Boredom has a bad reputation. This is hardly a surprise. Often it is portrayed as the root of evil – a chasm in which dark thoughts breed, a form of despair that we visit upon ourselves, a poison eating away our capacity for movement. To be bored, we’ve been told, is to be weak and to lay oneself open to the lure of depravity. It’s a sickness, easily and discreetly transmitted. It is an insult to the gift of being alive. The words ‘I’m bored’ have become a catch-all for many shades of unhappiness, and the adjective boring is a put-down that’s at once criminally vague and devastatingly effective: ‘He was boring in bed’, ‘It was such a boring lunch.’ We’re bombarded with suggestions about ways of keeping boredom from engulfing us, and parents are urged to fill their children’s days with improving activities – karate, ballet, soccer skills, conversational Chinese – lest the kids discover ennui and get into bad habits like, say, drug-taking or reading.
Of all the statements on the subject that I’ve seen, my favourite is in Cool Memories, a collection of aphorisms by Jean Baudrillard. ‘Boredom,’ says the eternally provocative French thinker, ‘is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.’1 These two sentences capture the relationship between boredom and self-inspection: when we are bored, we are agonizingly aware of the textures of the present moment and our place in it.
Yet we can think of boredom in less negative ways. As a corridor along which we are passing, slowly, rather than as a cell in which we are stuck. As part of the process of finding something that piques our interest, or a lingering period of looking before a giant leap. As a mark of our freedom, a privilege even, and an opportunity to think about our relationship with time – or just to think, period. Patricia Meyer Spacks, in a history of this state of mind, observes that ‘All endeavour of every kind takes place in the context of boredom impending or boredom repudiated and can be understood as impelled by the effort to withstand boredom’s threat.’2 All endeavour? Surely not. But Spacks’s account usefully promotes the idea of boredom as a great engine of creativity. When we are bored, we escape into ourselves: we push at the limits of the internal world precisely because the external one seems so suffocating and stale. Craving something to desire, we in the end invent that something. Or perhaps it’s not like that: rather, the value of boredom is that it allows life’s tensions to slacken, and this release from excitement and anxiety makes it possible for the imagination to dilate.
In an essay called ‘The Storyteller’, published in 1936, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin pondered the modern obsession with speedy delivery of information. This in an age before emails, Google and the digital gratification of every impulse. For Benjamin, this fixation with satisfying immediate needs – a cult of relevance and ‘verifiability’ – was linked to a decline in storytelling. The virtue of storytellers, he believed, is that they don’t force messages on their audience. A story is an activity rather than a product, and its rewards aren’t immediate or consistent. The desire to tell stories originates in a certain weariness or tedium – we use them to fill up life’s empty spaces – and our appreciation of stories depends on our having what he calls a ‘gift for listening’, which is also a product of boredom, for when we are bored we relax, becoming receptive to fresh insights. Benjamin concludes that ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.’
Walter Benjamin, an exponent of Marxism and Jewish mysticism, is an unlikely bedfellow for Sam. Yet they have some things in common that are pertinent here: bitter memories of childhood sickness, the wish to awaken from the torpor of their parents, a delight in city life and its diversions, a penchant for intractable projects, the inclination to read and read until they have got to the very kernel of a subject, the belief that an orderly library is not automatically a good one, a strange relationship to solitude (part addiction, part revulsion), and the sense that, in Benjamin’s phrase, ‘Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.’ Sam certainly shared the understanding that dry spells are part of creativity. To daydream, remember past hurts, survey the conflict within oneself, dally in introspection, refine one’s sense of the truth by butting up against untruths: these are not necessarily illuminating experiences in themselves, but they can bear fruit. The idle hour, the blind alley and the numb afternoon when ideas ferment in the unconscious are the elements of genius’s apprenticeship, and it is when we rid ourselves of the manic urge to be productive that we finally manage to be creative.
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Of Johnson among the Bluestockings – though it behoves us to remark that he did not refer to them thus, and that we might now be wise to forswear this somewhat disdainous appellation
Boredom, inertia, frustration and repetition, punctuated by moments of self-loathing and occasional flights of euphoria: this, for Sam, was the truth about a life of writing and the epitome of every artist’s existence. But he was surrounded by idealized visions of that life, in which writers and artists were represented as public figures, instructive and exemplary. Among these, one that is now very striking is the group portrait known as The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. A celebration of women’s creative talents and the national importance of their attainments, it indirectly testifies to Johnson’s centrality in the literary activity of the period. Originally drawn in 1777, it by pleasant coincidence appeared as an engraving in Johnson’s Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy, as a finished painting, in 1779.1 The Nine Living Muses was the work of Richard Samuel, who was young and ambitious and knew that this was the kind of picture that could boost his career; showing contemporary writers in classical garb, it affords a glamorous image of cultural harmony, in which the subjects’ silk gowns are perhaps better differentiated than their faces. We can think of it as a forerunner of those splashy colour-supplement tableaux that corral writers or artists with only a superficial connection and identify them as a new wave.
