It is an immense thing to be the definer of not just any old language but the language of what was then the greatest country on Earth. It is above all an act of fantastic self-assertion to freeze the great torrent of words as they change and glide through history and say: That’s it. That’s what they all mean, and they mean it because I, Johnson, say so.
Small wonder, then, that Dodd turned to him as the man to save his bacon.
The fun-loving cleric was no mean author himself, with fifty-five titles under his belt, including a charming volume on Shakespeare. But to compare him to Johnson, the Prospero of language, was to compare a popgun to a dreadnought. The interesting question, really, is why did Johnson agree to help? You may wonder why he turned his vast guns to the aid of this perfumed chancer.
Whatever Dodd’s charms, he was an obvious rogue. It was only three years earlier that he had been involved in a stunning case of bribery, when he offered £3,000 to Lady Apsley, wife of the Lord Chancellor, if she would help wangle him into the lucrative living of St. George’s Church in Hanover Square. You have to remember that these were still the days when being the vicar of such a place was a cushy number and well worth some greasing of palms.
The chicanery was detected. The letter was traced to Dodd’s wife, a buxom former servant girl. The King was shown the appalling document, and was so outraged at the insult to his Lord Chancellor and therefore to the crown itself that he sacked Dodd from the list of royal chaplains.
As London was convulsed by the scandal, Dodd’s persona was satirised on the stage of the Haymarket as “Dr. Simony,” a man reviving the ancient sin of trading in holy offices. Dodd wrote a letter to the papers, pathetically claiming that one day he would be able to explain it all—and then fled to Switzerland to escape the gossip. News reached London of his escapades; he was seen at the Paris races in a phaeton and dressed as a French fop, and when he returned to London, and preached his last sermon on 2 February 1777 (before a large and still adoring congregation), he was surely a notorious figure.
When Johnson received Dodd’s appeal for help, he must have known the detail of his final crime; how he went to an innocent broker with the forged bond, and how he persuaded him to cash it on the pretext that Lord Chesterfield had reasons, ahem, for not wanting to do it in person, and how he had scooted away with the then huge sum of £4,200.
Johnson had only met Dodd once, many years before, and when the letter reached him at his rooms in Bolt Court, it is said that he was “much agitated.”
He walked up and down his chamber reading it, and then declared, “I will do what I can.” He certainly did. Johnson made extraordinary exertions on behalf of this conniving cleric, many of them in secret.
We need to understand that he was very far from being the straightforwardly reactionary conservative of caricature. He was more complicated, more compassionate, and stricken with a sense of duty.
Johnson’s analysis of society seems weird to us today, because we accept from childhood the idea of equality. We accept, or at least we assert, that the perfect state of humanity is one of equal brotherhood and sisterhood, and that in an ideal world we would all treat each other and respect each other as equals. Johnson doubted that this was realistic. It just wasn’t how people worked, he said.
“No two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.” Even today, we might reluctantly agree that there is a grain of truth in that. But Johnson went further, and beyond the bounds of modern political discourse, in saying that equality was not only unrealistic but undesirable. He was once attacked by a female journalist named Mrs. Macaulay, a lady of strident Whiggish views. Remember the lines from “London,” about the female atheist who talks you dead? That was her. Mrs. Macaulay says everyone would be much better off if we all had the same size plots of land and no one could domineer over anyone else. Nonsense, says Johnson, mankind is happier in “a state of inequality and subordination.” If everyone was equal, he says, the human race would never get anywhere. There would be no intellectual improvement, because all intellectual improvement arises from leisure, and you can’t have leisure—vital gentlemanly time needed to think—unless some people work for other people. When Johnson sees a beggar in the street, he feels compassion, all right. But he is not exactly consumed with outrage at the disparity between the lot of the beggar and his own. Oh no.
According to Johnson, beggars are not only inevitable but indispensable. “It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality,” he says. Inequality turns out to be essential to almost every human institution.
It is the only way to get things done. You need hierarchy, he says, with a chap at the top and people set under him. Otherwise the whole thing seizes up. “Though many men are nominally entrusted with the administration of hospitals and other public institutions, almost all the good is done by one man, by whom the rest are driven on; owing to confidence in him and indolence in them.”
And do you know what, he says, the human race actually rather likes it that way. “There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed,” he says. Well, one can see why the governors might get a kick out of lording it over everyone else, but what exactly does he mean by this “pleasure in . . . being governed”?
Is he saying that we are all masochists, yearning to be bossed around? It turns out that the pleasure in being governed is pure self-interested common sense. “Men will submit to any rule by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and chance. They are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves.” We are starting to see a more generous interpretation of his feeling. He doesn’t propound inequality out of snobbery or lust for hierarchy. He believes it is for the benefit and protection of the little guy. And that was the point of the eighteenth-century Toryism of which Johnson was the great exponent.
