian pseudo-philistinism, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
There was the need to prove himself. He was an Oxford dropout, a failed teacher and a provincial. He said “woonce” instead of “once,” and “shuperior” instead of “superior,” and David Garrick, who rapidly attained fame as an actor and producer, used to send him up by squeezing a lemon into a punch bowl, with uncouth gesticulations, looking around the company and calling out, “Who’s for poonsh?”
Although Johnson was a dogged defender of the class system, he could be sensitive to slights. Even when he was famous, there was a nasty moment when a society hostess failed to introduce either Johnson or Sir Joshua Reynolds to two posh ladies, the Duchess of Argyle and Lady Fitzroy; and after the two men, leaders of the great professions of letters and painting, had been waiting in the corner in embarrassed silence, Johnson called out in a loud voice, “I wonder which of us two could get most money by his trade in one week, were we to work hard at it from morning to night?”
Even though he believed ideologically in the necessity of rank, we can detect a
buried indignation that people could outgun him by birth and not talent; and that aggression was part of his success. It was an age when men judged each other not just by money or other worldly measures, but by the swiftness and smartness of their conversation. Then as now, the British prized wit and repartee, and Samuel Johnson was the champ.
He was the king of the tart rejoinder, the master of the scorching put-down, and he didn’t mind who knew it. Oliver Goldsmith, he would declare, was good on paper but hopeless viva voce. Charles James Fox was hooked on the easy applause of the Commons but never went mano a mano with the master. Edmund Burke—now Burke was a different matter. The author of Reflections on the Revolution in France is rated one of the great orators of history, and when he was ill, an enfeebled Johnson admitted: “That fellow Burke calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.”
And yet in his day it was Johnson who had the edge, not least because of the sheer physical energy of his performance. He was not only large and shambling, and therefore intimidating, unlike other literary types, he was easily provoked into exuberant displays of strength, if not downright violence. He had been taught to box in Lichfield by his uncle Andrew, and was said to be terrifyingly good. When a man took his seat at the theatre and refused to move, Johnson picked him up, chair and all, and threw him into the orchestra pit. When he went to a fireworks display and the fireworks failed, he started a mini-riot. Told of a particularly dangerous whirlpool in the Isis near Oxford, he tore off his clothes and dived in.
He once challenged a smaller friend to a footrace, and when they reached a tree he snatched him up, popped him on a low-hanging branch and continued the race. On another occasion he was walking down the street with his characteristic roll of the head and convulsive starts when he came up behind a porter carrying a heavy load. For no reason at all, Johnson knocked the load off the porter’s back and, amid general bewilderment, continued on his way.
He was what they would now call “up for it.” One morning at 3 a.m. two young men of fashion, Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk, decided to roust Johnson from his lair, a few years after Tetty had died. He appeared in a nightcap, armed with a poker, and said, “What, is it you, you dogs? I’ll have a frisk with you!”
In a jiffy he was down in his clothes, and they were out to a tavern to see in the dawn over a drink of Bishop, a favourite of Johnson’s, made of sugar, wine and oranges; and in a state of deep refreshment they rolled into Covent Garden, where he insisted on trying to help the irritated fruit and veg sellers to set up their stalls. Then they went out for a row on the Thames, and Johnson was still calling for more entertainment when the younger men decided to pack it in. He was then pushing fifty, and a shining example to us all.
It was that inexhaustible spirit that made him so hard to beat in debate, as someone observed: “Sir, there is no arguing with Johnson, for when the pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it”; or as Boswell put it after Johnson observed complacently that he had “had a good talk”: “Yes, sir, you tossed and gored several persons.”
He was fired by a simple Homeric desire to achieve praise and renown, and it was no accident that The Iliad was his favourite work of literature, and that he often quoted the advice of Glaucus to Diomedes, that he should —always be the best and have the upper hand over the others.
So it was useful that he was, additionally, a genius. Of that there can be no serious doubt.
He had an astonishing ability to use the simplest Anglo-Saxon words to get to the heart of human motive and to mint observations that were both fresh and true, and which endure in the hundreds today. He could be extremely funny, though sometimes you perhaps had to be back there in the eighteenth century to appreciate the full richness of the gag.
He was once being conveyed on the Thames, where it was the custom for sailors to hail each other with what Boswell calls “coarse raillery.” Johnson took some incoming salvo and unleashed this sensational retort: “Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.” Long before Edward Lear produced his famous surrealist recipe for Gosky Patties, Johnson said that “cucumbers should be well sliced and then dressed with pepper and vinegar and then thrown out as good for nothing.”