Sam was intimate with five of the women depicted. He keenly supported Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus, and the novelist Charlotte Lennox, and he was especially helpful to Hannah More when she chose to revise her poem Sir Eldred of the Bower, the much-tweaked second edition of which appeared in 1778. He ultimately fell out with the other two – the historian and political pamphleteer Catharine Macaulay, and Elizabeth Montagu, who attacked what she thought was his failure to do justice to Shakespeare’s dramatic genius. But it pleased him to witness the ascent of a new generation of women writers, and he encouraged them by suggesting projects, assisting with the revision of their work, and making useful introductions, not least to his many contacts among the booksellers.2
Though he believed that women’s lot had improved since the late seventeenth century, he saw the limits of ‘the female world’ and wrote with feeling about the ill effects of the marriage market and tyrannical parenting. Convinced that young women continued to be stifled by lack of rights and opportunities, he argued that girls needed better education, with an emphasis on intellectual development. Hester Thrale records his telling Boswell, who wondered how much education his daughters should receive, ‘Let them learn all they can – it is a paltry trick indeed to deny women the cultivation of their mental powers, and I think it is partly a proof we are afraid of them.’ In his relationships with women he often revealed a sensitivity and fragility that male friends did not get to see. A character in Rasselas complains of having missed the ‘endearing elegance of female friendship’, and Sam found the company of women elegant – in the sense that it was on the whole harmonious, free from awkwardness and coarse talk. ‘The regard of the female world,’ he wrote in the Rambler, produces ‘a particular pleasure’.
For a while, his greatest source of delight among the living muses was Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay). The daughter of a Scottish soldier, she had spent her formative years in America before moving to Essex in her teens; still a teenager, she had in 1747 m
arried Alexander Lennox, a rather shiftless figure. She met Sam through either William Strahan, the printer of his Dictionary and Mr Lennox’s sometime employer, or Garrick, in whose company she briefly acted. Having made a poor impression on the stage (Horace Walpole pronounced her a ‘deplorable actress’), she turned to writing fiction, and Sam threw an all-night party, at which he drank only lemonade, to celebrate the publication of her first novel Harriot Stuart (1750). He insisted on a special hot apple pie being cooked to mark the occasion, and honoured her with a crown of laurel leaves. It has been suggested that he contributed some material to her next novel The Female Quixote (1752), but though he told Boswell that he was responsible for its dedication, to the extravagant and opera-loving Earl of Middlesex, it is doubtful that he wrote any other part of it.3 Although The Female Quixote was a success and made her a much more saleable author, Lennox was often short of money, and Sam continued to champion her through the 1760s and into the 1770s. When, in 1778, she and her daughter appeared in court, pleading not guilty to an assault on a woman who seems to have been their maid, he arranged for one of his neighbours to bail them out.
By this time he was busy championing Fanny Burney. Whereas others thought she was hopelessly meek, he noticed her shrewd intelligence and joked that she was a ‘rogue’ and a ‘spy’. They shared short-sightedness (literally, not figuratively) as well as prodigious powers of memory, and he was struck by the acuteness of her observation, both of others and of herself. In January 1778, the twenty-five-year-old Burney published, anonymously, her first novel. This was Evelina, one of the decade’s most sensationally popular books, a perceptive satire of fashionable society, which centres on a young woman from the country who has to pilot a course through the squally waters of city life. Sam admired the novel’s humour and style; Burney recorded that his approval ‘almost crazed me with agreeable surprise – it gave me such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig’. She had another guide, Samuel Crisp, a collector of art and instruments who was widely travelled and passionate about music. He influenced her tastes, but his forays into poetry and drama were feeble; to become confident in her own writing, she needed the encouragement of an important, established literary figure. Johnson gave her this, urging her to publish under her own name, speak her mind in company, and pay no attention to the negative remarks occasioned by her success. He treated her as his literary equal, and when the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots flared in the summer of 1780, wrecking property in the original Grub Street, he proposed that the two of them survey the damage together – ‘we have a very good right to go, so we’ll visit the mansions of our progenitors, and take up our freedom together’.
Yet for all his support of the living muses, there is a different image of Dr Johnson that stubbornly endures – summed up in a British newspaper item from 2009 by Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, which portrayed him as a ‘sexist’ and alleged, ‘It wasn’t just that he was opposed to women having jobs. He thought it was a bit off for them even to paint or draw.’4 This assessment, like others of its kind, spotlights a comment Sam supposedly made on hearing from Boswell about a Quaker meeting at which there was a female preacher: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ The quotation even pops up in Hillary Clinton’s memoir Living History, cited as a precedent for men being taken aback that a woman could speak convincingly about the ins and outs of the American healthcare system.5
Aggrieved responses to this quotation tend to treat preaching as if it’s a synonym for speaking or thinking. Hence a statement such as this, in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: ‘when Dr Johnson compared a woman preacher to a dancing dog . . . he was assuming that creativity and femininity were contradictory terms’.6 The person doing the ‘assuming’ here isn’t Samuel Johnson. However firmly one may disagree with his opinion about who should be permitted to preach, that’s what it is: a specific criticism, not a wholesale assault on women’s reason, creativity or powers of argument.
