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Boswell's Johnson, the Hero Made by a Committee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Hugo M. Reichard
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Abstract

The life of Boswell’s Johnson, with its manifold successes, is largely decided by others—the interested volunteers who, governing singly or collectively, control most of his conversation, writing, charities, frolics, trips, meals, and encounters. Johnson is a character whom experience befalls and who (between interruptions) is lost in “languor and dejection.” He is aware that “external authority” is his prime mover. His operating unit is himself plus one (or more). This dependence on his associates bears on the pessimism of the protagonist Johnson and perhaps has implications as well for the author Johnson and for his own volumes. Boswell is most original, potent, and subtle in rendering the part that other characters perform in the making of his hero, showing their role to be an ultimately integrating and exalting force both in individual scenes and in Johnson’s career as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 2 , March 1980 , pp. 225 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 The possibility that there might be a more accurate representation of Johnson than Boswell gives us has been canvased by Donald Greene; see, e.g., “ ‘Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, but—,‘” Georgia Review, 32 (1978), 17–43.

2 The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (printed with Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands), ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), p. 315.

3 Unless otherwise identified, parenthetical page numbers in the text refer to Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman and corrected by J. D. Fleeman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).

4 The phrase comes from Boswell's letter “To Edmond Malone,” 31 March 1786, The Correspondence … of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. Marshall Waingrow (London: Heinemann. 1969), p. 142.

5 The other forty instances occur on pp. 298, 302, 362, 399, 417 (twice), 419, 423, 440, 443 (twice), 446 (twice), 476 (twice), 494, 507–08, 520, 606, 687, 717, 744, 765, 766, 774, 775, 838, 863, 864, 867, 908, 922, 931, 1016, 1208, 1225, 1231, 1232, 1308, and 1314.

6 To scan the profusion, see pp. 10–17, 82, 128, 227, 244, 249, 250, 970, 1011, 1072, 1158, 1330. For ampler evidence see the Chapman-Fleeman Index, s.v. “Authors” and s.v. “Johnson iv. S. J.'s Writings.”

7 Ralph W. Rader, “Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson” in Philip B. Daghlian, ed., Essays in Eighteenth-Century Biography (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968). pp. 3–42.

8 Richard Bauman, “Verbal Art as Performance,” American Anthropologist, 11 (1975), 290–311. The subject is treated somewhat differently in the Spring 1977 issue of New Literary History, devoted to “Oral Cultures and Oral Performances.” My mentor in these matters has been my colleague Danielle M. Roemer.

9 E.g., pp. 680, 923, 924, 927, 1322, 1402.

10 Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 52, 61, 99, 108, 109, 131—32, 133; Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 57–58; Bertram H. Davis, A Proof of Eminence: The Life of John Hawkins (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 373—74; Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Complete Writings (Boston: Houghton, 1901), vi, 725; x, 56, 85; Thomas Carlyle, The Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899–1923), v, 178–79, 184; xxviii, 91–93, 114, 116–17, 120, 123–24.

11 Benjamin Boyce, “Samuel Johnson's Criticism of Pope in the ‘Life of Pope,‘ ” Review of English Studies, NS 5 (1954), 37–46, esp. pp. 37, 40.

12 Frederick W. Roe, Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1910), esp. pp. 125–26; George Mallory, Boswell the Biographer (London: Smith Elder, 1912).

13 See, e.g., pp. 20–21, 340, 755, 781, 1023, 1064, 1330.

14 See, e.g., Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson … (1786; rpt. with William Shaw's Memoirs of Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974]), pp. 68, 76–78, 134; Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2nd ed. (1787; facsim. rpt. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. Microfilms, 1978), pp. 21, 170, 360, 391–92, 415, 440–41, 517.

15 See pp. 32, 175, 278, 279, 282, 296, 342, 411, 426, 490, 543, 602, 863, 866, 875, 884, 928, 932, 972, 1021, 1083, 1127, 1130, 1150, 1151, 1210.

16 “The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.,” Ch. xiii in O M Brack, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley, eds., The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1974), p. 226.

17 The suggestion that “integrity” describes Boswell's effort was voiced by Jack A. Schwandt, of St. Olaf's College, after hearing a version of this paper at the 1978 meeting of the Johnson Society of the Central Region.