Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of inward nobility and sensitivity of Samuel Johnson
Dear friends and readers,
When at the first session of the class I was leading, The Enlightenment: At Risk? one of the people in the room remembered back to having had John Radner as “Study Guide Leader” (prof-teacher) twice for courses just on Johnson, and had clearly come for more, I felt I had made an effective choice of Samuel Johnson as the third of the writers we would read and discuss. Also when another man brought in his W.J. Bate biography of Johnson, an old battered and much read-looking book, and said how much he had enjoyed it, I felt vindicated. When someone had volunteered that he “liked” Johnson, after someone else said he much preferred Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides to Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, read aloud passages in which (it must be admitted) Boswell seemed the far more accessible, funny, vivid, concretely in an immediate way informative writer, while Johnson by contrast might seem so colorless and dull. Then the first man turned around to confess that Johnson in Boswell’s Life and A Tour seems a totally different person, not deep, not thoughtful, but a dense bully, by no means accurate in his pronounced assessments, coarse examples, stubborn, a contradictory egoistic, a religiously intolerant man. Were there two Johnsons? We had read Lisa Berglund’s essay on how Boswell’s presentation of Johnson’s cat-companion, Hodge, differs from Hester Thrale’s. Another man said he was reading John Wain’s biography of Johnson and agreed with me, that in some lines we seem to hear Johnson’s very tone, his meditative nobility of soul intermingling with Wain’s. Finally most of them read the supplementary reading by Johnson on line in the Ramblers, Idlers and prefaces.
Have I mentioned this is a group of highly intelligent adults more or less retired adults, have held positions of considerably responsibility in their lives? That made a huge difference in how the class went but I’m not sure how to talk about this. Also simply they seemed more able or willing to take Johnson’s point of view in than either Voltaire or Diderot’s.
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Colin Hunter (1841-1904); Good-Night to Skye (2895) (Glasgow Museums)
My second question to myself was, Did I chose the right text from among Johnson’s many? I avoided the Life of Savage because (like Boswell before me and I think Clarence Tracy too) I believe Johnson was deluded and that Savage was himself an imposter whose delusions grew to such a reinforced point, he believed them; similarly, as I couldn’t see how I could write about Johnson’s Life of Savage in as positive a vein as was wanted for a paper comparing his biographical art to Woolf’s, I couldn’t see how I could teach people over 60 that this text is a great biography even though its central information and even respectful sympathetic perspective of Savage is misleading. Johnson is obsessive in his understandable compassion and horror (because he believes that Anne Brett denied this child). In the biography Johnson believes the story that Anne Breet tried to have Savage hanged — and tries to justify his murder of someone in a violent brawl — Richard Holmes (Dr Johnson and Mr Savage as in Jekyll & Hyde) understands that one much more accurately. Apparently Anne Brett’s family had members willing to pay Savage off as long as he will agree to be silent (he wasn’t) and behave minimally decently in their houses — but he would not do that either, and after a while he was thrown out and the allowance stopped. The key story is hers as much as Savage’s: she was subject to violence from more than one husband, hers as hard a life. What this material cries out for is a life of Anne Brett.
It turned out yes. Maybe even some chose the course because they had gone to the Hebrides! I counted four people in the class who had been to the Hebrides or at least northern Scotland. So I also showed Patrick Watkins’s stunning anti-war docudrama, Culloden, and they were gripped, or at last interested to ask questions after I sent three good essays on Patrick Watkins’s art, on its place in 20th century great films, on the problem of teaching history from written fragments, visits to relics and landscapes, from a lack of evidence, from inescapable biases and identifications I read aloud from John Lister-Kaye’s poetically brilliant The Song of the Rolling Earth.
I retold Johnson’s life, and had sent a review of a biography of Francis Barber. At the time of the death of Johnson’s wife, Tetty, Colonel Richard Bathurst whose estates in Jamaica failed came back with a white son and one black boy given apparently a common name: Quashey. Richard Bathurst the son strong abolitionist and friend to Johnson. Given name Francis Barber and sent to school for 2 years – about age 10, and then came to live with Johnson in London. At one point he ran away. A bid for freedom?but Johnson thought this choice not a good idea, and agitated to get Francis back and at age 26 sent him to Grammar school. Francis came home and became a sort of servant, married a white woman and was set up in a shop to sell books in Lichfield. It’s said he was given a generous legacy, but the shop failed. He died impoverished in 1801, a schoolmaster. He is said to have given details of intimate domestic life to Boswell. He had a circle of African friends in London: there was a population of African black people living in London.