Besides, the line may be apocryphal. Boswell originally recorded it in his journal without any context, and it’s possible that he picked it up in London literary circles and chose to add to his stock of Johnsonian aphorisms. Perhaps it was a popular wisecrack of the day – an interpretation favoured by some of Sam’s defenders. Others accept the words as his, but treat them as a blip. They note his enthusiasm for adopting a female persona in his essays, to talk about issues such as domestic violence, and highlight his responsiveness to female readers, as well as the appeal his ideas had for many women writers. Among these was the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who met him in the final year of his life, admired his essays (especially the Rambler), invoked him in her own writing, and included five pieces by him in her 1789 anthology The Female Reader, which was ‘principally intended for the improvement of females’, and made telling use of an extract from his play Irene to encapsulate the ‘true end of life’ (namely virtue).7 Evidence of a less conspicuous kind can be found in the Dictionary, where, despite claiming to ‘admit no testimony of living authors’, he chooses quotations from contemporary women writers such as Jane Collier and Charlotte Lennox. His use of women’s writings is not extensive, but unlike his precursors in lexicography, he thought that examples from their works were valuable and that they could be presented alongside citations from male authors, with equal weight.
What’s for sure is that frequent repetition has allowed the statement about the dog walking on its hind legs to overshadow Sam’s deep interest in the problems women faced. It eclipses awareness of his generosity to female authors, his desire to share in their intellectual pursuits, and his distaste for the patronizing language many of his male contemporaries used of them.
His role as a source of inspiration and advice for women writers is interesting in light of his negative comments on patronage. The most famous of these occurs in the great letter he wrote to Lord Chesterfield in 1755, but even before that he was under no illusions. He knew that patrons liked their beneficiaries to treat them with stooping servility; it was usual for patronage to compromise an author’s artistic, political and psychological independence. Yet it didn’t have to be like this. In his most substantial work of biography, the Lives of the Poets, it’s apparent that he is hostile not to patronage per se, but to the many failures of patrons. As we’ve seen, in the Dictionary he defines patron as ‘One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.’ Commonly, not always. Sam was happy, in his own conduct, to kick against the norm: supporting (without insolence) and protecting were his preferred modes of patronage. The meaning of countenances may not immediately be clear, but it is the equivalent of ‘encourages’ or ‘backs up’. This is Sam’s forte, and it is worth noting that, besides the famous definition of patron, he offers others – including ‘A guardian saint’ and ‘Advocate; defender; vindicator’, all of which he was ready to be, when needed.
It is more useful to think of Sam as a mentor than as a patron. The word mentor, uncommon in his lifetime, does not appear in his Dictionary, and he appears never to have used it in any of his published writings; according to the OED the first author to adopt it was none other than Chesterfield, in 1750. But the term, now widely used, conveys the two essential characteristics of what Sam gave to Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney: practical assistance and psychological nurture. The latter must be confidential, and, precisely because of this, mentoring can be potent without leaving a visible imprint; for the recipient, its legacy may be lasting, and for the mentor too the rewards can abide, but, when most sincere, it is a relationship with a low profile. As a result it invites speculation and misreading, with overestimate perhaps as likely as underestimate. But even if we have to be wary of making specific claims about the extent of Sam’s mentorship, the fact of its recurrence is impressive: he is paying back the generosity that was once shown to him by others, and ill
ustrating the ‘familial’ character of the literary world, its potential to be a culture of sponsorship, advocacy and devotion.
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One of our longer chapters, directed with no little incongruity to the matter of life’s brevity
Sam’s involvement in the careers of writers such as Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney strengthened an already significant interest in the politics of literary reputation. The subject occupied him in several essays, such as Rambler 127, where he noted that ‘It is not uncommon for those who at their first entrance into the world were distinguished for attainments or abilities, to disappoint the hopes which they had raised, and to end in neglect and obscurity that life which they began in honour.’ ‘To the long catalogue of the inconveniences of old age,’ he added, ‘may be often added the loss of fame.’ A few months later, in Rambler 203, he described such fame as ‘a meteor which blazes a while and disappears for ever’, observing that ‘if we except a few transcendent and invincible names, which no revolution of opinion or length of time is able to suppress, all those that engage our thoughts, or diversify our conversation, are every moment hasting to obscurity’.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 27