The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  This, too, would turn out to be a position he repeatedly adopted, and one of his most astringent statements on the subject comes more than twenty years later in ‘An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain’, where he writes that ‘surely they who intrude, uncalled, upon the country of a distant people, ought to consider the natives as worthy of common kindness, and content themselves to rob without insulting them’. Behind these withering words lies a humanity appalled by imperial thuggery, and the memory of his translation of Lobo hovers in the background as he concludes, here with obvious reference to the putative greatness of Britain, that ‘no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous’.

  5

  A philosophical meditation upon the nature and rewards of Accident, in which are used the strange words ‘Galilean serendipity’

  I have started referring to Sam, rather than to Johnson or Dr Johnson or even Samuel. It’s not a very Johnsonian manoeuvre or one that’s in step with scholarly punctilio, but I think it is a small risk worth taking. To call him Johnson over and over is to keep him at arm’s length. A single easy syllable, rather than a lugubrious pair, makes him more present. As Sam, his story is immediate and his wisdom current; only when stepping back to view him in a broader historical context will I refer to him as Johnson.

  Sam grew up above, and often in, his father’s bookshop. He was evidently able to browse among its extensive stock, reading extracts of whatever took his fancy. The catalogue for a sale Michael held at Worcester in 1718 lists what must have been a typically rich assortment of titles. In it he addressed prospective customers, and this introduction includes the now rather tart-seeming detail that ‘to please the ladies, I have added store of fine pictures and paperhangings’. He explains that the sale will begin with ‘small and common books’, after which comes more serious fare: works of divinity (‘the best of that kind’), as well as law, mathematics and history.

  One of Sam’s recent biographers, Peter Martin, calls Michael Johnson’s shop ‘a huge biblio-cabinet of curiosities, a bookish bower of bliss tempting him into divergent and crisscrossing intellectual, cultural, . . . scientific and geographic paths’.1 Access to such abundance was unusual, and Sam made the most of it. But his reading was often spontaneous; living in a bookshop created opportunities for happy accidents. He told Boswell the story of how, as a boy, he went looking for some apples that his brother Nathaniel had hidden on a high shelf in the shop. It may be that he’d imagined this stash, for he located no apples, but in his search he came across a sizeable volume by Petrarch. He had previously read some praise of this Italian scholar, and he now sat down with the book and read it for a long time. ‘The story is too good to be true,’ says another Johnson expert, Robert DeMaria, who sees it as a convenient allegory about a youngster who ‘reached for immediate and simple gratification but grasped instead the old, intensive European Latin culture, in which he then laboured throughout his life’.2 Yet I’m not sure that it is too good to be true. Isn’t this exactly what happens in bookshops and libraries? We go looking for one thing and happily find another. If the bookshop were our home, wouldn’t this sort of discovery occur frequently?

  Large projects often have their origins in a stroke of luck or a chance encounter: ability stumbles on opportunity, and events that might well have happened separately instead concur. As a Christian, Sam could argue that ‘nothing in reality is governed by chance’, for the universe is ‘under the perpetual superintendence of him who created it’. Yet he was struck by what he couldn’t help feeling was the randomness of his personal history. He claimed that we arrive at our occupations by accident, and while his choice of a career as a writer feels apt and natural, we can see the events that set him on that course. In an essay that pictures Sam’s greatness being achieved ‘by committee’, as friends and associates prompt his conversation and adventures, Hugo Reichard describes how ‘it is mainly inner resistances that hold the man back, chiefly outside forces that start him, route him, and keep him going’. ‘What he badly needs, others come prepared to give’, and many of his key moments are ‘decided by others, by persons in his shadow’.3 This underestimates his resourcefulness, but it captures the mood of a life in which many grand enterprises had casual or unplanned beginnings.

  Opportunities rarely come from where we expect. My path has been shaped – to a greater degree than I may choose to recognize – by chance. We tend to underplay the role of chance because it threatens to make us look and feel like pawns; it diminishes our claim to genius. People who achieve great success will argue that every step of their ascent was planned. But this is the amnesia of victory. I’d argue that an unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of chance is a mark of a pedestrian mind, and accommodating it is a talent, not a weakness.

  In an intriguing essay on the relationship between chance and creativity, Lewis Hyde writes of how ‘a chance event is a little bit of the world as it is – a world always larger and more complicated than our cosmologies’. He describes ‘smart luck’, which is ‘a kind of responsive intelligence invoked by whatever happens’, a form of wit that ‘responds and shapes, the mind-on-the-road, agile, shifty in a shifting world’. Conventionally, we think of luck and intelligence as opposites (or near enough), but Hyde proposes that luck is a form of intelligence. He quotes Paul Valéry’s strangely satisfying claim that ‘the bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads’.4 It’s an image of juxtaposition as something at once magical and logical – and one that implies our failure to recognize that boundaries are zones of transition rather than limits.

