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

by Henry Hitchings

  In Sam’s lifetime, there was a marriage crisis. Anxiety about the relationship between love, sex, property and matrimony took many forms: the denunciation of fortune hunting, a fretfulness about the large number of bachelors, an insistence that regulating marriage was a means of preserving the boundaries of social class. The vigorous debates surrounding the Marriage Act of 1753, which sought to prevent clandestine marriages, focused political attention on this anxiety. Before the Act, the laws governing this institution were a curious hotchpotch. The Act’s sponsors were unhappy about the number of marriages contracted without parental consent. Many of these were worryingly ‘unequal’, and the result was social chaos; the attorney general Sir Dudley Ryder wondered ‘How often have we known a rich heiress carried off by a man of low birth, or perhaps by an infamous sharper?’ When the Act was debated in parliament, one of the most compelling speakers was the Earl of Hillsborough, who argued that ‘mutual love’ was ‘a very proper ingredient’ of marriage, but that it should be ‘a sedate and fixed love, and not a sudden flash of passion which dazzles the understanding but is in a moment extinguished’. Critics of the Marriage Act saw it as an assault on the freedom of the individual – an attempt to curb love and control the circulation of wealth – and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the motives for the new legislation were at root economic.2

  In the build-up to the Act, Sam was mulling over his own marriage. No one has ever pretended that it was exemplary. But, like his parents’ uneasy bond, it prompted a lot of thought about how marriage could and should work. When he writes in Rambler 18 that marriage is ‘the strictest type of perpetual friendship’, he’s proposing something that would have struck most of his contemporaries as radical: not a hierarchical relationship, but a balanced union, a place of confidence and integrity. In Rambler 167 he pictures a couple who in their ‘connubial hopes’ are ‘less deceived’ than is common. On the face of it they have a ‘general resemblance’. Yet ‘a nearer inspection discovers . . . a dissimilitude of our habitudes and sentiments’, of a kind that ‘affords that concordia discors, that suitable disagreement which is always necessary to intellectual harmony’.

  The theory of the concordia discors can be traced back to the Greek thinkers Pythagoras and Empedocles, but the expression itself was first used by Horace. The world, so the theory goes, is in perpetual flux between harmony and strife. When it comes to relationships, the ideal state is one of dynamic tension. In Rambler 167 Sam goes on to say that each half of a couple has thoughts ‘tinged by infusions unknown to the other’, yet they can be ‘easily united into one stream, and purify themselves by the gentle effervescence of contrary qualities’. While this could be more appealingly phrased, his thinking is suggestive. Although relationships need solid foundations, they are kept alive by our from time to time experiencing the frisson of difference: the person you know so well surprises you with an opinion or attitude that is at odds with your own, and you feel the fizz of chemistry, the pleasure of being tested, the same pulse of excitement that surged when you first met.

  Sam’s understanding of what mattered in marriage was tested in 1773, when his friend Henry Thrale got involved in trying to block the marriage of his niece, Frances Plumbe. The fifteen-year-old Frances wished to be wed to her sweetheart, Jack Rice; her father, Samuel, known in the family as Old Sammy, opposed the match and threatened to have Frances locked up. Our Sam surprised the Thrales by taking Frances’s side. Alert and hostile to the ways in which marriages could be contrived for dynastic convenience, in order to keep assets in the family, he argued that a child’s duty of obedience to its parent was not absolute: ‘There wanders about the world a wild notion which extends over marriage more than over any other transaction. If Miss Plumbe followed a trade, would it be said that she was bound in conscience to give or refuse credit at her Father’s choice? And is not marriage a thing in which she is more interested and has therefore more right of choice?’ It was a while before Old Sammy Plumbe came round, but Frances and Jack Rice married, in Holland, and together they would have thirteen children before her premature death at thirty-two.3