Never in Johnson’s lifetime were the Tories the majority party. They were the underdogs. They stood up for small shopkeepers and the monarchy, while the Whigs were the party of big business and “progress.”
There is an embarrassing scene when Johnson goes to see the King, and comes out saying what a damn fine gentleman he is, never mind what anyone says. But Tories didn’t reverence the King out of some atavistic juju but because he was thought of as the protector of the people. You needed the King there as an ultimate bulwark against the advance of the rich and the powerful. “I fly from petty tyrants to the throne,” says Johnson, the man whose parents submitted their child to be touched by the monarch, in the deluded hope that he would be cured of scrofula.
If we look at his economic thinking, it is on the face of it pretty reactionary. He attacks the raising of wages for day labourers on the grounds that it will only make them idle, and “idleness is a very bad thing for human nature.” He applauds luxury—luxury in food, luxury in buildings—and makes the classic conservative argument for the trickle-down effect. “A man gives half a guinea for a dish of green peas. How much gardening does this occasion?” Think of all the labour required to get those green peas to market, says Johnson. Think of the jobs. And isn’t it much better, he goes on, to spend that half guinea on green peas and keep people in work than just hand the money over to some poor person so that he may afford a meal? That way, you help the “industrious poor, whom it is better to support than the idle poor.” Listen, he says: suppose we were to revive the ancient luxury dish of peacocks’ brains? People would protest that it was a sign of luxurious decadence. But think of all the peacock carcasses that we could give to the poor!
Now some of this makes Johnson sound like one of those 1980s yuppie monsters, boasting how the consumption of champagne was economically essential and riffling his banknotes under the nos
e of a beggar. In fact, he was the very opposite of hard-hearted. He was personally hopeless with money, on one occasion hiding five guineas and then losing it. He was arrested for debt, and yet—in the words of his friend Hester Thrale—“he loved the poor more than I saw anyone else do.”
He was so generous that on many evenings he gave away all his silver between his home and the Mitre tavern, where he dined. His letters are full of intercessions on behalf of the unfortunate, such as a palsied painter he helped to place in a hospital. He looked after his nearest and dearest with affection and devotion.
Among the creatures of his strange menagerie at Bolt Court was an old blind poetess named Mrs. Williams, whose table manners were said to be revolting, and yet Johnson would take her with him across fashionable London. Then, most famously there was Frank Barber, his black manservant, on whose behalf Johnson’s labours were extraordinary. He got him out of the navy. He attended to his education and treated him as his ward, and Frank Barber was the principal beneficiary of Johnson’s will.
It was an instinctive humanistic anti-racism that made him lift his glass at a gathering of Oxford men and stun the company by saying, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” It was Boswell the Whig who produced the weaselly arguments in favour of slavery. It was Johnson, the Tory supporter of the underdog, who saw its evil and the hypocrisy of the Whigs.
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the negroes?” he asked. “It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal,” he went on, and no, there is no confusion in his thought.
Johnson believed that subordination and inequality were inevitable and in some sense desirable; and yet there is no inconsistency in thinking that all human beings are equal in dignity. If further proof were needed of the gentleness of his nature, I offer the occasion when he was staying at a house in Wales, and the gardener caught a hare among the potato plants and brought it in to be cooked for dinner.
Johnson asked to hold it for a moment, then shoved the terrified creature through an open window and shouted at it to flee. Or I might cite his treatment of his cat Hodge, whose oysters he would personally go out and buy. Beneath the veneer of blustering intellectual intolerance, he was, in fact, a terrific old softie.
So as he paced up and down his room, and wondered whether and how to help the cheque-forging parson, we can imagine that he was motivated by straightforward compassion—a compassion perhaps intensified by a couple of episodes in Johnson’s own past. The life of William Dodd was at stake because he had clashed with the Earl of Chesterfield, his former pupil who had dobbed him in and refused to indulge his crime. And this Earl of Chesterfield was the son of that famous Earl of Chesterfield with whom Johnson had engaged—a quarter of a century earlier—in one of the most spectacular spats of English literary history.
When a cash-strapped Johnson was looking for patrons to help finance his dictionary, he approached Lord Chesterfield, a famous diplomat, politician, man of letters and super-suave theorist of etiquette. After some slight encouragement, Johnson turned up chez Chesterfield, but was for some reason kept waiting in an outer room, and after a long interval left empty-handed and in a thoroughly bad mood.
Seven years later the dictionary was complete. Johnson’s opus was beginning to command public attention—at which point the languid Earl of Chesterfield penned some pieces saying how frightfully good he thought it was.
Johnson immediately fired off a letter, which contains some of the most magnificent put-downs in literature. “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.”
Chesterfield was in fact quite tickled to be so rebuked, and kept the letter on a table for visitors to read; but we can imagine that Johnson’s sympathies were engaged by the very thought that another man named Chesterfield—the son of his old foe—was about to play a part in bringing poor Dodd to the gallows.