  Inspiration is a receptiveness to accident and its effects. We see this principle in its crudest form, perhaps also its most absurd, in the ink spill on a writer’s desk which causes a gloriously suggestive Rorschach blot to form on the page. Not something that happens as often as it used to; the modern equivalent of the fortuitously ornamented page may be a website we blunder upon, which initiates some new and fruitful course of action or the possibility of a collaboration we’d not previously considered.

  Mostly we have been taught to be sniffy about accidental discoveries, and this is part of a larger cultural agenda of belittling luck. We have learned to think that people who frequently refer to luck are superstitious, unreliable and stupid, and that they are irresponsible, excusing their failures with the weak explanation that some things are simply beyond their control. At the same time, we persuade ourselves that our understanding of how things happen – the how, the why and the when – is impeccably scientific. But the world is more volatile than we are generally willing or able to accept, and our path through it less systematic than our pride will allow us to admit. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in Antifragile, a provocative book about the rewards of disorder, ‘our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness’.5

  Sam’s life is an instructive story of using uncertainty rather than hiding from it. This, after all, is someone whose education proceeded ‘by fits and starts, by violent irruptions’ (the phrase is Boswell’s) and whose career developed haphazardly. In his life of the poet Abraham Cowley, he argues that ‘Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction’, and the words ‘accidentally determined’ are key. Cowley found a copy of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene lying in the window of his mother’s room, and from that moment had his ‘particular direction’.

  Today, when we speak of happy and accidental discoveries, the word that comes to mind is serendipity. It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, as Sam was at work on the Dictionary, but its popularity didn’t take off till the second half of the twentieth century, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for serendipitous is as recent as 1958. Both noun and adjective are adored by self-professed word lovers, who like to point out that the island of Sri Lanka was once known as Serendip and that Walpole was inspired by a story, ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, in which
the main characters ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. But, as so often, delight in a nugget of etymology is an end in itself; it doesn’t inspire further reflection on the nature of this accidental sagacity or sagacious embrace of accidents.

  The historian Robert Friedel describes three kinds of serendipity. First there is Columbian serendipity: ‘When one is looking for one thing, but finds another thing of value, and recognizes that value’, as when Christopher Columbus, seeking a new trade route to Asia, landed in America. Then there is the Archimedean version: ‘finding sought-for results, although by routes not logically deduced but luckily observed’, as when Archimedes, wondering how he might measure the volume of an irregular solid, settled into a bath and noticed his body displacing a quantity of water equal to his own volume. Finally, we have Galilean serendipity: ‘the discovery of things unsought for’, a ‘facility for using new instruments or capabilities to generate surprises’, as when Galileo pointed his newly constructed telescope skywards and saw celestial phenomena no one had previously been able to perceive.6

  We tend to think of Columbus, Archimedes and Galileo as glorious pioneers. Yet their experience discloses a simple truth: you can’t plan to make discoveries, but can only plan the type of activity that could lead to discoveries. To this we might usefully add Einstein’s insight that ‘No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.’7 Inspiration happens when the ego acknowledges, at least for a moment, the existence of something bigger. ‘Whatever be our abilities or application,’ writes Sam in Rambler 154, ‘we must submit to learn from others what perhaps would have lain hid for ever from human penetration, had not some remote inquiry brought it to view; as treasures are thrown up by the ploughman and the digger in the rude exercise of their common occupations.’

  His definitive statement on the subject comes in Rambler 184. ‘It is not commonly observed,’ he writes, ‘how much, even of actions considered as particularly subject to choice, is to be attributed to accident.’ He goes on: ‘Let him that peruses this paper review the series of his life, and inquire how he was placed in his present condition. He will find, that of the good or ill which he has experienced, a great part came unexpected, without any visible gradations of approach; that every event has been influenced by causes acting without his intervention; and that whenever he pretended to the prerogative of foresight, he was mortified with new conviction of the shortness of his views.’ The productiveness of accident is not a reason, or an excuse, to shirk being purposeful. But to pursue ambition and feed a sense of adventure is to lay ourselves open to mishap. ‘We set out on a tempestuous sea in quest of some port, where we expect to find rest, but where we are not sure of admission’, and ‘we are not only in danger of sinking in the way, but of being misled by meteors mistaken for stars, of being driven from our course by the changes of the wind, and of losing it by unskilful steerage’. Yet sometimes it happens ‘that crosswinds blow us to a safer coast, that meteors draw us aside from whirlpools, and that negligence or error contributes to our escape from mischiefs to which a direct course would have exposed us’.

  6

  In which Samuel Johnson, being entrusted with a mission of Love, proceeds to execute it; With what success will hereinafter appear

  We left Sam at a critical moment – the publication of his first book. If this seemed to mark the start of a new chapter in his existence, an even more significant change occurred in 1735 when, after a brief but eager period of courtship, he married. Elizabeth Jervis Porter, affectionately known as Tetty, was a widow whom he probably met through Edmund Hector, and at forty-five she was twenty years his senior. Her husband Harry, a mercer in Birmingham, died in the autumn of 1734, and she and Sam were wed the following July, not in Birmingham or Lichfield but on neutral ground in Derby.