I also offered background on Scottish culture at the time, Jacobitism, Buchan’s Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind, and offered a narrative of Johnson’s life, and then we got down to going through Johnson and Boswell’s book. I found a number of the people also read a good deal of Boswell’s, which comes with most editions of Johnson’s.
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Johnson had desired to go to Scotland for a very long time, he says; he wanted to travel to another society and here was one close by, and now they were doing it: they spent about a hundred days in a place neither man was used to. Although Boswell had connections, once they crossed Inverness, he was essentially an Enlightenment lowlands city Scot whose rank and family, and father’s known position, made an opening wherever they went. This is not a package tour nor a comfortable one made very convenient and easy: they have to find accommodation where they can; they went through wildness, solitude, untamed, and as they go, Johnson repeatedly attempts to imagine the history of a object: why does a castle take the form it does? Or the landscape they are seeing. What happened here to make this building look this way or that? Johnson tries to analyze the economic activity that he sees and extrapolate from it to understand the economic and political systems of Scotland. His ideas about the tacksman could be applied to why communism failed as a system of exchange among people.
Johnson wanted to compare European society, to him modern, with what existed earlier; he wanted to discover a feudal society (so did Ann Radcliffe in her joural tour of a summer tour — she eventually went north too), but this was a society in the “agonies of change” to quote John Wain. Johnson was also observing two societies side-by-side — lowland modern Scotland and highlands older Scotland. Meanwhile the English were killing a way of life — and didn’t care who or what this affected. Again and again Johnson sees whole groups of people emigrating. How deeply sceptical Johnson was of claims of attribution and past glories and history. Yet he persists at each stop-over to read and write on – and at each turn Johnson is really describing what he sees, testing and verifying, an ethnography of a society in the throes of change, forced emigration and death and exploitation is what he describes to us.
To me it’s almost natural and understandable that Boswell’s book should be the one preferred by many readers as – to tell the accurate truth if like Johnson you really try to find out “which Johnson” the person is discussing – you discover often it’s Boswell’s Johnson, Johnson as described by Boswell and from Boswell’s book who is so well known or subject of fan groups not Johnson himself considered apart from Boswell. Boswell offers a comic, immediate, psychologized and prosaic talk-y language, going over the same incident with details nowhere to be found in Johnson but which support his point of view. Johnson’s is the tragic book: we see the tragedy of people’s lives, the difficulty of survival, and hard struggle each person makes to carry on. That’s the true emphasis of his book. By contrast, Boswell’s jovial filled with his real belief in hierarchy, enjoyment of good times, considerable self-esteem; he is continually name-dropping.
Johnson analyses the basic constraints and history behind each human existence or type of life he comes across with real depth of understanding. He is seriously looking at a different way of life in its death-throes and the violent history behind it. He really describes the desolation before him. His language moves from quiet to brilliant uses of general terms which capture so much meaning to magnificence and deep emotionalism of gratitude or enjoyment. Johnson ends his book on a school for the deaf. Deaf people were treated as idiots until the 18th century when two French philosophes (Abbe Sicard one, discussed by Oliver Sacks in his Seeing Voices) invented sign language. I regret to have to report this was one of those schools where the teachers were to force deaf children to learn to speak so it was not kind place but it was backward step (still not gone) in a forward movement.