  This episode again shows Sam’s soberly businesslike attitude to how one chooses a spouse. The individual is entitled to select a course of action – and to get it wrong. In Rasselas, the prince discusses ‘the common process of marriage’, which is ‘a choice made in the immaturity of youth, in the ardour of desire, without judgement, without foresight, without inquiry after [the couple’s] conformity of opinions, similarity of manners, rectitude of judgement, or purity of sentiment’. He claims that all the evils of a bad marriage could be averted ‘by that deliberation and delay which prudence prescribes to irrevocable choice’. But Nekayah puts him straight: delaying marriage means that a couple ‘suspend their fate upon each other at a time when opinions are fixed and habits are established’. Although a youthful or hasty marriage may be made in a mood of ‘desultory levity’, the alternative is a union between people too set in their ways (and guilty of a ‘pride ashamed to yield, or obstinacy delighting to contend’). It’s not possible, she says, to resolve the question of a marriage’s suitability simply by applying reason and logic; intense feelings can pass, but well-advised arguments in favour of a marriage or against it are equally fugitive.

  Nekayah may not strictly speak for Sam, but in its fundamentals her position is his: the most frisky or facile case for matrimony can sometimes stand up, and the most considered can founder. In his sermon on marriage (written for his friend John Taylor to deliver), he comments that it is ‘an institution designed . . . for the promotion of happiness’ but ‘sometimes condenses the gloom, which it was intended to dispel’. This is because many married couples neglect their duties, for instance failing to maintain the ‘continual acts of tenderness’ that keep the flame of love burning. There are lots of reasons why this happens, scarcely foreseeable at the point when one marries. Among them is this: the demands of life can erode our capacity for tenderness. In Rambler 45, Sam observes that people who complain of the unhappiness of their marriages will often say that they were wed in a moment of folly, yet ‘the days which they so much wish to call back, are the days not only of celibacy but of youth, the days of novelty and improvement, of ardour and of hope, of health and vigour of body, of gaiety and lightness of heart’. Such people’s expressions of regret for what they have lost are the tokens not of superior judgement, but of jaundiced maturity, since ‘whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn’.

  7

  The mournful truth of London life: or, an author embarks upon the sea of Literature (with but a smattering of wormy cliché)

  The first two years of Sam’s married life were dominated by his efforts to launch and then maintain his new school at Edial. When it failed, he decided to try his fortunes in London. On the morning of 2 March 1737 he left Lichfield, travelling with David Garrick. He was Garrick’s mentor and friend, and their journey – sharing a horse, which they took it in turns to ride – now sounds like a story contrived by a nutty scriptwriter, rather than something that actually happened. To picture them in transit is to picture, let’s say, Marlon Brando crossing America on a motorbike, with Ernest Hemingway in his sidecar. Except it’s bigger than that.

  Garrick’s name is indelible in the history of British theatre. His approach to portraying a character was sympathetically imaginative, rather than declamatory like that of his predecessors. Besides redefining what it meant to act a part, he promoted the idea that a cast should work as an ensemble instead of largely ignoring one another onstage. He revolutionized the theatre’s understanding of how to achieve its effects, particularly through lighting and scenery, and overhauled the mechanisms of management and publicity.1 Yet when he quit Lichfield, a few days after his twentieth birthday, he had no definite plans. In hindsight, his ascent looks astonishingly swift – a decade after arriving in the capital he would be earning more than £1,000
a year. But before he blazed across the stage, there was a fallow period. His father believed that his loquacious energy suited him to a legal career – and was hardly the first person, or the last, to misconstrue acting skills as a gift for advocacy. That career did not materialize, and in fact his early years in London were spent working in the wine trade with his elder brother Peter, selling bottles of port at eighteen shillings a dozen.2 It was only in 1741 that he made his professional stage debut, stepping in to replace an unwell performer as the harlequin in a pantomime. That year he had several roles as part of a small company in Ipswich, and in October he made an astonishing breakthrough, as the king in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