When a young man lamented that he had lost his Greek, Johnson replied, “I believe it happened at the same time, sir, that I lost all my large estate in Yorkshire.” And when a magistrate was droning on about how he had sent four convicts to a penal colony in Australia, Johnson said he wished he could be the fifth. He was, in other words, not only funny but also rude, and that helps to explain his popularity then and since.
In a nation addicted to evasion and embarrassment, we treasure people who are rude, because we assume (rather primitively) that they are more likely to tell the truth. Johnson was once disparaging the works of Laurence Sterne when a Miss Monckton said that well, actually, she thought they were really rather good.
“That is because, dearest, you’re a dunce,” he said.
People are “blockheads” or “dogs,” and when he was asked who was the greater poet, Derrick or Smart, he said, “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and flea.” For all their famous hypocrisy, the British also love a person who seems honest about his pleasures, however vulgar. Johnson once said, “If I had no duties and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,” and there he articulates the eternal dream of the British male. We think of him as a scholar, as “Dr.” Johnson, a man who spent his hours peering at ancient texts, and yet he also devoured romantic novels; he disliked the honorific “Dr.,” and was one of the greatest students of human nature—one of the greatest moralists—of his or any age.
Long before Jeremy Paxman or any other anthropologist of the English psyche, Johnson spotted our strange standoffishness. If a Frenchman bumps into another Frenchman or if a German comes across another German in a foreign country, they will fall into easy conversation. Show an Englishman into a room with another Englishman, says Johnson, and one will sit on a chair and the other one will stand by the window, and each will go to some lengths to pretend the other does not exist.
He noticed the frailties of his fellow journalists and writers, how everyone claims to have some high motive for their work. Pshaw, said Johnson: there was one reason why writers were writers, and that was the pleasure that goes with repetition of their own names; and he paints a ludicrous picture of the author stealing round the coffeehouses, “like a monarch in disguise,” and cocking a pathetic ear to hear what the world is making of his latest effort—when the crushing reality is that no one is even talking about the thing.
Time after time you come across a dictum of Johnson, and you find yourself nodding and saying, yes, that’s us, that’s the human race:
“Almost every man has some real or imagined connection to a celebrated character.”
“Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme for merriment.”
“The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.”
“The cure for the greater part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.”
“Every animal revenges his pains on those who happen to be near.”
And there are many more.
Even if his tragedy, Irene, became an accidental comedy, even if his poetry is not much on the syllabus, his couplets have a weight that is entirely Johnsonian. “Here falling houses thunder on your head,” he writes in his satirical poem on London, “And here a female atheist talks you dead.”
It is a lapidary style in the sense that it is as economical as a Latin inscription. He not only wrote the famous epitaph to Oliver Goldsmith that you can see in Poets’ Corner—“Olivarii Goldsmith, Poetae Physici Historici, qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit” (Oliver Goldsmith, poet, philosopher,
historian, by whom scarcely any style of writing was left untouched, and no one touched unadorned)—but of all the lines in Goldsmith’s plays the most famous was actually contributed by Johnson: “How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
There is a lot of thought in that couplet. Many journalists have been paid many thousands of pounds to say the same thing at considerably greater length. But by the time Dodd the dodgy clergyman came to appeal to Johnson, his prestige and his moral authority derived from one superhuman literary effort.
It took forty Frenchmen fifty-five years to produce a dictionary of French. It took the Accademia della Crusca twenty years to produce a dictionary of Italian. It took Johnson nine years to produce his dictionary, and he personally wrote forty thousand entries. There is a mistaken view these days that Johnson played it for laffs, mainly because of a handful of chucklesome entries.
Oats are defined as “a grain which in England are generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people.” A patron is a “wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” A lexicographer is a “harmless drudge.” There is the fabulously brain-stretching definition of a “network” as “anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections.”
Challenged by a woman to explain why he had wrongly defined the pastern as “the knee of a horse,” he said, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” And yet any suggestion of bluff British anti-intellectualism, or amateurism, is entirely illusory.
Johnson’s dictionary was a breakthrough. Noah Webster may have sniped at his predecessor, but he took over thousands of entries; and when the Victorians began their great oeuvre in 1888, they called it the “New English Dictionary,” and it was new in the sense that it was the first to presume to move out of the shadow of Johnson.
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