And then there is one other memory that the case of Dodd may have stirred. Almost forty years earlier, Johnson’s younger brother, Nathaniel, had died in sad circumstances in Somerset, after falling into debt. There is a suggestion of suicide, and of forgery; and who knows, perhaps it was the thought of his young brother’s despair that helped to decide Johnson in favour of action. He turned his pen to the aid of Dodd, and with a zeal that was almost obsessive.
Whatever the task he was set, his conscience would thrash and goad him until it was complete. This was a man who had to touch the posts he passed in a certain order, who had to enter rooms in a certain way and whose inner demons compelled him to collect the peel of every orange he ate. Woe betide him if there was a task he had failed to complete, because his conscience would be at him—clicking its tongue and tapping its foot—until the job was finally done. If you want a single episode that sums up the guilty compulsions of Samuel Johnson, think of how he had once failed as a young man to go to Uttoxeter to do an errand for his father, and how fifty years later he went to expiate the omission and stood bareheaded in the rain before the spot where his father had had his stall.
Here are some of the things he churned out—anonymously—on behalf of a man he scarcely knew. He wrote a speech to the Recorder of London, to be read out on the occasion of Dodd’s sentence to death at the Old Bailey.
He wrote a “convict’s address to his unhappy brethren,” a sermon given by Dodd to his fellow inmates at Newgate jail.
He wrote a letter for Dodd to the Lord Chancellor and one to Lord Mansfield, a petition from Dr. Dodd to the King, and a petition from Mrs. Dodd to the Queen; he wrote several long articles in the newspapers pointing out that a petition had been presented to His Majesty, signed by twenty thousand, calling for Dodd’s release.
He wrote a petition in the name of the City of London, and he also wrote a document called “Dr. Dodd’s last solemn declaration.”
It was all terrific Johnsonian stuff. It was also useless.
The King was implacable. Pardon was refused. Amid enormous crowds Dodd was conveyed in a mourning cart to Tyburn, bound in halters, praying and weeping as he passed a street where he once lived in such style.
As he ascended the scaffold, an official named Mr. Villette was handed the last solemn declaration (secretly written by Johnson) so that he could read it to the baying multitudes.
It was full of orotund protestations of faith, and repentance for the delusion of show and the delights of voluptuousness and his general failure to crack down on spending. Vanity and pleasure had required expense disproportionate to his income, and distress, importunate distress, had urged him to temporary fraud. The gist of it was that he was a good Christian, even though he had behaved very badly. It was also, alas, quite a long document, and the official decided that the crowd would become impatient. So they decided to save it for another time, and they got on with hanging William Dodd.
The cart pulled away from the gibbet, and down he dropped. As if that were not indignity enough, he was whisked off, while his body was still warm, by the ghastly body snatchers who then haunted the Golgotha of Tyburn Tree. They took him off to the famous surgeon John Hunter, who tried to pump the air back into his lungs with a pair of bellows.
That, too, was no use. Dodd was as dead as a dodo. All Johnson’s exertions had been in vain. As he wrote in protest, under his own name, to the Secretary for War, it was the first time in history that a clergyman had suffered public execution for immorality.
It is an episode that shows many of Johnson’s best qualities: his compassion, his energy, his phenomenal literary fertility. In his willingness to write anonymously, i
t shows the spirit of charity and obsessive sense of obligation that was so strong in his makeup.
And yet when Dodd was interred, and the controversy was over, the greatest and most competitive spirit of eighteenth-century England could not quite resist the chance for glory, the serotonin boost of praise and esteem that had driven him all his life.
When a Mr. Seward challenged Johnson and said that the “convict’s address to his unhappy brethren” could not possibly be by Dodd, and that Johnson must have had a hand in it, Johnson did not admit it, but neither could he bring himself to deny it.
So he came up with one of his most famous gags.
“Depend upon it, sir,” he said, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.”
* * *
Incurable show-off he may have been, but I hope I have convinced the reader that Samuel Johnson was a gentle and kind man. He rooted for Dodd. He felt the hardship of the poor. “Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed,” he said in his early satirical poem “London.”
He was a compassionate conservative, in today’s language; and yet there is little doubt that he was a conservative—one of the principal fathers of a political philosophy (if that is not too big a word) that holds that there is a hidden wisdom in old ways of doing things, and that you monkey with the established order at your peril.
He opposed the American colonists in their war of independence. They were seditious renegades, he said, and wrote a pamphlet called “Taxation No Tyranny,” in which he urged that they should cough up whatever the government of George III demanded. And he deeply disapproved of anyone who whipped up the mob to insurrection. “He is no lover of his country that unnecessarily disturbs its peace,” he said. Which was not entirely the view of eighteenth-century London’s greatest radical.
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