  But in March 1737 Garrick was a volatile young man whose eagerness to amuse others had not yet found a proper outlet, and his mentor was scarcely any more sure of the road ahead. As Adam Gopnik has observed, Sam had the misfortune to arrive in London ‘in a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying’. Aristocratic patronage, which had tended to deform writers’ endeavours, was dwindling, but authorship was not yet securely established as a career.3 At the time, Alexander Pope was perhaps the only living English author who had grown rich from writing. Many others were ‘writers by profession’. The term, later interchangeable with ‘authors by profession’, seems to have been coined by the critic James Ralph in 1758, and he used it disapprovingly of the quill drivers he had come across since arriving in London from Philadelphia more than thirty years before. After trying his hand at poetry, political pamphleteering and writing for the theatre, Ralph was conscious of how precarious professional authorship tended to be. Sam, who would follow in Ralph’s footsteps as a parliamentary reporter, was entering a realm in which writers were expected to work quickly, be versatile and embrace political causes with gusto – all for very modest rewards.

  By unhappy coincidence, on the day of departure his brother Nathaniel died, aged twenty-four. Three days later he was buried at St Michael’s Church in Lichfield. We can’t be sure how or when news of this reached Sam, but it is safe to assume that he left without knowing of his brother’s death. Ignorance was in this case a blessing. Had he been aware of Nathaniel’s fate, he would have delayed his journey. Instead, for a moment, he had the pleasure of not knowing: he was relinquishing a scene with which he was tediously familiar to venture to a place he had visited once as a child. He could imagine himself stepping into freedom: a life with more elbow-room and fewer threads binding him to the Johnson family and its gloomy legacy. But the journey itself was the moment of psychological liberation.

  Before we continue to London, let us pause to think of Nathaniel Johnson. He is a murky figure, and it is a grim irony that his passing is one of the few moments that bring him into view. It seems that he drank too much and shared the melancholy temperament of his brother and father. He may well have had little genuine interest in the family’s bookselling business, but there is evidence that he practised that trade in the West Midlands and in Somerset. The one document that survives to shed some light on his life is a letter to his mother, written the year before his death. In it he speaks of a plan to emigrate to America. Hoping to go to Georgia, which was then being settled under the guidance of James Oglethorpe, he admits that he has little idea of what to expect there – but is sure that his new life can be no worse than the one he will leave behind. In the letter he refers to ‘these crimes . . . which have given both you and me so much trouble’ and to his brother who ‘would scarce ever use me with common civility’.4 We can only speculate about the nature of the crimes – forgery is one suggestion – and what passed between him and Sam. As to the manner of his death, nothing is known. Suicide seems plausible, save for the detail of his being buried in consecrated ground; perhaps he had an accident or was felled by sudden illness. It is clear, though, that in adulthood the older brother, who as a child had been encouraged to think of Nathaniel as ‘little Natty’, barely acknowledged that he had existed. When Sam mentioned that memories of Nathaniel had surfaced, he was tantalizingly unspecific about them. On the day of their mother’s burial in January 1759, he wrote in his diary, ‘The dream of my brother I shall remember.’ More than twenty years later he wrote to Mary Prowse, who had once employed a cousin of his and lived near Frome in Somerset, asking if she could find any information about a bookseller who had resided there ‘more than forty years ago’ – ‘He was my near relation.’

  Because we know so little about Nathaniel, it’s easy to overlook him completely. But it is clear that their cheerless fraternity was something Sam felt glad to leave behind. London promised different flavours. His awareness of the possibilities of a literary life there, begun during his teenage stay with Cornelius Ford, had been strengthened by his reading of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Edward Cave’s periodical was the first to call itself a magazine – the word had previously denoted a storehouse or centre of commerce – and aspired to be a sober, useful publication. Its audience consisted not so much of gentlemen as of the middling sort: professionals and tradesmen and their families.5 Many of the people who wrote for it weren’t Londoners, and Cave welcomed new voices. About half of each number consisted of contributions from readers, and in 1734 he ran the first of several generously funded poetry competitions – nothing out of the ordinary now, but an innovative scheme at the time, and one that suggested to Sam that an outsider with no secure standing and no rich backers could find ways to make a living in the capital.6