Boswell gives us a good time with individual justifications as we go along. We meet individuals and rejoice in them or help or listen to or just interact with them: the old woman and her goat is to Johnson an epitome of hard-scrabble life; how admirably she uses all her resources. To Boswell, she’s a merry joke; she thought one of them would want to go to bed with her, or rape her. She seems unaware that Boswell does not find her attractive. In a frightening tempest, Boswell shows us how frightened he was, what a fool he made out of himself, how he tried to help and appreciated all the captain did. Johnson barely notices this transitory if deeply (to them as frail human beings) ephemeral experience of life. What does Boswell end on their last agreeable days –- how Johnson was feted, what they saw, what they laughed about where they stayed and that he deserves the credit for having gotten Johnson to go, taken him through and so the existence of Johnson’s book. Boswell’s book is an advertisement for the coming biography which he was already diligently at work at.In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell — there are a number of such books, I brought in Israel Schenker.
I cited some months ago Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, with or without Boswell’s A Tour to the Hebrides, as one of ten that had the most influence on me in my life. I quoted a passage where Johnson tells us how he came to choose to want to travel to Scotland even now in his old age. Now I’ll emphasize Iona, which island experience (and others) we went over carefully in class. I read Henry Hitchings’s redaction in his The World in 38 Chapters:
An inscription over the door, to show what kind of a Book this is
A scrap of land, a speck in the sea’s breath. On an OctoTuesday, two travellers arrive after dark. The sea has been rough, and their craft’s four oarsmen can find no easy place to disembark; it seems they must carry the visitors to dry land, though one of them chooses to spring into the water and wade ashore. In the moonlight the two
figures embrace. It is late to be inspecting monuments, so they retire for the night — sleeping fully clothed in a barn, nestled in the hay, using their bags as pillows.The next day they explore the island. Its buildings have been battered by storms and stripped by locals needing materials for their homes; now they are ruins, caked in filth. The old nunnery is a garden of weeds, and the chapel adjoining it is a cowshed. The two men walk along a broken causeway — once a street flanked by good houses — and arrive at a roofless abbey. Its altar is damaged; islanders have carried off chunks of the white marble, believing that they afford protection against fire and shipwreck. A few intricately carved stone crosses still stand.
Later, the visitors will write about what they saw. One will comment that the island used to be ‘the metropolis of of learning and piety’ and wonder if it ‘may be sometime the instructress of the Western Regions’. The other will reflect that ‘the solemn scenes of piety never lose their sanctity and influence’: ‘I hoped that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an exemplary conduct. One has a strange propensity to fix upon some point of time from whence a better course of life may begin.’
This is a sketch of Iona, where in AD 563 the energetic Irish exile St Columba founded a monastery. Today, the island’s great sites have been restored and are often mobbed with day trippers – a mix of Christian pilgrims and happysnapping tourists. Yet in 1773, when Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited, few people went there. It was Johnson who reflected on the island’s lost role as ‘the metropolis of learning and piety’, recalling how, as he experienced its decay but also its tranquillity, he was transported into the past — to a time when it was ‘the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion’. This was a place where earth and heaven seemed only a finger’s width apart. Somehow it cheered the soul.
‘Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses,’ Johnson wrote, ‘and makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the
dignity of thinking beings.’ This is a rallying cry, an appeal for historical understanding. He doesn’t mean that we should refuse to live in the moment, ignoring the pith of the present to spend our lives dwelling on how idyllic the past was or how ambrosial the future might be. Instead he is arguing that we are dignified by our ability, through the operations of our minds, to transcend our circumstances, to reach beyond the merely local, to appreciate difference. It is an insight typical of Samuel Johnson, a heroic thinker whose intelligence exerted itself in a startling number of directions. A poet and a novelist, a diarist and editor and translator, as well as the author of numerous prefaces and dedications, h produced the first really good dictionary of English, invented the genre of critical biography …
There is more than one edition of the original two copies as In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell (Israel Schenker from the NYTimes wrote one and now lives in Scotland).
Hitchings led to talk of journeys people in the class had taken to the Hebrides and even Iona and how “spiritual” it had felt. I used Matthew Arnold’s old touchstone method — I quoted Johnson: in the midst of telling how the Highlanders are fleeing the place, and that there are some “lairds of more prudence and less rapacity [who] have kept their vassals undiminished,” Johnson writes: “From Rasaay only one man has been seduced, and at Col there was no wish to go away” — because of the good man running the place. It’s that “at Col there was no wish to go away” that captures the dense concision of understanding in the man’s texts.