  In marrying someone so much older than him, he must surely have recalled the circumstances of his cousin Cornelius Ford, who had shown that, whatever other people might think, an age gap of this kind need not be a problem. It was the first time that his affections for a woman had been returned, and that sensation – of love, of reciprocity, of someone being willing to make sacrifices for him – was enough to fortify him against criticism. There was plenty of that. To many in Tetty’s social circle, the appeal of this poor, strange and dishevelled young man was impossible to fathom. Of her three children, only her nineteen-year-old daughter Lucy was willing to accept him, and even she was unnerved by his appearance. The standard image of Dr Johnson is of a man built like a Toby jug – well-fed, even fat. Such is the portraitist’s privilege (or obligation). But although in later years his body became large and unwieldy, until middle age he was formidably built rather than overweight. When Lucy Porter met him, he struck her as ‘lean and lank’, his imposing bone structure alarmingly visible even through his clothes. Her brothers found his arrival in their mother’s life both physically and morally repugnant. Tetty’s elder son, eighteen-year-old Jervis Henry, refused to have anything more to do with her, and the younger, Joseph, took many years to get over his disgust.

  Tetty brought £600 to the marriage, and as a result Sam was able to set up a school. This was at Edial, a hamlet a few miles from Lichfield, and an advertisement in the Gentleman’s Magazine sought to attract interest from all around the country, boasting that ‘At Edial, near Lichfield in Staffordshire, Young Gentlemen are Boarded and Taught the Latin and Greek Languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON’. Readers of this London publication, launched in 1731 by a fellow Midlander called Edward Cave, could have had no idea of who Samuel Johnson was, and the advertisement failed to inspire great confidence. But the school seemed at first both a brave experiment and a reproof of all who had cast doubt on Sam’s suitability as a teacher.

  Later, when he was famous, people struggled to see other motives for the union with Tetty and concluded that it was odd or opportunistic (or both). She was not an obvious match for a man of his powers. Imprisoned by the affectations of faded beauty, she had weaknesses for gaudy make-up, trashy romances and opium. One of Sam’s Victorian biographers, Leslie Stephen, puts the matter with wry succinctness: ‘The attractions of the lady were not very manifest to others than her husband.’1 But to her husband they were clear. He apparently trusted her judgement, and she declared him ‘the most sensible man I ever met’ (sensible at the time meant ‘judicious’ or ‘capable of tender feeling’). It also seems likely that she was receptive to the affections his mother had seldom encouraged or welcomed, and that she embodied an idea of nurturing womanhood he had heard about but not experienced. She grounded and pacified him. Yet the possibility that she saved him from himself – that their private life together had a substance outsiders couldn’t divine – seems scarcely to have occurred to any of his biographers until the twentieth century.

  While the couple didn’t need the rest of the world to approve of their union, they were wounded by its mockery. The school at Edial opened in the autumn of 1735 and attracted a handful of pupils; it is possible that there were as many as eight, but we know the identity of only three. Among them was David Garrick. In later life, established in fashionable London society, Garrick would turn party tricks for his admirers. One of these involved impersonating Tetty (‘a little painted poppet, full of affectation’) and exaggeratedly recalling certain amorous scenes between man and wife that he had witnessed through a keyhole. Hard luck for Sam that, of the tiny number who could have witnessed the newlyweds’ fumblings, one turned out to be the age’s leading actor.

  By his own account, Sam married for love. But love, he argued, was not a guarantee of marital happiness. Boswell records his saying that ‘marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter’. It is tempting to dismiss this as flippant or say that Sam was reflecting his own experience of an unsatisfactory union. Yet he
touches on an interesting issue. While marrying for love is today exalted in most cultures, and we perhaps tend to sneer at those where arranged marriage is common, there is a history of love marriages being regarded as foolish. According to this school of thought, passion makes us blind. Arranged marriages, widely considered coercive and authoritarian, often work. They have pragmatism at their core and are supported by both families involved. Comparatively untroubled by the problems that cause love matches to fail – a lack of realism, tension between the couples’ relatives – they can be secure rather than flighty, and love, at first absent, may gradually emerge.

  Am I advocating arranged marriage? No. But there is evidence all around us that people aren’t very good at judging whether they should bind themselves in perpetuity to a particular individual, and while ‘due consideration of characters and circumstances’ is something most of us are likely to carry out before marrying, an impartial expert may perceive points of incompatibility that someone lovestruck will overlook. Sam’s line about the Lord Chancellor engineering marriages shouldn’t be read as a serious suggestion, but it is the comment of someone who has observed the arbitrariness of people’s decisions about marriage – the imprudence with which they enter into it, or indeed the callousness with which they are shepherded in its direction. We hear a similar note of realism in Sam’s short romance Rasselas; the title character is an Abyssinian prince, and his sister Princess Nekayah says that ‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.’ She is immediately accused of ‘exaggeratory declamation’, yet imagine being charged with that – it’s like being told you’re right.