  Although he had several literary projects in mind and dreamed of being recognized as a serious scholar, Sam’s most pressing task in the spring of 1737 was to complete his stately tragedy Irene. He believed that it would make him a fortune if only he could get it finished and put on, yet it wasn’t a good time to be trying to do this. New plays were not often staged, and in June his prospects worsened when parliament passed the Licensing Act, which restricted both the subject matter of theatre – so as to quash political satire – and where it could be presented (a form of censorship that would last until the Theatres Act of 1968). In 1739, he would write a heavily ironic pamphlet, A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, arguing that, given the political will to keep the public in a state of ignorance by suppressing plays, it might also be sensible to stop teaching people to read. The pamphlet contains one especially chilling sentence: ‘What is power but the liberty of acting without being accountable?’

  By the time of the Complete Vindication, insults and frustrations had blighted his sense of London as a place of opportunity. Soon after his arrival, he met a bookseller known to Garrick, John Wilcox, who asked how he expected to make his living. When Sam replied, ‘By my literary labours’, Wilcox laughed and suggested that, given his burly appearance, he might be better off looking for work as a porter. Wilcox wasn’t being needlessly mean; he was making the point – an enduringly true one – that anyone proposing to live off their literary labours had better come up with a Plan B (or a Plan A, around which the writerly ambitions can fit). But the judgement was still galling. No one delights in being told what they look like they should do. ‘You should be a model’, which is about as good as this gets, is usually an offer of a leg-over rather than a leg-up. My own experience on this front, which runs to ‘You’d make a good bouncer’ (a wild misreading) and ‘You’d be perfect for one of those ads about hair transplants’, is merely dismal.

  In retrospect, Wilcox seems an outlier among Sam’s acquaintances in the book trade, a source of discouragement rather than a generous sponsor of literature. Yet he was willing, despite his reservations, to lend Sam and Garrick £5. This was hardly a trivial sum at a time when £30 a year was reckoned enough for a young man to live frugally but not contemptibly. Furthermore, words that sound like discouragement can sometimes serve a different purpose: by challenging a person’s ambitions we oblige them to stiffen their resolve. Wilcox’s putdown was bracing, a useful illustration of the capriciousness and competitive spirit so prevalent in the li
terary marketplace. It also demonstrated how important perceptions could be in that sphere: authors’ looks were thought a foretaste of their style.

  The London in which Sam found himself was dangerous. At night, robbers skulked in the unlit streets. Armed muggers and pickpockets crawled over the open spaces of Spitalfields and Covent Garden. At any time of day one might be mown down by an out-of-control cart or startled by a stray animal. The city was a confusing patchwork of districts, divided by the Thames, with only one bridge connecting its northern and southern halves. The river itself was spectacular and often busy with ships – as later depicted by Canaletto, who moved to London in 1746 – but the bankside neighbourhoods were squalid. Much of what we now think of as central London had yet to become urban: St Pancras and Paddington were villages, and anyone who walked along Oxford Street could glimpse open fields to the north, while west of Hyde Park lay a broad swathe of green.

  As Sam wandered London’s streets and ventured beyond its limits, from Chelsea to Bow and from Southwark to Hampstead, he got the measure of the city, which seemed overwhelmingly crowded. It had a population of about 700,000, whereas Birmingham was home to roughly 20,000 people, Oxford to 8,000, and Lichfield to 3,000. Violent and noisy, it was in the grips of a mania for gin, despite legislation the previous year to curb its consumption. The Gin Act had provoked riots, and so had competition in the building trade between British and Irish labour. The threat of mass protest was constant. The streets were dirty, too – Benjamin Franklin reported in 1742 that the gutters running up their centre were often glutted with offal. Grime from the street was popular with market gardeners, who bought cartloads of it and rejoiced in the richness of its ‘glutinous mixture of animal manure, dead cats and dogs, ashes, straw, and human excrement’. No eighteenth-century citizen could avoid occasional over-intimacy with dung, but London’s abundance of horse-drawn traffic – and the enduring habit of driving cattle through the streets – meant that the city’s thoroughfares were alarmingly feculent.7