We then went over a number of individual passages. What Johnson is interested in? the past, meditation of what was, on generalization about humanity trying to survive in hard and various conditions: looking upon human life; passionate student of history, and of geology, geography, culture in general and that’s what he puts in his book. Sudden affection. Universities are decaying, on Canongate. Inch Kenneth, high point. How he spontaneously, inspired, wrote poetry in Latin. How he admires people: Col, so well educated trying to help his people, spends such time with them, drowns suddenly, Macquarry emigrating. Topics included his interest in castles and dungeons and the violent past they reveal. Mountainous people and their cultures. His Sardonic humor. But also merry and unself-conscious; can imitate a kangaroo. They spend a long time in Sky, Ostig: Johnson talks of what really corrodes people’s minds. Power overcomes law but money has power to abrogate law. When guns appear, non-human animals decrease. The fight over the Ossian poems: James Macpherson claimed to have found and just rewritten slightly these epic fragments in ancient gaelic and Johnson challenged him to produce the manuscripts. Of course there were none; people wanted ancient poems and unscrupulous writers produced them – it was a kind of watered down Miltonism style that appealed – tremendous international popularity but Johnson stubbornly held out. The man, thug-like threatened him, and Johnson said he’ll carry a big stick and protect himself Boswell often quotes Johnson, and works passages in, like this.
Johnson provides somber, Boswell the prosaic thought. The two of them talking, different perspectives, Johnson goes about to show us how different the re-tellings of history and concludes how little Boswell’s tour he just complains he can’t learn anything from oral tradition. In the mornings Boswell would bring what he wrote to Johnson and Johnson fix what he had written, rewrite, plan in his mind. They were making books together.
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The Yale edition of Johnson is now complete and online, open to the public
I assigned a few other texts found online. We went on to the Rambler and Idler, etexts online. We read the history of Misella (Nos 170-71) How she was drawn from her parents’ house with promises, never given the advantages claimed; then seduced by the benefactor, removed from the house when pregnant and gradually abandoned and her life as a prostitute now. Then Idler No 22 the mother vulture teaching her children — how 18th century readers liked allegory of this type in the period – an outgrowth of Aesop’s Fables. The vulture thinks man made for them and Johnson approaches Voltairian satire. We turned for an example of Johnson at his most witheringly sardonic: the review of Soames Jenyns. The malevolence in the idea that extending education to all is dangerous, will make people discontented, rebellious. The notion that human and animal sufferings produce good effects made Soames imagine that immortal beings enjoy watching us for their diversion and those in heaven derive satisfaction from those in hell. Unforgettable. Idler 22 similarly against debtors’ prisons. Idler No 81: native Americans discussing behavior of European armies and how they can use these killers.
Lives of the poets: constitutes a history of English poetry across the long 18th century, a discussion of the nature of poetry, even in this different style, lives of writers, and he is at his personally involved or make political points. He chooses some of subjects because booksellers told him to (they had the man’s works – no woman I regret to say) and others because he knew the man. Great compassion for some: William Collins. He added names he thought should be included, but one can be very disappointed because a poet today thought important isn’t there: Christopher Smart who died raving in a prison when he should have not been put in their in the first place.. Famous for a long poem on his cat Jeffrey who kept him company. I went briefly over Boswell’s, Hawkins, Thrale’s and Murphy’s biographies of Johnson himself. His letters. I read a couple to Warton, one to Mrs Thrale, part of the one to Chesterfield.
As editor of Shakespeare’s works: he did not idolize the man and some students reading the preface are surprised to find critical and evaluative comments. He puts Shakespeare in the context of his time, looks at his ultimate vision. His observations on passages are like close readings of Shakespeare’s texts. From Measure for Meausre. They did not have novels the way we do and what they read often were bound up groups of plays sold as books. Shakespeare’s plays could be read as realistic novels, so on Macbeth …
Lastly I offered a bit on Johnson’s politics. I recommended Donald Greene’s Twayne book. Thoughts on the Falkland Islands is his most anti-colonialist. But he supports gov’t sometimes because he fears chaos and who might rise to power. Oddly it has been rumored and whole essays written to show Johnson as Jacobite because he supported the Tory party and in context, from Boswell he seems sympathetic but anyone who knows the realities of Jacobitism and he did would be hard put to go that far. In his own day some accused him of this — he was often corrosive over the Hanoverian gov’t – more anti-whig than pro-Tory. Wrote Swiftian parodies. He did support expulsion of John Wilkes seen as this ultimate patriot at the time. England had the right to tax the colonialists without their permission – because they defended the colonialists against the Native Americans (but why did they so?), he attacked the anonymous Junius – a kind of Deep Throat writing eloquent diatribes exposing corruption.
