It may not greatly surprise us that Johnson became famous in his own time for extraordinary conversational powers. His formidable reputation as a talker still survives, even among people who have read scarcely a word that he wrote. But to his contemporaries it must have seemed a strange and paradoxical thing. In the West the eighteenth century placed a greater emphasis than any age before or since on the art of conversation. Johnson flouted many of the rules, and yet he was widely recognized as an outstanding exponent of the game. To see what lay behind this contradiction, we need to look a little into the theory and practice of what the Dictionary calls “familiar discourse.”

Backgrounds

The body of ideas that went into this activity came to full expression in the Renaissance. As that label suggests, however, the humanist scholars of the period found much of their raw material in the classical world. Thus, to take a single influential case out of hundreds, Cicero had written in the first book of his late moral treatise De Officiis (“On Obligations”) about the requirements for good conversation in familiar situations: he also distinguished between its needs and the qualities demanded of an orator in courts and senates. In the sixteenth century the topic became a central feature of courtesy literature, notably in Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier (1528), a work translated into English more than once during Johnson’s lifetime.