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Another depiction of Johnson by Reynolds — a more familiar one
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. As shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon … finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on — Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
I had assigned Isobel Grundy’s irreplaceable essay on Johnson’s depiction of death in his biographies. She says he shows both the older views and the modern towards death: it’s a rounding off and leaving a meaning, but also confusing, ambiguous, making one feel that the life had no significance beyond for the person and for most of us the few people who we’ve been meaningful to. We still see the older attitude in churches and religious places, and in people who plan their death, care about their will, make due preparations. Pope did. She says that Johnson repeatedly fails to find this significance or meaning in the deaths he recounts or describes, asked what he felt while dying: he wanted to live” deaths ironic, horrifying, show a lack of concern in reality; jarring and shocking. Did they die as they had lived? He again and again refuses to draw a moral. More: he deliberately puts before us the ironies, casual comedy, inappropriateness of what happens, the grotesqueries. In his essays we find death is the great leveller, what is the case for common humanity, avoids religious talk or judgement; early lives he does offer exemplary deaths; he looks into legends: Hermione Lee who has written a number of even great biographies says the most problematic of chapters is often the last because so many lies, distortions, agendas come in – we hear what the survivors of the scene want to tell us – yet you can’t avoid it and so recent biographies tend to scant it. He moves from seeing death as a kind of testing to part of common humanity – ridiculous, frailty of human body, not dignified not in control. The person or people comforting the dying can try to help the dying person feel he or she has that control over the last if that’s what the person wants or cares about.
Grundy’s was the last text I talked about and then I did wish I had assigned the Oxford Authors volume of Johnson, edited by Donald Greene, because we could have read some of the Lives of the Poets as then the people in the room would have read some of these texts.
The three to four sessions were about as successful as I’ve ever been with a “older” more difficult author. More successful than the Voltaire and Diderot sessions I felt. I asked if I tried to do this theme again, did they think it was a good idea? They said they did. I said I would try to substitute other authors: Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Voltaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker as it needs to be a shorter text), Goethe (either The Sorrows of Werther or Elective Affinities). Mary Wolstonecraft for Madame Roland (The Rights of Women, Residence in Sweden), but I thought to myself I can probably not find an analogous substitute.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Johnson’s life: Johnson – poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Johnson a very different person than we’ve been discussing for the enlightenment. He was not the Tory conservative that Boswell makes him out to be, but he was almost neurotically religious. My feeling is he was very nervous about his religious belief, about death, about life after death, ideas of punishments, and came near the edge of disbelieving but could not or did not want to divest himself. Like other people of this era, and today too probably, he was instructed about church and good and evil and good by his mother, but as he grew up he became sceptical and when he went to university describes himself as on the way to be a typical rationalist – and he remained all his life someone who based his understanding on natural world, experience, probability, valued highly education, natural philosophy (called science) – as you can see. His trip is based on him going out and looking and thinking about what he sees and experiences, placing each incident in real world historical natural context: he says he read a book written in sermon form, William Law’s A serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and if I’m not mistaken, what he admired so was its bedrock seriousness. Law has powerful prose style, dramatized ideas in stories and characters, deft satirical portraits of people who are worldly, neglect their spiritual interests; and he resumed a religious faith that includes tragic sense of life, of what torments people. Pattern of his character stayed the same, but comes out in stronger colors. It’s not Catholic but Anglican. His melancholy not unusual but his religion is. Maybe he could not face a world where there is no other. Obsessive.
Born 1709 and died 1784 – our three males over-lap. Son of a bookseller and as a boy he learned how to make and print books and watched the book business. Michael Johnson was probably a gifted sane and decent man; he rose from nothing to be a bookseller, he did go bankrupt but kept people’s real respect, and how the father and son probably fought fiercely (see especially p. 33). Thus many years later Johnson standing out in the rain to make up for his unwillingness to stand and sell with his father comes out as Johnson understanding how hurt his father had been. Johnson’s pride had been so exacerbated by watching his father’s failure and also his pride in his older son. Did not get along with brother.
Johnson’s bullying emerges early on. It was how he learned to cope: “his intelligence and bulk” could compensate by domineering at school and home.
Mother came from family with status but I agree with David Nokes whose biography I review in one of my blogs that she was narrow minded, disappointed, married late; calvinistic, God as all powerful and you as an utter failure. When you read any biography, you must realize it’s written by people with an agenda, mostly conventional. So to me it is more important that he spent years away from his mother as he did his wife, Tetty: second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience..As I said he was disabed early on from illness. His mother’s nephew, Cornelius Ford. First one to recognize, help, mentor, Johnson came for the fall and stayed until May (Whitsun). Ford was his first adult companion of the heart, 31 to Johnson’s 16.
When Johnson returned home, he found he was not allowed to return to school. So pupils could be thrown out. I hadn’t thought of that. Of course. Hunter refused to have him back. Johnson was very open with his scorn for teachers who had nothing to teach him and repeatedly they can’t take it. So he worked with his father in the bookshop (binding).
Then he is taken up by another mentor an older sophisticated man, relation: Gilbert Walmseley and again find himself in an environment where he can thrive and be appreciated, and a bond is forced (despite Walmsely being a whig).
The Oxford story is known by all: what Nokes adds is Johnson began optimistically; he was eager and so happy to be there, but hid it under a carapace of apparent indifference. Johnson worked in his room, he loved his 100 or so books. And then it’s all over for him. He runs out of money. He was eager, idealistic at times, loving his work (or wanting to), and at the same time so discouraged and he had to leave. Heart-breaking how gifts don’t matter in the least Well he is a person who has no connections that can be used to wrench a position and no money and he spends this desperate after period.
John Radner suggested Johnson’s depression afterwards was brought on by religious guilt. I am not sure of that. Oxford with the help of patrons and then a humiliating time is enough to create an lasting depression after the earlier life.
First he was a schoolmaster and he is again taken up, another mentor, an old school friend, Edmund Hector and goes to Birmingham. There he begins his career in journalism. Nokes adds how mortified Johnson was in comparison with his hopes and that’s why his translation of Lobo is not what it ought to be. Nokes depicts Birmingham at the time, what it looked like and how it was regarded (snobbery). There he meets Tetty Porter. Nokes adds and makes a strong case that Johnson married her for the money. 600 pounds. School failed. Tetty much much older, ridiculous looking.
Finally went to London (like Shakespeare) to make his fortune and worked for publishers and editors of magazines. He lived far closer to the bone than Diderot. He later wrote a once famous biography of Richard Savage where he is with Savage wandering the streets –1737-39.
She was not a dreadful woman. She drank and read romances. Why shouldn’t she have? He left her for London. Perhaps his guilt also came from sexual unfaithfulnes– the London streets were full of prostitutes. One root cause for his terrible guilt was perhaps sexual life – and that’s just a terrible shame, for if he did find solace and companionship there (and empathized as may be guessed by Misella in the Ramblers) how horrible that he hated himself for it and dreamed he’d go to some terrible hell — if he did. there is reason to infer that he also thought annihilation awaited him (preferred it in Hamlet’s way).
He was no catch and none of the women we find him involved with romantically (Hill Boothby, Mrs Desmoulins who he had sexual relationships with) was attractive to us, or rich, or even very smart. Who would go for companionate marriage with him anyway? He didn’t keep a steady clean house, had no visible means of steady support, was often strongly depressed, half hysterical at night. Not good husband material I’d say even if a great writer, good man, and genius. When he was awarded his pension, he gradually gathered round him a group of people living off him.
The happy period of the Dictionary – 1746-55; 9 years and then he has to work again. An edition of Shakespeare. Around time of his mother’s death Rasselas Prince of Abysinnia. 1763 he meets Boswell in bookshop. He did make friends all his life, and close friends. Was loyal to people, never corrupt. I think he became center of later 18th century literature’s story because of these circles of extraordinary friends. When you read his warm letters you know why. We would not begin to know about him what we do but for the extraordinary leap in biographical art which was begun by him and others and carried to one extreme by Boswell.
Hester Thrale Piozzi – 1741-1821 so a good deal younger. Brilliant, daughter of rich people, married off at young age to a bully philistine with whom he lives and has four daughters – she meets him in 1765 when she is 23; soon sees he is deeply depressed, he opens up to her and he basically lived with her and husband on and off until the husband died. While on tour with Boswell, he writes letters to Hester Thrale, read 20+ years Very close. There is left this letter which suggests an uncomfortable sexual relationship. After her husband died, she tried for love and married musician tutor, Piozzi; Johnson very hurt, writes very cruel letter and breaks it off.
She wrote a biography made up of anecdotes. Two other friends attempted biographies: Jame s Boswell, Arhtur Murphy, John Hawkins. Only Hawkins knew the younger man.
In Journey to Western Islands we are seeing Johnson ten years before death. Going before he can no longer do it. He never made to Italy but did go to Wales and France.
E.M.
Jacobitism and Scotland: – not to be confused with Jacobins. Jacobins take their name from Jacques: working men, men sans culottes, not wearing elegant fancy breeches and wigs but trousers down to the floor because they worked all day and needed protection . Jacobitism or Jacobites take their name from James II, the brother of Charles II, both of them sons of Charles I who went down in history as having been beheaded by the parliamentarians in 1649 after he lost the civil war and (like Louis XVI) kept fomenting rebellion. I recommended Frank McLynn’s The Jacobites. There’s an international or European wide dimension too, by the later 18th century it moves into the Western hemisphere as the English and British become settler colonialists, as the Scots themselves travel abroad to exploit and destroy the native peoples there. The religious dimension: Jacobites are Catholics and they attract to them Catholics suffering under the penal laws; Hanoverians are Germans and Walpole’s corrupt bribery system alienates people.
There were at least two Scotlands: John Lister-Kaye writes wonderful nature writing books about Scotland and the Highlands. Pass around map. But I have two to recommend: Song of the Rolling Earth (which I’ll bring next week) and Crowded with Genius: Scottish enlightenment and Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind: a great deal of the finest though of American born in Scotland. Curiously both worlds defined themselves against England as England used to define itself against France. France is what we are not, but the problem is that England annexed the Scots, and she decimated half their landscape. Behind this trip was the fascination that individuals who participated in the 18th century were fascinated by primitives, by tribal culture, by “savages” and how this basis of human culture relates to their own experience.
Where to begin first and say each part in less than 15 minutes, leaving over time for a brief biography of Johnson himself. The north comes a plate previously attached to North America, is mountainous, rocky, a lot of sedimentation, while the south is green, meadow-y. The present small population results from a 2 century diaspora it’s fair to call ethnic cleansing, or sheer ejection by chieftains become landlords determined to make a large profit on the land by filling it first with sheep and later with deer (for rich people to come and slaughter. He talked of how romanticized the descriptions of its civil social society, which is now based on commercialism laid over family biology bonds and the original tribal laws and customs of clans, as well as results of warfare and sex. We might call them an edge people, a people descending in written history from Celtic culture which was pushed back by the more modern Roman culture, successful war machine from the Mediterranean, found along Northern Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, down to Basque country. Tribal people forced into the peripheries where it’s hard to make a living on much non-arable land. Edge people. Little of Northern Scotland is more than 37 miles from the sea, it’s crossed by faults as are the lowlands. and rivers. Large cities include Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Sterling, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness Clan system we’ll see in action at Culloden.
There is imposed picturesque narratives of the wealthy who came north to exploit the people left after the forced emigration. and their land. Northern Scottish landscape looks and often is so empty, came to have species of animals and plants not indigenous to it at all, the abject poverty of what we can call the 99% until the early 1980s. In 1972 one could easily find people living in huts with no central heat, not running water, poor windows and ventilation, no electricity, without shoes. He stressed that a lot of the emigration from early 19th century on became voluntary: when the Scottish reached North America, they realized a much better life was on offer for them all. In effect colonialism of the English
At same time down in the south, ship building, iron mining trade, agriculture were creating a prosperous people. Everyone fished. It did entail a destruction of a previous order in law and custom and strict religious groups. 17th century a bad time of religious conflict based on these changes – witch trials, the 18th a time of confidence with acceptance of diversity of sects (like Voltaire recommended): what next? It was a civil society based on commerce
The rebellion of the Scots under Bonnie Prince Charlie was the third attempt of the Stuarts to disrupt the Anglican and Hanoverian order, and this time when the English put the rebellion down, they behaved ferociously to all the Scots during and after Culloden: a great diaspora occurred. In summer 1685 – Monmouth’s rebellion (which comes up in the story of the Man on the Hill) produced savage reprisals and executions. It was a serious attempt to overthrow the gov’t but Jacobitismt like Essex’s rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601 it was swiftly (though not so easily) put down. In the 1690s there was a rebellion in Ireland whose spearhead was James II; in 1715 another headed by James III. Walter Scott has novels about these Scots wars. These were dynasty wars, ethnic and religious, and they were civil wars, and they were finally suppressed after 1745 by ruthless action on the part of the English in Scotland. Within the Scots world, the clans were themselves subject to harsh master chiefs; there was in effect a civil war in Scotland itself.
You will notice Johnson complains there are no trees in Scotland. The ecology of Scotland by the end of the 18th century had been sadly neglected, and in the 19th century deer, sheep and in the 20th the industry of the black black oil further decimated. Scotland of trees and bushes. However, there is a new movement in the last 40 years of restoration ecology and Scotland now has been reforested, using both native and transplanted trees. The problem is deer are very bad for trees and sheep bad too – fights about deer removal and sheep removal today – bringing back native species and so on.
Ellen
Ellen,
I liked this very much — your original point of view (original in that it’s yours, not derived from others) and the thoroughness of your examination of the texts. I wish I could have taken your course.
I teach an occasional course for retired people in my local program in learning in retirement, but it tends to be less demanding, both of me and of my “students,” than yours.
John
My reply:
Thank you for this comment.
This OLLI at AU has a high academic rating for the OLLIs but even here it depends on what the person running the course wants to ask. Mine is not the most demanding courses, or (to put it another way), I’ve been in equally demanding courses. Say 4 books the people are expected to read — by the Brontes. But I know there are much easier ones and also many non-academic ones — more practical, more appreciation type thing, more political gossip or advice (how to do one’s taxes, which was very useful to me).
There are many types of these retirement programs. It’s very heartening to realize there is a population who find fun and meaning in carrying on learning — and also have the funds and time and health to do it.
Very well done, my dear. I don’t agree with every thing you said, but most of it is sound, by my lights. I especially appreciate your deeply considered, personal responses to the materials. You are not derivative; you think for yourself. That is most impressive. Have you read Bertrand Bronson’s essay, on the double tradition (https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2063710). You hit some of the points he raises in your fine blog.
Yours ever,
T
Yes I think for myself — sometimes that gets me in trouble because I can offend and people who think if you cite so-and-so that’s what one should think – I’m not thinking of Johnson but say these super-respected authorities like Foucault — and I say, so what? He’s wrong or she’s wrong. I’m also not in my heart impressed by people with high ranks or status.
I have read Bertrand Bronson and know which essay you are referring to. It’s one of several I read early on when first reading Johnson. They remain as accurate to me as ever — or taking the deeply humane perspective that matters.
Ellen
Hi Ellen,
Very well written and informative. I am looking forward to reading both books and was glad of the link to the Yale editions. The brief times I have spent in Scotland, especially Isle of Skye, made a deep impression. Thank you for the in-depth sharing: you are fortunate in the students you attracted.
Diane
And thank you for this comment. Myself I think I might do as much good teaching seriously this way to an important and mature segment of our population as any other humanities activity.
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